Music, Melodies and the Savior

By Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)

August 15, 2006

Classical music has its dazzling charm. Piercing violin, up and down cello, and in only background the reflective organ mash the music in its virtuoso synthesis. A world of music, where new tunes defy the traditional vigor, frothing like dewy soap bubbles, harmonious beauty in soothing sound. You can hear distant tabla chatting with playful sitar while harmonica keeps tango with shifting piano and strumming guitar.

So many talented music composers contributed in the vastness of musical library around the world, generations after generations. All different kinds, different appeals to different people from varied background. Poor or rich, literati or illiterate, music can seep into everyone’s welcoming veins if given a chance, transfusing agonies into sweet melancholy.

In its elemental form music have no boundaries, no immigration laws could bound its soaring trebles, and no artificial barriers could stifle its flowing crescendos. In war and in peace, music can bring solace in grief and in meaningless triumph.

A mother’s lullaby, from Russia or Venezuela, or perhaps in American middle class suburb, has the similar effects on an infant or a child of innocence as it has on children of starving Africa or burning Middle-East. Music can pour love in hate-filled minds. Music can lift deadened boys or girls to lively lost childishness.

Even if you look closer into an apparently desolate vanishing summer like ours, where the jovial mood has gone sour witnessing distressing events surrounding our livelihood, remote but so close to the heart, day by day erosions of accumulated civility in the broaden world stage by masterful gory violence of deliberate randomness, where truth has sunk into the deepest level of Pacific or Atlantic ocean, buried into the darkened whiteness of blinding deserts, a simple melodious tune from stringy mandolin enmeshed in gentle tuba and mechanized harpsichord raise the level of awareness of cosmos and vast expanse of our singular universe.

We are all into it. Into romantic pop, ear splitting rocks or heavy metals, cool Jazz, Brazilian samba, poetic rap, Bangladeshi forgotten melodies, Arabic qanun dominated pleasing harmony, piety empowered Hebrew Nusach; our frazzled mind gets pacified in taking Buddhist and Hindu chant in variable raga and kirtan; even Muslim muezzin’s enchanting azaan, full of melodies, so similar to captivating hazzanut, Jewish equivalent of classical music, and then the spiritual gospels of Christianity, orchestrated in purified hymns of pacifist doves.

Perhaps the “saviors” of our humanity remain within our humane reach, not in some dismal mythical figures. Perhaps changing chords of guitar or piano aspire to replenish our severed but still repairable bonds.

When the choice comes, music will surely vanquish bombs and mindless destructions in a sweeping binding coda. At least that is the musical melodies yearn to accomplish in its variable beats amid shadows and clouds.