Recalling All Music

The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran's supreme leader, has declared that music is not to be practiced nor taught in the country. Better, he said, a young person "spend their valuable time in learning science and essential and useful skills, and fill their time with sport and healthy recreations."

I find it hard to understand how someone who claims to be a spiritual leader can be hostile to the most complex and transcendental of artistic expressions. Surely, I thought, this ban is not to be taken seriously. Apparently, I was wrong. Ali Bagherzadeh, head of the private- schools office in the Iranian Education Ministry wholeheartedly agrees: “The use of musical instruments is against the principles of our value system,”

Ironically, these principles of the Ayatollah's "value system" are neither particularly "non-Western" nor uniquely Muslim. I sometimes ponder what sublime creations the world may have been denied thanks to a certain 18th century Archbishop.

Archbishop Hieronymus, aka Count Colloredo, was determined to modernize Salzburg. Strapped for money he closed the local theater and reserved the performance of orchestral works for rare occasions. Singing in church was restricted to German hymns and a young composer then in his employ saw his salary and status reduced to little more than a footman or a scullery maid. That composer was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. But before you judge the Archbishop too harshly, what the world may have lost of Mozart's genius during those underused and under-appreciated ten years was Salzburg's gain thanks to the Archbishop's commitment to science and progress.

Similarly, the Ayatollah's vision, like the Archbishop's priorities, are no doubt admired in China where it recently banned the Mozart Requiem, Handel's Messiah and a proposed performance of Carmina Burana (the last ban, I concede, may be a point in favor of good taste.) In China's defense they do cotton to most secular Western music, just not Bob Dylan.

It troubles the heart and depresses the soul, this fear of music. A random survey finds: Israel now bans music cd's from entering Gaza, Afghan music was previously banned under the Russians. Now Saudi clerics want music and women both banned from television. Fortunately bans seldom last long or even work. Hitler failed to banish jazz from Germany, as did Stalin in the Soviet Union.

In a world in which most of us are powerless to set the terms of "progress" the power of music is our last redoubt, a fortress for restoring a place for dreams and finer ambitions. As someone wrote: "By correlating musical developments with historical events or conditions, we can see not only why certain styles of music were written when they were, but also how the times dictated the styles as much as the styles dictated the times." Poets may be dreamers steering a way to the future but as Auden so aptly wrote: "Poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become."

And what it becomes, archbishops and ayatollahs be damned, moves far beyond the reach of edicts or official interpretation.