in La rivista di Arablit, a. XIV, n. 28, dicembre 2024, pp. 137-142.

Ǧubrān Ḫalīl Ǧubrān’s (Gibran Kahlil Gibran, 1883-1931) work can be aptly described by the term “prophetic density”. His writings and paintings encapsulate themes and ideas that generate a vibrant energy, instilling hope and providing a deeper understanding of existence that goes beyond everyday events and vicissitudes. When we consider prophecy as the vision of meaning and the hope it brings, Gibran fully embodies the compelling presence that this belief can inspire. He parallels the experience of Nietzsche’s posthumous figures1, who are often less understood than their contemporaries, gaining authority through a unique misunderstanding.

At the young age of 22, Gibran published Nubḏah fī fann al-mūsīqà (A Short Treatise on the Art of Music) in New York in 1905. While a superficial reading might suggest it is merely a youthful tribute to music, there is a significant homology, after Lucien Goldmann’s definition, between the themes of this early work and Gibran’s own life journey.

In truth, critics and scholars have not been very impressed with the book. For example, Suhayl Badī‘ Bušrū’ī (Suheil B. Bushrui, 1929-2015) stated that «al-Mūsīqà, as a work of art, showed all the signs of inexperience. While it had passion, the fire of his imagination was held back by an overly ornate style, a slow tone, and an uncertain rhythm»2. According to the Lebanese poet Ḫalīl Salīm Ḥāwī (Khalil S. Hawi, 1919-1982), Gibran’s descriptions of music are so vague that they could just as easily apply to any other emotional subject3.

In May 1903, Amīn al-Ġurayyib (Ameen Goryeb, 1880-1971), the editor and owner of the daily Arabic newspaper “al-Muhāǧir” (also known as “al-Mohajer”, i.e. “The Emigrant”) in New York, visited Boston. During his visit he met the young Gibran, who impressed him with his kind manner and intelligence. The next day, Gibran invited Ameen to his home, where he showed him his paintings and shared an old notebook containing his thoughts and meditations. After seeing the paintings and reading the poems in the notebook, Ameen realized he had stumbled upon a genius artist, poet, and philosopher.

Thrilled by his discovery, the journalist offered Gibran a position as a columnist on “al-Muhāǧir”. This opportunity allowed Ameen Goryeb to bring Gibran out of his retreat in Boston and introduce him to his Arabic readers. In one of his editorials, Goryeb wrote: «We are very fortunate to present the Arabic-speaking world with the first literary work of a young artist whose drawings are admired by the American public. This young man is Ǧubrān Ḫalīl Ǧubrān of Bišarrī, the famous city of the braves»4. They published his contribution, Dam‘ah wa ibtisāmah (A Tear and a Smile), without comments, leaving it up to the readers to judge it according to their tastes. This marked the first time Gibran saw his name in print.

In the footsteps of its genesis Gibran’s early work foreshadows his future as a spiritual bridge-builder and cultural traveller. In just twenty-five pages, he explores themes that would define his brief but impactful life. Blending history and lyricism, Gibran probes the evocative power of maqāmāt music. He seeks to reconcile Eastern and Western musical traditions, reflecting his own journey between worlds. This effort hints at a deeper quest to uncover universal human experiences. Gibran’s musical musings offer a window into his evolving worldview, illuminating the historical context that shaped his ideas. Gibran’s artistic vision straddles musical and non-musical realms, seeking harmony yet risking dominance. His death in 1931 preceded the Congrès du Caire (Mu’tamar al-mūsīqà al-ՙarabiyyah al-awwal [First Congress of Arab Music]) in 1932 and its adoption of tempered quarter tones for Arabic music – a move both preserving and Westernizing tradition.

Unlike this colonial bent, Gibran sought common roots while honouring uniqueness, echoing Mahler’s view of tradition as living flame, not worshipping cold ash. Though his early musical influences remain unclear, Maronite liturgy and Islamicate soundscapes likely shaped him. His aesthetic, rooted in Christian and Islamic mysticism, aligned with the Arab concept of ṭarab – the emotional power of music in urban settings. This approach bridged cultures, preserving essence while embracing evolution. The term, as Ali Jihad Racy clearly illustrates, «is similar in meaning to the word fann, which literally means “art” or “craft” and has been used in reference to local urban music […]. And in a more specific sense however, the word “ṭarab” refers to an older repertoire, which is rooted in the pre-World-War I musical practice of Egypt and the East-Mediterranean Arab world and is directly associated with emotional evocation […] and describes the musical effect per se, or more specifically, the extraordinary emotional state evoked by the music»5.

In the first section of the text, Gibran states that «music is a body with a spirit generated by the soul and a mind that is the fruit of the heart»6. Through the figure of musical art evoked by the beloved woman’s voice, he presents a vision of the relationship between hearing and imagining that brings to mind John Keats’ famous verse in Ode on a Grecian Urn: «Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter»7. Gibran goes on to conceive of music as «a lamp that dispels the darkness of the soul, illuminating the heart and revealing its deepest recesses»8 – a kind of negative capability that makes cognitive contact with interiority. The influence of English Romanticism is evident at an intertextual level, while the idea of music’s divine origin refers to the phono acoustic dimension of biblical and Koranic revelation, an echo still heard in Byzantine chant and its Oriental church declinations, as well as in synagogal cantillation (hazanut) and the art of qirā’ah through the phonetic orthopraxis of taǧwīd. Creation pulses with a musical breath, a secret code of nature. This cosmic symphony defies human translation yet opens hearts to philosophical enlightenment. Like Nietzsche’s «Dionysian mirror»9, music reflects the essence of the world. Through it, we glimpse our divine origins, recognizing all living beings as varied expressions of a singular source. Cultural differences and diverse life forms become harmonious notes in this universal composition, resonating with love and knowledge intertwined.

In the third section of al-Mūsīqà Gibran cursorily traces through the «theatre of remembrance»10 the role played by music in ancient civilisations. The intention is to unite the human experience in a search for the meaning of the mystery represented by this art, where the aetiological explanation of myth arrives at an inspired subjectivity of the musical phenomenon. The example of King David mentioned by Gibran shows an “intransitive” conception of sound experience. The I playing is not oriented to the instrument (I play an instrument), but the instrument is the medium of an inner sound in which the I is the active subject of the song, an I that resonates in its innermost self «as if the notes of the harp flowed directly from its afflicted heart and carried the drops of its blood to its fingertips»11. Myth, therefore, among the ancients would only capture this universal springing of sound from the depths of the human soul, a sound that precedes speech and accompanies every manifestation of the cycle of existence. The original presence of sound permeates life itself in its course marked by phases of joy and sorrow – even in the darkest experiences such as war – and accompanies its flow by preceding in experience the word itself: music as word-origin, authentic myth (in the sense attributed to it by Károly Kerényi12), ritual.

In the penultimate section of the work, the author attempts a description of the emotions and moods aroused by four different maqāmāt13. The maqām is in fact a complex musical system that embraces the cultured traditions of music that developed in the Islamicate ecumene, from Andalusia to Maghreb, as far as the borders of China, passing through North Africa, Turkey, Persia and Central Asia – an immense geographical area, therefore, inhabited by peoples characterised by the most varied cultures, not by chance indicated by some scholars with the fanciful toponym of “Maqāmistān”. According to its etymology, the term maqām itself designates the place where music is made, both as the physical space of performance practice, and as the consistency of notes grouped by pitches and intervals. The vastness of this ecumene has, by nature, favoured contaminations and imprests that, in the case of the Syrian-Lebanese region from which Gibran came, refer, but not only, to the presence of the Byzantine musical tradition and the forms assumed in the various confessions derived from it. In the age of colonisation and with the consequent rise of nationalist instances, the awareness of this original unity was lost, which explains why today a distinction is made between Arab, Persian, Turkish, Uzbek maqām. It may be noted as a seminal hint for further discussion that the difference between cultured (maqām) and popular (‘atābā) musical forms could recall a homology with the diglossia present in the Arab world, i.e. the coexistence of a single literary language alongside a myriad of spoken dialects.

The maqām, in its technical sense, is a hierarchical arrangement of notes in intervals and pitches, serving as sound material for the performer’s practice. It cannot be reduced to a scale or mode, as it also encompasses specific motifs, melodic formulae, and phrases comprising only its unique notes. This structuring bears a strong resemblance to Hindustani Indian classical music and the raga system. The group of maqāmāt, categorized into families, possesses distinct characteristics. Firstly, there is microtonality, where intervals are either lower or higher than those in the European cultured tradition which is based on equal temperament and fixed semitone distances within an octave. The pitch of notes does not have a fixed reference to a tuning fork, and both relative pitch and microtonal distance are adjusted according to the practice of schools, masters, and performers, resulting in a virtually unlimited range of nuances, colours, and expression.

Additionally, there is monophony, where instruments or voices do not have overlapping or concatenated melodic lines, making it alien to the European concept of counterpoint or harmony. Furthermore, heterophony involves the performance of the same melodic line by several instruments in unison, differing in timbre and register. Developed into elaborate forms of expression and suites, the performance practice links different parts and forms, usually beginning with a solo that presents the structure, colour, and mood of the maqām through the arrangement of notes along an ascending or descending path, dwelling on certain characteristic notes or intervals, transitioning to the upper octave, and presenting phrase-types that become leitmotifs or unmistakable specificities of each maqām. This presentation, known as taqsīm in Arabic, is guided by improvisation and then developed into different forms, possibly modulating to other maqamāt, but always maintaining the idea of a path, a dialogue, and a fluid flow. Uzbek scholar Otanazar Matyakubov14 has likened the maqām to a city that the performer navigates, deciding where to stop and which places to visit. The characteristics are those of a soundscape that the musician explores according to an articulated dialectic between tradition and improvisation.

In its historical development, in dialogue with the Hellenistic-Byzantine tradition, the maqām system has developed connections with therapeutic praxis and spirituality, as seen in Sufism, by associating individual structures with macrocosmic and microcosmic correspondences. Gibran focuses on four common traditional structures used by performers – the nahāwand, the iṣfahān, the ṣabā, and the raṣd (or rast) – and explores their emotional impact and inner resonance, which encompass a wide range of feelings and moods. The evocative nature of the vocal sonority fosters an odeporic and sometimes rhapsodic quality, allowing us to touch on themes and images characteristic of a heritage that Gibran would later develop in his figurative and literary works, but which are already present here in an early, intense synthesis. «O daughter of the soul and of passion»15; with a tone reminiscent of Keats, this conclusion celebrates and invites us to honour those in Eastern and Western traditions who have taught us to listen to the call of the invisible and to see what sounds convey in the mirror of the imagination, connecting humanity to its origins and propelling it towards a spirituality free from sectarian compromises and pettiness.

The text is now published under the title La musica in Italian for the first time by Mesogea, edited by Francesco Medici, a renowned expert on Gibran’s work, with the assistance of Lebanese scholars Maya El Hajj, a professor of Translation and Foreign Languages at Notre Dame University-Louaize, and Nadine Najem, a poet and musicologist. Medici, who has spent years exploring every aspect of Gibran’s production – from poetry to fiction, from pictorial art to theatre and non-fiction – and is well-versed in the literary scene of the Syrian-Lebanese diaspora in the Americas at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, provides a very accurate introduction that offers a comprehensive viewpoint drawn from his long acquaintance with the author and his entourage. This introduction clarifies the context and genesis of al-Mūsīqà. The publication is enriched by a preface by Paolo Branca (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan), who highlights the importance of Gibran’s thought within his specific cultural background. The volume is also enhanced by the inclusion of the literary text in the original language, as well as the Arabic translation of all the paratexts, making it very useful to Arabists and Arabic-speaking readers.

La musica / Nubḏah fī fann al-mūsīqà, presented in both languages, invites readers on a journey through spaces, places, times, cultures, arts, and lives, where the work and figure of Kahlil Gibran take on a prophetic and proclaiming tone, full of hope in humanity and its presence in the world, for times to come.