Martin Meenagh blog

Szymanowski: Songs of the Infatuated Muezzin

The image is Delacroix, 'the women of Algiers' and is often used to illustrate orientalism, curry-houses, and for all I know, knocking-shops. I was looking for one of Salambo that I could slip onto a post, but was taken with it since it seemed apposite, and they look lovely. You can read about it here; it was very important to the impressionists and Picasso took to reworking it later on.

Occasionally--in fact more and more lately--I ignore the news and put 'radio 3' on in the background. I don't think that I ever listened to so much music before I got a good internet connection and got rid of the TV.

For foreign readers, Radio 3 is the BBC classic music station, and if you can read this post, you can probably listen to the BBC i-player that I've linked to above. It was whilst I was doing so tonight and being a parody of my pseudish self (if that's possible) that I came across the beautiful arrangement of the Muzzein songs, from an imagined and more tired Levant less vigorous in its fidelity to fundamental things than today.

I don't know much about Szymanowski, but apparently the work is a favourite with singers, and the lyrics are ultimately traceable to Rabindranath Tagore, the Koran, and love poetry. The conceit is that the Muezzin is singing out prayers for Allah at the same time as recalling the woman he loves on earth, and it is very beautiful.

The songs were written just as the Ottoman empire was falling, and they made me think of Kahlil Gibran's 1925 call to Arab youth, which translated into an invocation to 'ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country' on the new frontier of the soul. Anyone with any sense of American history c.1960 will know where that one led.

Have a listen if you want to waste some time; programmes are normally available for five days but can extend to weeks. The BBC is great for this sort of thing.

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