Counter-messaging by violin, cello and cigarette
[ by Charles Cameron — long a chain smoker, painful on the ear when he attempted the violin, never tried the cello ]
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No, I don’t smoke any more, haven’t for more than a decade. But I still think of cigarettes as potential sacraments, as when a soldier in the trenches at the Somme passes one to his dying mate.. sacramentals, to be precise. So I can take pleasure in this conjunction of violin and cigarette in defiance of the Islamic State:
Islamic State banned music in Mosul, but it didn't silence Ameen Mukdad's violin – The Sydney Morning Herald https://t.co/BRdXVlZeEP pic.twitter.com/coPVNexv7T
— BLACKOPSCyber (@blackopscyber1) April 20, 2017
and:
Good detail here as ever by @alexjrowell The Rebel Who Defied Jihadists By Smoking – The Daily Beast https://t.co/1OM4asCqMG
— Shane Farrell (@Shanekfarrell) May 6, 2017
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The potential for grace is more easily seen in music than in smoking, to be sure — Ameen Mokdad with his violin in Mosul surely found it, as did Karim Wasfi with his cello in Baghdad. In these times in which the President scatters bombs around the place with one hand while planning to cut funding to the National Endowment for the Arts with the other, you might like to visit the Facebook page of Karim Wasfi Center For Creativity – Peace Through Arts, or listen to one or more of these videos..
Karim Wasfi — Interviewed by NPR’s Renne Montagne:
Iraqi cellist Karim Wasfi plays music on bomb explosion site:
Karim Wasfi, cello sonata and lecture at Geneva Centre for Security Policy during Geneva Peace Week 2016:
Iraqi Violinist Ameen Mokdad Plays Concert In Defiance Of ISIS | NBC News:
Ameen Mokdad, Viaggio:
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Music as sacrament is nicely illustrated by John Eliot Gardiner‘s quoting Bach immediately after Sara Mingardo sings O selger Tag! in the DVD of Bach Cantata BWV 63, “Christen, ätzet diesen Tag”:
Wherever there’s devotional music, God with his grace is present.
Recitatives — O selger Tag! is an example — are by definition “musical declamation of the kind usual in the narrative and dialogue parts of opera and oratorio, sung in the rhythm of ordinary speech with many words on the same note”. Arias are the stellar “diva” vocal parts for solo, duet etc, and recitatives the mere handmaidens that carry us from one aria or chorus via narrative to another. How extraordinary, then, the devotion Sara Mingardo‘s musicianship manages to pour into this recitative as performed in rehearsal above!
May 7th, 2017 at 8:39 am
More on Ameenis, this: Islamic State banned music in Mosul, but it didn’t silence Ameen Mukdad’s violin, and:
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Also, and related, Mosul blogger defies ISIS by listening to violinist Itzhak Perlman:
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