On the Classical Music Revolution, the Halls of Power, and Other Matters

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Ismail Iskandarani

I took advantage of the weekend to go out and relax. My wife and I walked into a restaurant Restaurant waiter On a street near the Wu Its history is related to the struggle of black people for civil rights. We sat in the classical performance hall and listened to classical music played by some members of the movement. classical revolution Musically, I did not understand the meaning of the “classical revolution” written in the printed program accompanying the table menu.

After two or three segments, a member of the movement took the floor to explain to the audience what the Classical Revolution was all about. It was not a band, but a movement to revive classical music, played by volunteers, not paid by the host venue or the audience, and the audience was welcome to play. After finishing their segment, they invited the audience to come up and play classical music. The places they played were all non-commercial places; such as streets, squares, libraries, cultural art galleries, etc. Even the restaurant we were in – the “Bus Boys” restaurant – had a cultural and BroadCast Unitedlectual orientation. It was attached to a library for reading and selling books, and there was a special area for books on peace studies. The walls of the hall where we ate were covered with a “collage” of icons of world peace and non-violent struggle, such as Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King. The speaker explained that this movement, which they called the “Classical Music Revolution”, started in 2009 on the West Coast of the United States and spread to the East Coast and some European capitals.

The evidence in the story shows that the word “revolution” here is related to breaking the entertainment model of consumerism, involving the public in volunteers, and ending the myth of “professionalism”. I will not tell you about the unique harmony I see in the eyes and body language of musicians who do what they love on weekends without any financial compensation. I will not describe the racial and age diversity among musicians. But I just want to emphasize here that the replacement of the ruling model of “experts” and “professionals” by the masses has become a general commonality of the concept of revolution. On the contrary, we can confirm the meaning of revolution by liberating from the context of rules whose secrets no one knows or their origins, such as the requirement to wear formal clothes in opera, or the huge distance between the stage and the audience, or even the curtains or “guards” at the “gates” of the media!

On music and mosques in our country

I have never played music except by knocking on doors or tables, but I can understand how players love their instruments, and I apologize if my use of the word “instrument” offends them. When someone hugs his oud or guitar, I see in his eyes the look of a mother holding her child, or a friend following his companion after a bad journey that has separated them.

I observed members of the “Classical Music Revolution” movement, unpaid volunteers who were non-professional musicians. I saw a special, intimate relationship between each musician and his instrument, and I said to myself: How do you love your tongue if these are ways to express yourself, your feelings and emotions? How does a writer love his pen? What are the colors of a painter?

My imagination was carried away to our country. I imagined someone holding his oud or flute, walking into the mosque and hearing the sounds of their afternoon prayers.

I imagined him confused about where to place the stick for ablution. Several possibilities flashed through my mind about the dangers Chenxiang faced during his ablution. In my imagination, I saw him step out of the puddle, water dripping from his hair and beard, rolling up his trouser legs and shirt sleeves, holding the stick in his left hand and straightening his sleeves with his right hand. He then held the stick in his right hand again and spread out his sleeves with his left hand.

Amidst the surprised and disapproving looks, he walked to the first row, leaned his stick against the wall, bent over, stretched his legs, and put on his socks. He intended to recite the opening takbir to start the two rak’ahs of the Sunnah and the greeting of the mosque, but his ears caught whispers and he felt a murmur and whispering around him. One of them joked about praying at “one and a half years old”, and one of them clapped his palms in annoyance and said, “What’s missing?”

Our friend tried to be modest during the prayers, but the voice of the Quran reciter stopped him, and he left the entire mosque, sat next to him, and raised his voice and said: “Among the people, there is a man who buys things. The Hadith is to distract oneself and deviate from the path of Allah without knowledge.” So he understood that this is what the recitation meant. He said to himself: “Is it wrong for me to enter the mosque to pray? ! !” The muezzin stood up to lead the prayer, and then the Imam came forward, and the person leading the ceremony turned back to the queue and gave our friend a sharp look that reminded him of his father, and that’s why he left his home to live with some single friends. About the prayers, he thought: “Everyone I know who prays listens to music and likes songs, but this particular muezzin, I visited him once after the Maghrib prayer in Ramadan and found him breaking his fast in the mosque, listening to songs on the radio.”

I noticed him, felt him, understood what was going on inside him, my respect for him disappeared, and I thought to myself, “Which is greater in the eyes of Allah, carrying agarwood in the mosque, or alienating the servants of Allah from the House of God? !” From a jurisprudential point of view, the situation was different, and he was not playing around in the mosque. “Why are you chasing him with your glances, grunts, winks and nudges?”

“May God’s peace and mercy be upon you. May God’s peace and mercy be upon you.”

The Imam gives a sermon at the end of prayers about the temptations of the world and how what God has is better and more lasting than a life of entertainment and vanity. I saw people listening or pretending to do so while the Imam continued to give a one-sided speech without any discussion or comment. I remember when Omar ibn Khattab was on the pulpit of the Messenger of God and the lady interrupted him – may God bless him and grant him peace – he admitted his mistake and her rights and realized that the rightly guided Caliph had passed away. After that, the preachers could not be free from the oppression of the masses, so the elite carpenters built high pulpits for them and closed the doors when they ascended the pulpit, may this protect their position of authority from the masses. .

I heard the sound of a conversation coming from behind, which ended with someone saying sorry to those who suffered from the contradiction, alluding to our friend who was praying with the oud. I was about to tread out of the mosque to see our friend when I saw three people with leg hair showing through their socks and super short pants, walking towards him with frowns on their faces. As one of them was about to start talking to our friend, I shook my head violently, expelling the scene from my imagination, reminding myself that I was in Washington, the capital of Uncle Sam’s country. It was not my wife’s fault that she accompanied me through an evening that could have ended tragically. I interrupted the imaginary movie and returned to reality… Where is the dessert menu for lunch we can have?

On imposing one’s own authoritarianism

In September 2012, I participated in an intensive program organized by the Dutch Embassy in Cairo for some Egyptian journalists, covering the parliamentary elections and learning about the Dutch political situation. What caught my attention was that the conference rooms where we met with representatives of ministries, government and non-governmental institutions did not have rectangular tables. We did not sit in or even see more than two dozen halls, and we did not sit in or pass by anything other than round tables. Then I traveled to Washington for a fellowship program, and I began to hear that some groups and institutions repeatedly used the title of “president”. I saw narrow rectangular tables with a person presiding over the meetings. I thought to myself that perhaps the essence of the country’s political system is imprinted in the interior design of the furniture. The Netherlands is a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system and always a coalition government, while the United States is a presidential federal system. But the question I could not find an answer to was: which took precedence, the political system or the furniture design?

I thought a lot about that enthusiastic college student who would stand up in class to discuss his professor, disagree with his views, and respond to the views he disagreed with. This is a common situation in theoretical college students’ lectures, and no matter how strong the student’s argument is, it often ends in the professor’s victory. At one point I said to myself, why can’t I imagine myself being a professor troubled by these enthusiastic students?

I played this role to the point where I started the day with my broken-down car and the taxi I had to take, feeling my pockets and ruling out the idea of ​​public transport as inappropriate to my university status. I arrived at the university, passed through the gates and saw the security guards exercising their unique powers over people and students entering the university campus, a scene never seen before in any respectable country or any free society. I walked into the amphitheater and took the only podium where I had considerable freedom, thinking: I wonder which of these pretty girls will write the security report?

One of the leaders raised his hand and asked to speak when I started to express myself, my thoughts and my feelings, which were not necessarily related to the topic of the lecture or the material I was teaching. The tramp’s language was broken and he tried to imitate my words. I am a university professor whose doctoral thesis was recommended and recommended for publication by the university council before this child was born. I was shocked by his audacity and I couldn’t help but retaliate with irony so as not to show my annoyance in front of the students. I asked him to finish his speech and take a seat, and then I warned him that his colleague was playing the trumpet for him personally in the seat behind him. He and other students turned to the unruly colleague, but instead of finding anyone in the seat, they saw the mischief on the face of the colleague who disagreed with my point of view, and the auditorium was filled with laughter.

You don’t need to finish this story to trace the impact of this situation on the soul of every student who may have had a professor with whom he or she disagreed in a college class. What is important here is to know why a student cannot play a similar prank on his college professor after having so much fun with his high school teacher. The answer is simple: because the design of the hall protects the professor from the inside, placing a barrier between him and the vast student body, giving him the ability to monopolize the view of everyone in the hall while his back is secured by a safety. His predecessors told him that when he was forced to write on the blackboard, he had to turn one side of his body in the direction of the students so that he could see them. In addition to the absolute divine power over grades, success, and failure.

I remember a professor at the Faculty of Arts at Alexandria University who refused to let his students onto the stage because the seats in the amphitheater were too crowded, and instead rudely verbally rebuked them and made them sit on the floor somewhere else than his wooden kingdom. I compare it to informal educational activities in which a teacher or a tutor sits in a circle with his learners or trainees in an open place, and no one is safe except for his trust in the members of the circle, who will surely warn him of any danger coming from behind him, and there is no possibility of stupid pranks, because in the presence of trust and cooperation and alliance there is no room for them.

Revolution and power…many forms and one concept

Now we can understand that the revolution is not just one big story, but countless small stories. The story of the brother who controls his sister’s travel schedule, the young man who leaves his fiancée because of emotional blackmail from his family, the story of Farid Shawqi, the bully in the wet market, and the secretary of the police station. It is the story of the gypsies and descendants of slaves in southern Upper Egypt, the orphans of the Bedouin tribes of Sinai, and the displaced residents of the city streets of Cairo. It is the story of a physically disabled person who wants to ride the subway, but is turned away by the station’s stairs and the entrance gates designed for able-bodied pedestrians. It is the story of a man who grabs the tractor of a train and chooses to risk his life in the open air instead of paying the state representative (conductor) in the train carriage within his power. It is the story of tuk-tuks that cannot get government licenses, and the story of pedestrians who look left and right when crossing the road at midnight when red lights have lost their meaning, regardless of the laws that are supposed to be established to manage people’s lives, not to sanctify them.

The revolution will go on until it succeeds. It will not succeed unless institutions kneel at the feet of the humanity of the people, unless theaters open to the streets, unless audiences play the music, unless audiences play the heroes. It will not succeed unless the students become active and effective learners, and the professor knows that he is a partner in the students’ learning. It will not succeed unless readers write the texts, audiences direct the films, people create their own media, and visitors build their own museums and exhibitions.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 5, 2013 at 7:09 am and is filed under Social Issues, Analysis of the January 25 Revolution, Social MovementsYou can RSS 2.0 Feed. You can Leave a Replyor Tracing From your own website.