8 Singing with the Taxi Driver
There’s a particular kind of music that is a return. A return to the past, to childhood; to where we came from, to what we’ve lost. Music is structurally return. It moves forward, developing in time, and can’t be returned to except in mechanical recordings; but it depends simultaneously on reprise, repetition, patterns heard before. Arising and falling, it is always present. Music only works through memory, our ability to remember themes and notes that have come earlier. And understanding how one listens to music helps one understand how memory works in life. Moving what’s been into what’s to come, music can work across languages, cultures, and histories. Listening to music has the power to evoke through the ear memories consciously forgotten, emotional, felt in the rhythms of the body.
This key quality common to music and memory is transition, the bridge between past and present, cultures then and there and our world right here and now. Daniel Barenboim, the Israeli-Palestinian conductor—and the only Israeli citizen to hold passports to both nations—has drawn on the transitional character of music to effect culture transitions in history.1 In 1999 Barenboim set up with Edward Said the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, joining musicians from Arab countries with Israeli musicians. Their aim was for Israelis to remember and understand Palestinian history and for Palestinians to perform and participate in Western classical culture. Speaking about the enterprise, Barenboim finds in music an ideal for historical reconciliation: “through music we can see an alternative social model, a kind of practical Utopia, from which we might learn about expressing ourselves freely and hearing one another.”2
In 2006 Barenboim gave the BBC Reith Lectures, in which he spreads wider his practice of deriving lessons for life from music. It is transition that allows Barenboim to correlate music with life: “Transition, let us not forget, is the basis of human existence. In music it is not enough simply to play a statement of a phrase, it is absolutely essential to see how we arrived there, and to prepare it. One plays a statement one way at the beginning of a piece, but when the same statement returns later, in what we call in musical terminology the recapitulation, it is in a completely different psychological state of mind. And therefore the bridge, the transition, determines not only itself but what comes after it.”3 In his first Reith lecture Barenboim makes the connection between music and memory: “The first quality that comes to my mind as to the intelligence of the ear is that the ear helps us tremendously to remember and to recollect… and that shows you one of the most important elements of expression in music, one of repetition and accumulation. In any case, the ear has this incredible memory.”4
In the memoir I am writing of my mother’s family, music—against my consciousness at first—has been a way to access the memories of her Baghdadi Jewish and Chinese roots and routes and of my parents’ own meeting in Singapore. As together my mother and I go through her archive of different media—stories, documents, objects, and, of course, photographs—music is a recurrent theme and a channel for returning forgotten pasts, and particularly for remembering cross-cultural encounters and the desire for transition. I am finding that even the collaboration with my mother, which is the process of producing the memoir, corresponds to Barenboim’s description of music. In the beginning is my mother’s “statement”; in writing I “return” to or “recapitulate” it; and this can reshape her present understanding of herself—“what comes after.”
For example: recently my parents were inspired to make a cruise from Singapore to Southampton, via various stopping points in India, the Middle East, and Europe, having just read my account in the memoir of their own previous identical journeys. My return in writing to their early lives prompted their actual return to those old sites. From my mother on the boat, I received this further account of capturing memories, adding another layer to what I had already written. She had just visited Bombay, where she spent her childhood, equipped with the maps, directions, names of places, and contacts I had used from my research trip preceding her. But it is music that returns her properly. In the speechless conversation that is e-mail, she writes:
This is a different world; we are so cocooned here. The ship is OK and the excursions mixed; Phuket was a waste of time, and so was Dubai. But Cochin & Bombay were an amazing experience. Bombay was especially very poignant for me; seeing the coastline at dawn brought tears to my eyes, thinking of my Papa. It was all strange and yet familiar. Your notes and maps were crucial to our visit; we decided to go it alone (because the Jewish ship tour was cancelled) so we went by taxi. During the morning we saw two synagogues (the Magen David & Knesset Eliyahu) and the David Sassoon Library & School. We tried to find the exact spot in Ripon (now Maulana Azad) Rd where we had lived but it was impossible. We had a useless taxi driver who didn’t know a thing, so I had to get out & talk to the people (my Hindi came back in a big way!). It was all so crowded there & I have a feeling now that we actually lived along that road which at the time was so quiet I remembered it as a courtyard. There were cloth shops here & there still, but all those dwellings are now shanties occupied by very very poor Indian families as you know. It was sad to see them and yet they went around with smiles on their faces. We treated ourselves to a nice lunch at the Taj Mahal Hotel then took another taxi, a better one, along Chowpatty Beach to Colaba and Malabar Hill, then to the Hanging Gardens and Dhobi Ghat. He then took us back to Byculla to take one or two pictures. He was a nice young man who sang whilst driving; Dad told him I could sing, which the driver made me do, so all the way, we sang in turn then found we were singing the same song together (in Hindustani of course!). It was such an uplifting experience. The driver was amazed I could sing & speak Hindustani! I loved Bombay; not sure if I’ll return but it was a very evocative experience and I thought of my Papa who talked so much about the different streets & I found them. I think during the war it was the Jewish mahallah for the poorer Jews!5
My mother is confronted by the distance in memory from the moment, especially since it’s from early childhood, and the fact that the passage of time has changed things visually, externally. It is inevitable and symptomatic of memory’s holes that she can’t find the actual place—the “exact spot.” Where has the past gone? Her return introduces her to a difference. This is so also because the place is not only physically more developed and crowded, but politically and demographically renamed. India, like all of the former British East, has been de-empired, de-Anglicized, and, with the increasing sense of nationalist consciousness, Hinduized. Ripon Road, now Maulana Azad Road, is named no longer after the town in the Yorkshire Moors near to where I now live but after a leading member of the Quit-India movement, a scholar of Arabic descent and the most prominent opponent of a separate Pakistan state and supporter of Hindu-Muslim unity—and most unusually for Bombay, itself now renamed Mumbai after a Hindu goddess, a Muslim.
The whole area of Byculla, where my mother was visiting, is Muslim now, among the poorest in Bombay and one of the most Muslim. But during the Second World War, when my mother lived here, it was where those more impoverished Jewish families came who could escape from Singapore before its fall to the Japanese; Byculla was the Jewish mahallah, the Arabic word for “stopping place” that Baghdadi and other Arabic Jews use to describe a Jewish quarter. When I went to Byculla, the caretakers of the synagogues and cemeteries, who were such a help to me, were Muslim. The Jacob Sassoon High School is completely Muslim, still with a Hebrew dedication on its outside wall and still honoring a promise to say on its grounds at least one Hebrew prayer a day. Strange yet familiar indeed. My mother mentions her slap-up lunch at the Taj, right after describing seeing the poor people of Byculla and their shanties, but when she lived here she was a refugee in camp, with no shoes and dependent on donations and rations—in much the same place.
In contrast to the differences the eye notes, vision’s characteristics of discernment, distinction, differentiation, music allows the ear to find connections, transitions even, and here it’s with an identity precision—the “exactly” that is precisely missing in the visual encounter. The language of Hindi, one of the languages of her childhood even if she grew up multilingual, a language that surrounded her in Bombay as she was coming into language, comes back to my mother almost to her own surprise (“my Hindi came back in a big way!”). I trust that she remembers this language and especially the songs in this language pretty exactly, the sounds still existing in her memory and her body, so different from the changes effected to place. For, separated in age by probably half a century from the young man, she and the taxi driver end up singing the same songs, he knowing, recognizing, and this identity in their music accompanying, probably spurring, his willingness to try to return her to that place. And this shared singing, the identical songs, more than anything seems to make for her “uplifting experience,” to make the visit “evocative”—the sound of the voice—calling forth memories and feelings and especially bringing back her father.
What is the power of music to bring back memory? Other media promise better routes and roots (we’ve figured out we can never separate these) for return. Stories would give us the whole narrative but, often told to us by loved ones, leave things out, family secrets, and are edited unconsciously even when driven by the need to know. Photographs have the lure of reality, the precise moment itself, but may shock us by giving us what we least expect or become fixed themselves and colonize memory. History fills in the gaps of context, we think, giving essential background, but can be hard to integrate into a personal narrative, particularly if this goes against the grain of public events. The qualities of music for Barenboim are really inexpressible, yet correlated to life in part because of this; because “it is really impossible to speak really deeply about music,” we can “draw some connection between the inexpressible content of music and, maybe, the inexpressible content of life.”6 Becoming an adult is about becoming visual, discerning, and repressing the ear, our openness to everything and the body and the body’s openness to everything. And this openness is perhaps shifted into music to be heard as the inexpressible.
Barenboim lecturing us on how music makes its way into memory speaks about the seven-month advance the ear has over the eye in development in the womb. At the end of one lecture he has a conversation with Antonio Damasio, the neuroscientist of, particularly, human emotion, who confirms through vibration—we might say reverberation—the deep connection of sound to body and emotion. Damasio states that “there are many ways in which music goes very deep because of its closeness to sound, and sound goes very deep because of its closeness to emotion.” Barenboim understands Damasio’s work as saying “that the auditory system is physically much closer inside the brain to the parts of the brain which regulate life, which means that they are the basis for the sense of pain, pleasure, motivation—in other words basic emotions. And he [Damasio] also says that the physical vibrations which result in sound sensations are a variation on touching, they change our own bodies directly and deeply, more so than the patterns of light that lead to vision, because the patterns of light that lead to vision allow us to see objects sometimes very far away provided there is light. But the sound penetrates our body. There is no penetration, if you want, physical penetration, with the eye, but there is with the ear.”7
Returning to Bombay, my mother sang Hindustani songs from film music, and as a child she had sung these when her family were repatriated to Singapore after the war. Her father, like most of the returning Singapore Jewish community, which had been halved by the war, found it difficult to get his business, as a spice trader, going again. His daughter, for her singing, would be given some money, ten Singapore dollars—“a lot of money in those days”—by his Indian friends. But she also sang because her father and she enjoyed the songs—the music had penetrated them, if you will. One of our most treasured family possessions is a tape of my grandfather recorded in Singapore when he was eighty, singing his favorite songs—her songs and his songs, his songs becoming hers. My grandfather, a Baghdadi Jew living in Singapore, had been born in Bombay, and my mother in going back there had also been returning to songs her father taught her and to her father’s birthplace.
Hindustani music, particularly from old Bollywood films, was my grandfather’s favorite kind of music, as it is my mother’s—the type they find most emotive—and she says the music where he placed and which shows his great heart. My grandfather also played the harmonium, an instrument that was handheld at first and came to India with the British and that then became a staple of popular Indian music. Jacob Elias identified with all things Indian—food, dress, language, but especially music. And though Jacob was of a Jewish family from Baghdad, he was known as “Jacob Bombai-Wallah”—“Jacob the man from Bombay.” One of Jacob’s songs on the tape is from Bombai Ka Babu, “A Gentleman from Bombay,” a 1957 Bollywood film about a man expelled from his native Bombay and trying but failing to find acceptance in a new part of the country.8 My grandfather’s song, “Saathi Na Koi Manzil,” sung with Dev Anand’s good looks lip-synching over the pining rendition by Mohammed Rafi, the Muslim singer who sang for Hindustani films, is now on YouTube as a song of consolation and despair.9 The words, “There is [I have?] no destination or companion. There is [I have?] no group of people. This heart has made me walk. Where is it taking me alone? / The roads are of my own country. Even then they are a stranger to me. Who will I call as my own?” are about what’s lost, about loss remembered, rootlessness. The song is completely—unutterably in any other form—nostalgic. It is made sadder still when everything, the words and musical theme, is repeated twice. Maybe loss is what many songs, certainly many old Bollywood Hindustani songs, certainly those loved by my mother and her father, catch and hold.
Displacement can produce music, and music can become a way to remember the country left behind. In a coda that reprises and resolves some of the main themes of this family memoir, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts famously ends with the songs of Ts’ai Yen among the barbarians. Her Chinese language sounds like singsong to her barbarian children, but the poetess reaches for a high note, “an icicle in the desert,” which she holds and which sounds like the reed pipe music the barbarians make. Hers are songs that “translated well,” and “the barbarians understood their sadness and anger… barbarian phrases about forever wandering.”10 Most mobile of forms of memory, most portable, the tunes helping remember longer accounts and simple themes, songs are also a medium of travel. You can imagine song as the progenitor of Walter Benjamin’s stories of the first storyteller, the long-distance, long-term traveler.
Israeli Jewish singer Yasmin Levy makes songs about displacement and longing for home. The first song on La Juderia, “Naci en Álamo,” “I have no place / and I have no country / And I have no homeland,” is one that shows immediately and perhaps most strongly the characteristic and unmissable catch in her voice.11 Her father, Yitzhak Levy, was a researcher in Judeo-Spanish culture and the Ladino language, and particularly with her second album, named after the Jewish quarters in Spanish towns, the Ladino correlate of mahallah, she is choosing to “follow her father’s footsteps and become an ambassador of Ladino.”12 She makes this return to her father by singing in the Ladino language and reviving old musical forms, but much more profoundly by forming or in fact reforming affiliation and connection. The Jews arrived in Spain the same year it was conquered by the Muslims, 711, and both groups leave together under the Spanish Inquisition. “With this album I am proud to combine the two cultures of Ladino and Flamenco, while mixing in Middle Eastern influences. I am embarking on a 500 years old musical journey, taking Ladino to Andalusia, and mixing it with Flamenco, the style that still bears the musical memories of the old Moorish and Jewish-Spanish world, with the sounds of the Arab world. In a way it is a ‘musical reconciliation of history,’” as she returns to and remakes music from the time when Muslims lived in harmony with Jews.13
If traveling can produce music, this is especially so in crossing cultures, crossing borders, when traditions, forms, and languages can be brought together to make a particular kind of mobile, moving, and emotive music, forming a synthesis from the preexisting into something new. Levy returning to Andalusia goes to one border zone between West and East, North and South, Arab and European. Based in Israel, the Andalus Orchestra goes to the same border zone, according to their Web site playing music “that originated in Andalusia, the southernmost region of Spain, on the Mediterranean coast, overlooking the Moroccan coast. Nearly one thousand years ago, this cultural boundary-zone between North Africa and Europe gave birth to this unique music that intertwines both Arabic and Western Sounds.”14 As an ensemble, they blend Arabic voices and instruments with Western instruments and orchestration. Key to the common practice and goals is the term that Levy uses, “reconciliation.” And music’s coexistence of voices, human and instrument—the orchestration—allows for reconciliation. In another mode, that of Arabic improvisation and rougher but with a similar open ear, Yair Dalal, of Iraqi Jewish descent, works with other Arabic and Israeli musicians to produce folk music of the Middle East, “songs with which all of the people of the region grew up. Arabs, Jews, Christians, Moslems—people of all nationalities who share the same musical culture”—in particular on his album Inshalla Shalom.15 Such forms of music, such songs, tell of affiliation between Arabs and Jews, Muslims and Jews—what Ella Shohat calls the inextricably “conjunctural” relation between Arabs and Jews in the situation of Jews from the Middle East, the irremovable bridge, really ever present transition, of the hyphen between Arab and Jew in the “Arab-Jew.”16
From a family of Baghdadi Jews, thus also an Arab Jew, my grandfather was more familiar with Arabic than Hebrew, language of trade and life versus a language of religious worship. Another song he liked to sing and on the tape is a ghazal, a Persian-Arabic expression of both love and the pain of loss, this one translated into Urdu, the language of Muslims of North India and, since the end of the empire, of Pakistan. It is yet another of my grandfather’s songs that romanticizes journeying, not settling down. Jacob never lived in an Arab country, and Baghdad is the one place in the family memoir where it’s not been possible for any of us to return. My great-grandfather left Baghdad for Bombay probably in the 1880s, just a few years before my grandfather was born, spurred by the opening of the Suez Canal, which was part of the expansion of the British Empire and likely some increasing nationalism in the Ottoman Empire, of which Iraq was then part as a province. As my grandfather (eighty years old) belts out the words to this saddest song on the tape, his voice falters, and, given the contrasting strength of his renditions of other songs, I can’t help feeling that this is with grief more than age. What did he know, what do any of us now know, of Baghdad?
Is there a national or, perhaps more truthfully, native sound in music? Rachel Shabi, an Iraqi Jew of my generation, whose parents came straight from Baghdad to England, skipping India and Singapore, recounts realizing, as she listens to an Iraqi Jewish jam session in Israel that there are “Oriental” rhythms. Or—to use her term for Jews from the Middle East in a book which shows their contribution to Israel, as 40 percent of the population (and making up, with Israeli Arabs, the demographic majority, outnumbering Israelis of European descent)—Mizrahi: Eastern.17 In the most moving chapter, on music, Shabi writes her response to the Arabic Jewish musicians as one of recognition, remembering: “Watching them, I immediately understand that my mother, forever clapping a misfit, irregular beat over evenly syncopated Western tunes during my childhood, was simply marking out a rhythm that I couldn’t hear. The alien clapping is normal—appreciated—in this room fully of Iraqi Jews, in Israel.” She notes that she had missed and now hears this music because “Oriental quarter-tone melody—music from the Middle East—utilizes notes in between the ones on a Western scale, tones that can sound strange to an unaccustomed ear.” These “Middle Eastern Jews came to Israel with ears tuned to the Oriental frequency, set to appreciate the complex half-and quarter-tone arrangements of the East.” In Israel, a nation suffering in its conflict with Palestinians in part because of its symptomatic “confusion over cultural capital,” Mizrahi music for Shabi “brought the ever present tension to the fore: what to do about these Israelis, essentially so close in culture to the Arab world.” There is no way to measure electronically the Arab scale. Not many, particularly Western, musical instruments can play quarter tones, these symbolically laden sounds in between Western notes. But over many centuries quarter tones, tone leading meter, the inverse of Western music, have been the driving element of Arabic music, with its singing arising on different occasions, including of course traveling: “the rousing song of the camel driver, its rhythm corresponding to that of the camel’s steps, songs intoned by the young Bedouins riding through the desert on their camels and to the dirges sung by the women.”18
It’s the music of my mother that moves me most, often holding a traveled past. We grew up with her singing those sad songs from Hindustani film music as well as the occasional Chinese (my mother’s mother was Chinese and a convert to Judaism) and Arabic/Hebrew song. For a while now I’ve been consciously consuming this “Eastern” music. While I’ve never felt English—and this feeling of not being English is stronger than ever now as I write the memoir—Levy, Dalal, Idan Raichel, the music, connects me back to my mother and back past my mother to some genealogical memory.19 I don’t claim the memory or the music as native, since, from at least two migrant lineages, we were always passing through. But something, via the music, has penetrated.
Not long after I received my mother’s e-mail, I attended a concert on Eastern music—Iraqi Jewish songs, Arabic folk songs, Bene Israel Jewish songs, Bollywood: “Rivers of Babylon. An Evening of Eastern Promise: From Baghdad to Bollywood,” directed and compered by Sara Manasseh, an Iraqi Jew via India (not Singapore).20 Jews from all over Asia, and why not non-Jews and from other parts, sang songs, remembering private ones publicly and unashamedly—such as the Indian family sitting in front of me who all knew the words to the Bollywood songs and sang with gusto the one from Shree 420 (“Mr 420”). In this film, sung by Mukesh and mimed by Raj Kapoor, the memorable song is nationalist, and comic: “Méra Joota Hai Jâpâni.” “My shoes are Japanese, these trousers are English, on my head a red Russian hat—still my heart is Indian.”21 The high point the evening held for me was in the joza solos by Sohaib Al-Rajab, the world’s most famous joza player, from Baghdad, descended from a family line of Baghdadi maqam players and virtuosos in the genre of al-maqâm al ‘irâqi. When Sohaib played his stringed instrument, sad and slow, thin, eerie and difficult, the sounds were so embodied in a shared memory that the audience started less humming in accompaniment than leading his playing with a deep-throated lament or dirge. There seemed to be many people from Iraq there or from places removed from but remembering Iraq. At the end of Sohaib’s performance, the band leader was moved to thank the audience for their performance.
The maqam is a “technique of improvisation unique to Arabian art music found throughout the entire Arabian world,” which in contrast to European genres finds form not in meter, not fixed by time, but in “tone-spatial factor,” its melodic passages, phrases, and tone levels producing a strong emotional content.22 In one version, it can coexist with the Babylonian piyyutim, initially liturgical prayers—prayers in song—practiced in every Jewish mahallah, or quarter, but especially in Spain under Islamic rule and in Babylon, Iraq.23 (Most of the Andalus Orchestra’s performances are based on piyyutim). In the form of a piyyut, I’ve come across a song by another ancestor, Sliman Ma’tuk, who according to the family tree made the internal migration from Baghdad to the port of Basra in the 1800s. A scholar owning one of the largest libraries in Baghdad—which was until just after my great-grandfather left a culturally Jewish and Muslim city, where many of the musicians were Jewish—Sliman also wrote songs. In the Sassoon Hebrew Collections of the British Library (the Sassoons were also Baghdadi Jews), I’ve found a manuscript of a lyric Sliman composed. His Hebrew is thoroughly infused with Persian Arabic, as piyyutim fused with Arabic poetry and music. “My enemies are surrounding me,” his opening quotes the Psalms, then segues into an account of how he is being forced to hide in the Baghdad hammam, where he is writing this. It is a moment of persecution under Daoud Pasha, and from there he presumably went on to Basra. But the hammam, Arabic for a “public bathhouse,” in Baghdad was used by both Muslims and Jews.
There are, of course, clichés about music as the universal language, producing harmony—which have resulted in some pretty bad music. For anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, setting out on his structuralist attempt to collect and explain myths, music verges on being both all language and no language, pure code and opaque materiality. It is “the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable.”24 As a professional musician, Barenboim speaks more specifically and more literally about the structure of music as a means to integration, of “the ability of music to integrate, and how it is that a musician is by the sheer nature of his profession in many ways, an integrating figure. If a musician is unable to integrate rhythm, melody, harmony, volume, speed, he cannot make music.” In music there are always and only groups, because notes can’t have egos, must be in relation, or legato, “linked”—another thing that music teaches us in relation to life. And music, arising from silence and returning to it, has a metaphysical or transcendent quality: “sound proceeds from silence, and evaporates…. You can control life and death of the sound, and if you imbue every note with a human quality, when that note dies it is exactly that, it is a feeling of death.” Music is finally “a wonderful combination of more knowledge and nothing materially there to show for it.”25
But music, as especially both Barenboim and Lévi-Strauss know, is mediated, produced in culture. The songs of my grandfather cited here are also a cultural archive. If they bear the trail of my mother’s family’s migrations as Babylonian Jews via Bombay, it is because the songs are personal and public, emotional and meaningful. Immediate of person, they are also thoroughly mediated by place. And, as well as religious liturgy, film music—even what I think is an American folk song he must have heard on the radio, perhaps revived after the First World War when the radio came to Singapore (“Say, darling, say, when I’m far away / Sometimes you may think of me, dear / The bright sunny days will soon fade away / Remember what I say and be true, dear”)—my grandfather sings the second verse of the British national anthem. Who now knows that, who ever knew that—who knows that there even was one? Keeping time and place with the British Empire, moving with its expansion, the Baghdadis were known as the empire’s Jews—although my grandfather never forgave the British for abandoning their colony of Singapore to the Japanese, an abandonment that nevertheless forced him to return to one home in Bombay.
The recording we have of him is made in 1970, and the new technology of the audiocassette tape, introduced just six years before, allows the return of my grandfather, to me a long-dead person. But I was there when this recording was made and am also recorded singing on this tape, ringing out the English nursery rhymes that surrounded me in Europe, as I was coming into language and, I suppose, song. In the early magnetic audiocassette tape, before any kind of Dolby noise reduction, I can hear now the sounds of Singapore as I remember them then: from the flat on Short Street, the veranda open to where they used to keep the chickens tied up with string by their necks, the echoes off the concrete floor, as my grandfather sits in his cane chair and sarong. In between songs, my grandfather speaks Malay to his daughter, and her daughter my cousin, who must have just acquired the tape machine and been experimenting. My grandfather spoke many languages: English, Hindi, Arabic, and Malay, an indigenous language of Singapore. Singing is what I remember about my grandfather, not his stories, for which I was neither old nor geographically close enough. I remember him singing as I sat on his knee, on his sarong that I now have. Listening to him singing now is also my return to him.
What kind of return is song? Yair Dalal speaks about a child remembering family and culture through music, child and parent connecting through song. “You teach a child of Mizrahi origin an Iraqi song, and suddenly something in their soul awakes. Afterwards, the child goes home and practices and comes back a week later and says, ‘You know, my Dad started to sing the song I was playing.’ And that’s the connection. That person is back on track.”26 As the thesis of his lectures and the title, later, of his book based on them, Barenboim says something similar about connection, suggesting how musical memory can happen in mind and body—“something in their soul awakes,” Dalal says—soulfully: “This is why music in the end is so powerful, because it speaks to all parts of the human being, all sides—the animal, the emotional, the intellectual, and the spiritual. How often in life we think that personal, social and political issues are independent, without influencing each other. From music we see that this cannot occur, it is an objective impossibility, because in music there are no independent elements. Logical thought and intuitive emotions are permanently united. Music teaches us that everything is connected.”27
Everything is connected. My mother to her father; me to my grandfather; my grandfather to Iraq. When my mother and I listen to the tape of my grandfather’s songs, she adds her stories and tells me their meanings. I record her on a second tape for posterity and for accuracy. On this second recording, made now, my mother sings over my grandfather’s voice, and it’s a duet across another forty years. She is back on track I think—as she was when singing songs with the taxi driver, the young man and the old man and my mother and now myself all knowing the same songs.
Notes
1. Daniel Barenboim, Everything I s Connected: The Power of Music (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2008), 197.
2. Daniel Barenboim, BBC Reith Lectures, 2006, lecture 4, “Meeting in Music,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2006/lecture4.shtml (accessed May 31, 2009).
3. Daniel Barenboim, BBC Reith Lectures, 2006, lecture 5, “The Power of Music,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2006/lecture5.shtml (accessed May 31, 2009).
4. Daniel Barenboim, BBC Reith Lectures, 2006, lecture 2, “The Neglected Sense,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2006/lecture2.shtml (accessed May 31, 2009).
5. May Prosser, e-mail to author, March 30, 2009.
6. Daniel Barenboim, BBC Reith Lectures, 2006, lecture 1, “In the Beginning Was Sound,” http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2006/lecture1.shtml (accessed May 31, 2009).
7. Barenboim, “The Neglected Sense.”
8. Bombai Ka Babu, DVD, directed by Raj Kholsa (1957; Shemaroo Entertainment Infinity 2005).
9. “Dev Anand Sathi na Koi Manzil” (Adobe Flashplayer file), YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1uYlnPQZZI (accessed May 31, 2009).
10. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (London: Picador, 1981 [1977]), 186.
11. “Yasmin Levy: Naci En Alamo” (Adobe Flashplayer file), YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4RO9QiwvTM (accessed May 31, 2009).
12. Yasmin Levy, Romance and Yasmin, copyright © 2004, Connecting Cultures CC 50016.
13. Yasmin Levy, La Juderia, copyright © 2005, Connecting Cultures CC 50024.
14. “Andalus Orchestra,” http://www.tom-cohen.com/58251/Andulusic-Orchestra (accessed May 31, 2009).
15. Yair Dalal, Inshalla Shalom: Yair Dalal and Friends Live in Jerusalem, copyright © 2005, Najema Music MGDO50.
16. Ella Shohat, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 336.
17. Rachel Shabi, “Everyone Deserves Music,” Not the Enemy: Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands (Bodmin, Cornwall: Yale University Press, 2009), 135–156.
18. Habib Hassan Touma, The Music of the Arabs, trans. Laurie Schwarts (Portland: Amadeus, 2003 [1996]), 3.
19. Raichel’s “project” works with musicians and singers who come from across the Middle East and Africa to create the sounds that reflect the cultural fusion that is Israel. “The Idan Raichel Project,” http://www.idanraichelproject.com/en (accessed January 23, 2011).
20. Rivers of Babylon, “An Evening of Eastern Promise: From Baghdad to Bollywood,” directed by Sara Manasseh, with guest Sohaib Al-Rajab (joza) (Travellers Studio, Harrow Arts Centre, Hatch End, Middlesex, May 17 2009).
21. “Mera Joota Hai Japani—Shree 420,” Adobe Flashplayer file, YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8lyrGr0eyM (accessed May 31, 2009).
22. Touma, The Music of the Arabs, 38.
23. Amnon Shiloah, Jewish Musical Traditions (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992).
24. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology (London: Random House, 1994 [1964]), 18.
25. Barenboim, “In the Beginning Was Sound.”
26. Shabi, Not the Enemy, 143.
27. Barenboim, “The Power of Music.”