This oft-repeated phrase— cited to Wm. Shakespeare— is usually misquoted in America as « Music hath charms to soothe the savage beast.» And, why ever not? This popular expression certainly holds true of us all in the human family, where music is concerned. Nothing else has such power to reach us, in the marrow of our being, as does music. It infiltrates our souls physically; it moves our hearts. It dreams us!

Despite our lack of knowledge of other cultures, their musics can transcend those details, particularly if the music is being played or sung with artistry. By this, I mean that the piece being played must first

deeply move and touch its interpreter—with the comprehension and the skill to both restrain and to convey it to its listeners, within its own traditional forms of expression.

One does feel it in the body. The intellect is a fine instrument in its own field, but when outside its field, it becomes a meddlesome trespasser. Whilst absorbed in Persian music—be it classical or folkloric, I shut my eyes and let the music take me up and away into itself. It meanders close always to the sacred. Listening to Persian music in dreamtime, while knowing little about it, I can, nevertheless, feel something about its natal culture—despite the fact that American [folk] music is less about dreamtime than about its being on a butcher’s counter to be chopped into equal pieces. Time in the Persian culture is dreamy, meandering, sensual as a daf’s waves, complete. It values the soft unfolding of time, itself, as being beyond time. When an ensemble isn’t in its own music, our bodies tell us that it is on «automatic pilot» instead.

We lose interest; the mind buzzes and resounds with myriad thoughts. We cannot enter the music nor can it enter us. As an audience, we become co-conspirators. Last evening, at Berkeley’s music club-cum-coffeehouse, Freight and Salvage, my body notified me of the precise moment that the usually-sublime musicians became distracted, bored, tired: when it flattened into the linear; and the music fell to earth. No more highs and lows; profundity is missing-in-action, along with our emotions.

A Kurdish song metamorphoses into one of pure Persian provenance; the daf is played on its hard edge, banging towards show-business spectacle. The usually sublime singer pushes his voice as if to hide his indifference, fear, or exhaustion. It loses the shivering, the subtleties, the great leaps of faith; his faith in us and in our discrimination. The tar player becomes hurried and somewhat sloppy in his playing style. Perhaps each is hoping that the Americans—a culture of the obvious and of impatience with development unfolding in its own time and ways—musically speaking—will not notice the difference. How can the audi-ence know how hackneyed two of the pieces really are? In a general way, the ensemble has turned itself into a Persian version of the Gypsy Kings, as the Gypsy Kings are to flamenco puro.

I stop short of pronouncing these signs of desperation to be signals of contempt towards audience and to the music itself. Nevertheless, something in us always knows; were we not—each and all— ever children?

I suspect that this type of music belongs outside on a crisp, lovely day; or in a room of the country inn—not onstage where the temptation and the danger wink one towards Performance. Only that. In this case, it is all the more disappointing because this group of music makers is usually adept at what it does best.

—Rita Weill Byxbe

Berkeley, California