In the early 1990’s I was intro­duced to Majida El Roumi. I call her the “Nightin­gale of the Middle-East” in def­er­ence to the “Nightin­gale of India”. I present to you her most pop­u­lar and beloved song (which is, unfor­tu­nately, in two parts due to YouTube’s lim­i­ta­tions on the length of videos):

and

This is the orig­i­nal sound record­ing. You will find dif­fer­ent record­ings of this pop­u­lar song per­formed in var­i­ous con­certs worldwide.

In my opin­ion, this nightin­gale has done for Ara­bic music, what Salil Chowd­hury did to Hindi Film Music – learned, absorbed, and incul­cated West­ern Clas­si­cal ideas into their own tra­di­tional music.

Prefer­ably, you should lis­ten to “Kali­mat” at a very, very loud vol­ume as is pos­si­ble, sit­ting at a com­fort­able dis­tance away from the speak­ers, such that the nuances of the entire orches­tra­tion reach you, with­out jarring.

Lis­ten to the orches­tra­tion. The themes are bold, the orches­tra­tion switch­ing between arro­gance & gen­tle­ness, adamant & empa­thetic. The rhythm pulses like a heart­beat, that races to a level of excite­ment and then never looks back. And within that level of excite­ment, the orches­tra­tion man­ages to find adren­a­line as well as empa­thy. Beau­ti­ful as well as artis­ti­cally, musi­cally, almost impos­si­ble. These are emo­tions sweep­ing both mind and heart, and the music sym­bol­izes not only your pul­sat­ing heart­beat, but also your ana­lyt­i­cal mind.

Thanks to HyperActiveX’s com­ment below, I real­ized, I had not cred­ited the com­poser Ihsan Al-Mounzer suf­fi­ciently. Here he is, rehears­ing his own mas­ter­piece (this is an invalu­able video in itself – see how he per­forms the whole com­po­si­tion on just the piano!)

Finally, to the inter­pre­ta­tion and mean­ing. I don’t under­stand Ara­bic, nei­ther did I know about what the lyrics of this song actu­ally meant, until more than a dozen years after I began to love it. For me, it evoked a mul­ti­tude of emo­tions – a feel­ing of cat­a­clysm, how man can con­quer nature ulti­mately, and so on. But the actual lyrics mean some­thing totally dif­fer­ent and they are won­der­ful. Here is the orig­i­nal, intended, mean­ing (cour­tesy):

He tells me,
When he dances with me,
Words that aren’t like words
He takes me under­neath my arm
And plants me in a cloud

And the black rain in my eye
Pours down… pours
He car­ries me with him… he car­ries me
To a night on a rose-filled terrace

And I am like a child in his hand
Like a feather car­ried on the breeze
He car­ries for me seven moons
In his hand a bunch of songs

He gives me a sun… he gives me
A sum­mer and a flock of swallows

He tells me… that I am his mas­ter­piece
And I am equal to thou­sands of stars
And that I am a trea­sure… and that I am
More beau­ti­ful than any paint­ing he’d ever seen

He tells me things that make me giddy
That make me for­get the dance hall and the steps
Words that upturn my his­tory
That make me a woman in seconds

He’s builds me a cas­tle of illu­sions
I don’t live in it except for a few moments
And I return, I return to my table
With noth­ing with me… except words

Isn’t it won­der­ful? I have a very old record­ing of Maji­dah her­self per­form­ing on stage on a VHS cas­sette, and it is price­less. Music can say so much, and say so many dif­fer­ent things to dif­fer­ent people!

Hope you like this.