#ostad elahi

[au-jardin-de-mon-coeur]

Le hasard n'existe pas, tout a une cause et une raison d'être.

Ostad Elahi

[edlorado]

Ostad Elahi - Sāru Khāni Suite

[jorgedaburgos]

"La verità per l'uomo consiste nel sapere

- chi è

- da dove viene

- quali sono i suoi doveri qui sulla terra

- dove va."

(Ostad Elahi)

[thefunke]

- Ostad Elahi, Asar ol-Haqq, vol. 2, saying 194

[abdur-rahman-blog]

Pooriya Faraji: On the occasion of Ostad Elahi's 127th birthday

Peace, one and all… Beautiful music of the soul.

[dustedmagazine]

Listed: Joseph Allred

Photo Credit: Susanna Bolle

Joseph Allred grew up in Tennessee and currently lives in Boston, where he’s found good company with acoustic musicians such as Glenn Jones and Rob Noyes. Like them, he makes music that can easily be tagged as American Primitive guitar, a category that Dusted’s Bill Meyer invoked in a 2019 review of two Allred cassettes that were issued on the Garden Portal label: “Of all the musicians who convened in Takoma Park, MD last year to attend The 1000 Incarnations of the Rose festival, Joseph Allred hews closest to American Primitive guitar’s mystical spirit.”

But Allred has also made music that has little to do with that approach, and is not even played on acoustic guitar. A quick survey of the seven vinyl albums and virtual basketful of tapes and downloads that Allred has released on Feeding Tube, Garden Portal, Melliphonic, and Scissor Tail Records since 2013 will turn up songs played on piano and harmonium, banjo instrumentals, and sound collages made from cell phone recordings as well as sonically rich and emotionally commanding acoustic guitar soli. Meyer also reviewed Allred’s newest release, Michael, out on Feeding Tube, noting that “his grasp of the essence of American Primitive guitar, which is that music is not just an idiosyncratic reordering of certain influences… that are played on a steel-stringed acoustic guitar, but an articulation of one person’s uneasy relationship to the wider world.”

Mike Gangloff – “The Other Side of Catawba”

Ten Years Gone : A Tribute to Jack Rose by Mike Gangloff

This song was Mike’s contribution to Buck Curran’s 10 Years Gone tribute to Jack Rose that came out last year. In addition to being a moving tribute to his friend and musical co-conspirator, it points to the mystical, dirge-y side of the Appalachian fiddle tradition that I’m particularly fond of, evoking more than a bit the keening wail of graveside bagpipes.

Powers/Rolin Duo — St

St by Powers / Rolin Duo

A lovely ecstatic drone folk album from these lynchpins of the Columbus, OH cat-instagramming scene. Shimmery, rumbly, at once earth-planted and heaven-turned. 12-string guitar paints color washes like the album’s watercolor sun-scape cover and hammered dulcimer fills to the brim with echo, sometimes sounding on the verge of being blown apart by its own reverberation. It’s been providing a much-needed meditation and catharsis lately.

Ostad Elahi — The Sacred Lute: The Art of Ostad Elahi

Nur Ali Elahi was a Kurdish musician, mystic, jurist, and philosopher born in Iran to the Yarsani religious leader Hajj Nematollah. Despite showing a prodigious talent for the tanbur and being recognized as a master musician at an early age, he never played music in a professional performance setting, preferring to use the instrument, which accompanied him throughout his life, as part of a personal spiritual practice. The tanbur has an airy, ephemeral sound often described as dry or even ascetic, but it uses a rolling right hand technique that creates seemingly unending hypnotic swirls of notes.

Buck Gooter — Finer Thorns

Finer Thorns by Buck Gooter

I met Billy Brett and Terry Turtle about 10 years ago when the band I used to play in shared a spot with Buck Gooter on the lineup of a Harrisonburg, VA basement show. I thought of Suicide and Big Black with some primal Ramones-tinted sludge seeping through the cracks, but it was ultimately something uniquely weird in the best possible way. I didn’t get to know Terry as well as I wish I could’ve before he died last December, leaving Finer Thorns as his last album, but he was a special person and a true outsider art savant. I wish Billy the best as he carries the Buck Gooter flag forward on his own.

Stanley Brothers — The Complete Columbia Stanley Brothers

My dad sang in a gospel quartet and I used to poke fun a bit by asking if it hurt his feelings that most of the gigs they got were at funerals. Maybe because I’ve experienced a lot of loss in the last decade or so I understand the special place gospel music has around death for some of us, but I think it can call us to start building a heaven on earth just as it imagines a place where our departed friends and lovers watch over and wait for us. These recordings made between 1949-52 are some of the finest gospel and bluegrass to be found and have been my medicine for homesickness and world-weariness.

Arvo Pärt — Für Alina

I did a transcription of this piano solo for a tape that came out on Michael Potter’s Garden Portal label two years ago and found my first experience with transcription deeply rewarding. Für Alina is a quiet, introspective piece, arranged to slowly unfold and then fold back up and consisting of two voices that move together against an occasionally sounding pedal tone. When I arranged it for guitar, one of the alterations I needed to make is that I put the two voices in the same octave, whereas on the piano they’re played an octave apart. Pärt intended the dedication to “Alina” as a consolation to a mother who had recently been separated from her daughter, so distance is a theme of the piece, but I found it especially poignant that the tension between the two voices seems much more pronounced when they’re put closer together.

Julian Bream — Dances of Dowland

The recently departed Julian Bream was a giant of classical guitar but his anachronistic lute playing technique and use of an instrument with some modern amenities earned him the ire of the more authenticity-minded lutenist community (apparently a fairly ornery bunch). I don’t recommend caring too much about the difference between the right hands of a classical guitarist and a dedicated lutenist, and I still love this album of Dowland renditions for the lute. Bream is a particularly good candidate to bring out the drama and flamboyance that can be extracted from the music, and it’s always a treat to hear the joy and mastery he brought with him to whatever era or instrument he happened to be playing.

Popol Vuh — Spirit of Peace

Music can be weaponized and used to challenge oppressive structures in overt and destructive ways, but in the hands of those like Florian Fricke, it creates spaces for self-transcendence and communion with the Divine, which builds the foundation necessary for successfully transfiguring those structures or building new ones. It allows us to enlighten and empty ourselves, to become conduits for Divinity and activate it in the world. Like much of Popol Vuh’s music, Spirit of Peace speaks from soul to soul.

Alan Sparhawk — Solo Guitar

I’ve been experimenting with an electric guitar a little after having gone two years or so without plugging in at all and using some of that time to think about what the electric guitar excels at or might be uniquely capable of. Alan Sparhawk’s Solo Guitar came out the year after he had a well-documented breakdown that led to the cancelling of a 2005 Low tour and an eventual hospitalization, and this album stands out to me as a testament to how bleak and alienated the electric guitar can sound. It’s also a reminder of what made me put the electric guitar down for so long to begin with. It’s a beautiful album, but sometimes I can’t help but hear audio renderings of hellscapes Alan must have been fighting through.

Dorothee Soelle — The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance

Dorothee Soelle was a German Protestant theologian who came of age against the shadow of Germany’s horrific deeds during World War II. She spent her professional career as an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and Cold War arms race, patriarchal renderings of God, and a perversion of Christianity she called “Christofascism.” The Silent Cry stands as one of her most important and widely read works. She imagines an imminent, politically engaged mysticism, one equally at odds with the violent, patriarchal exploitation enacted by capitalism, and other-worldly mysticisms that refuse social analysis.

[andishe-online-germany]

English:

Master Elahi's Prophecies

[brunel-music-and-driving]

Here is a new publication that was led by PhD student Dr Amir Yassari M.D.

The paper presents a case study that details the application of an auditory training programme on a male patient with a first episode of major depression.

The auditory intervention centred on the Music for Mind 2 programme, which features the improvised music of Ostad Elahi (1895–1974).

https://mmd.iammonline.com/index.php/musmed/article/view/851

[hell-yeahfilm]

FUNDAMENTALS OF THE PROCESS OF SPIRITUAL PERFECTION

Ostad Elahi (1895-1974) was a true 20th-century Renaissance man: a distinguished judge who promoted women’s rights in Iran from the 1930s through the ’50s, an acclaimed musician whose tanbur recordings were celebrated at a 2014 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit, and a metaphysical philosopher. In this book, his son, Bahram Elahi, offers readers a “condensed handbook” for the practical application of the elder Elahi’s teachings of spiritual perfection. Like his father, the author—who’s a medical doctor and surgeon by training—embraces a “new medicine of the soul” that eschews “in vitro” spirituality that prioritizes theoretical conjecture in favor of an “in vivo” spiritualism that emphasizes “concrete, personal practice carried out in real-life situations.” Drawing on personal observations and anecdotes from his father’s life as well as his own previous publications and oral teachings, the author provides an approachable version of Ostad Elahi’s esoteric philosophy of self-realization. While at times frustratingly repetitious, the book does provide ample text-box vignettes, contextual footnotes, and bulleted talking points to ease readers into the spiritual practices that the author asserts will ultimately lead to spiritual “perfection” and “total bliss.” Perhaps most helpful are a series of drawings and diagrams at the beginning of the book that introduce the complex jargon of the philosopher’s ideas relating to the human psyche and the nature of the human soul. Originally written in Persian and French, this uncredited English translation generally succeeds in its quest to condense the philosophy into accessible prose. In doing so, it offers thoughtful answers to the persistent questions of humanity, such as “For what purpose are we here?” and “Where do we go after this world?” In a world in which too many spiritual leaders fail to practice the lofty ideals they preach, this book’s focus on intentional actions is more than welcome.

from Kirkus Reviews https://ift.tt/kLbhjyP

[dandanjean]

Leili Anvar

Leili Anvar, Maître de conférences à l’Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, chroniqueuse sur Radio France, évoque la notion de bonheur dans les traditions spirituelles occidentales et orientales, liée à la qualité d’être plutôt qu’au matérialisme. Leili Anvar évoque la proposition de vie du poète Ostad Elahi menant au vrai bonheur. Entretien réalisé par Dominique…

[chaoticshehanghothi4-blog]

Advanced Brain Technologies - Ostad Elahi - Music For The Mind Regular Price :125.00$ Sale Price:37.8$

[badebi]

DB3.3 Floating in the Divine Flux

Poem #1

This is how foolish we’ve become! A human being is a mountain range! Snakes are fascinated by us! Yet we sell ourselves to look at a dead snake.

آدمی کوهیست چون مفتون شود ** کوه اندر مار حیران چون شود

خویشتن نشناخت مسکین آدمی ** از فزونی آمد و شد در کمی

خویشتن را آدمی ارزان فروخت ** بود اطلس خویش بر دلقی بدوخت

صد هزاران مار و که حیران اوست ** او چرا حیران شدست و ماردوست

Poem #2

من عرف زین گفت شاه اولیا  *** عارف خود شو که بشناسی خدا

بهر آن پیغمبر این شرح ساخت *** هر که خود بشناخت یزدان را شناخت

Poem #3

منبسط بودیم یک جوهر همه ** بی‌سر و بی پا بدیم آن سر همه

یک گهر بودیم همچون آفتاب ** بی گره بودیم و صافی همچو آب

چون بصورت آمد آن نور سره ** شد عد�� چون سایه‌های کنگره

گنگره ویران کنید از منجنیق ** تا رود فرق از میان این فریق

Concept & Process

“To come to know God, we must seek Him within ourselves. To do so, we must delve within.” - Rumi

“The key to true self-knowledge lies in delving within, meaning that we must seek Him within ourselves.” - Ostad Elahi

In this design brief what I tried to illustrate is a simulation of an interactive installation so show the idea that we human beings are made from the same essence, and our ultimate goal of living this life is to discover ourselves so that our real selves, our souls, can grow and evolve and reach to the state of unity through the path of perfection. 

The other concept that I wanted to illustrate in this piece is the concept of Divine Flux. The Divine Flux is like a wave of consciousness that emanates from His radiance. This flux can be analogized to God’s infinite field of consciousness, which encompasses all beings in the universe and is present everywhere and in everything. 

To visualize these ideas, I could not think of any thing but the Farsi (Persian) script and the poems from Iranian mystics such as Rumi. I have also took advantage of the concepts of “Repetition” Iranian art and culture and tried to used that in my work, such as:

In Persian calligraphy,  the calligraphers would write a phrase repeatedly on practice sheets in order to understand the soul of the words they were writing and to refine the shape of letters , reach to the perfection and become a master on writing them. This process is called Siyah mashq which literally means "black practice". 

Another use of repetition is in Dhikr (Zekr), meaning "mentioning", which are devotional acts in Islam in which short phrases or prayers are repeatedly recited silently within the mind or aloud.  To Sufis, dhikr (zekr) is seen as a way to gain spiritual enlightenment and achieve union or annihilation in God a person can feel that the presence of God.

To get all these together in one piece I used After Effects to be able to animate things. working with Persian type after effects was a bit tough, and that is because the of nature of the Persian script and the different behaviors that letters have compared to Latin letters. The font I used is called “Iran Nastaligh” which is an imitation of one of the main calligraphic hands used in writing the Persian alphabet, and traditionally the predominant style in Persian calligraphy. For the color of words, I used different shades of brown to different individuals to show that all of us were made out of clay despite the fact that we seem different. I multiplied the text and animated it to give it a Siah Mashgh feel, and I used black for its color so that the actual poem which feels each person’s body remains legible, yet needs some effort to read it. This resembles to the process of delving within and seeking our actual truth in which one has to invest some energy. 

The blue and black text which starts from one head and connects it to someone else’s head, says “Ya Hagh, Ya Hu”, which is a dhikr (zekr) consist of two of God names. The color blue is Persian Blue which is widely used in the tiling for Iranian architecture , and also in Iranian enameling. It represents the color of sky and ocean, which  surrounds everything within it, similar to Divine Flux.

The result, as you can see, is an idea for an interactive installation piece which detects user’s body (using kinnect) and fills it up by Persian poems (mostly by Rumi) whose main theme is to discover God and unite, one has to search for Him within himself. Each individual will be filled by a different poem, and each user will connect by his/her head to other users through a repetition of names of God which represents Divine Flux.

[jorgedaburgos]

Ostad Elahi, Parole di Verità, 415.

[thefunke]

“Much is revealed about us through our eyes and words. As our spiritual character is reflected in our countenance, that which lies within cannot be concealed.”

Ostad Elahi

[potdecitations]

'Si l'intention est fondée sur le bien et la bienveillance, en elle-même, elle porte des fruits.' -Ostad Elahi | Cliquez ici pour plus de citations!

[ijustmakepizzapies]

If you’re into, say, Robbie Basho or Sandy Bull, then you’ll probably dig Ostad Elahi. These home recordings from 64-72 are amazing explorations of acoustic sound.