Allah

1951 · réf. ABC_50690 — Damascus Syria: Ibn Zeydoun Printing Shop 1951. Original green faded to brown printed paper wrappers with the English title on one wrapper and the Arabic title on the other staple bound. 4to. A scarce bilingual pamphlet trying to connect music theory to global pacifistic politics and international harmony by the Syrian musicologist Allawerdi published in the year he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1951 for his efforts to advance world peace through a unified universal language of music which he had formulated a few years before in his groundbreaking work The Philosophy of Oriental Music Damascus Ibn Zeydoun 1949. The pamphlet contains the text of a speech Allawerdi originally delivered in Arabic over the radio. He held that there were two basic forms of music: the oriental natural one based on the natural harmonic series - associated with serenity and peace - and the western mechanical one based on the tempered scale of 18th-century instruments which he considered as artificial and complex ultimately leading to restlessness chaos and war. He wanted to unify the ‘language of music’ as a first step towards achieving world peace.Allawerdi went even further connecting his ideas on world peace with his belief in economic equality and justice having once advocated his theories already from the platform of the Unesco conference in Beirut in 1948 where he caught the attention of the eminent English evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley the brother of Aldous and serving at the time as the first Director-General of Unesco.Also including in this pamphlet between the English and Arabic texts pp. 1-4 is a short positive review of his main work The Philosophy of Oriental Music.With manuscript annotations on the front wrapper "duplicate". The green wrappers are somewhat faded to brown. Otherwise in good condition.l WorldCat 690043678 1547321918 17306860 78737345. Ibn Zeydoun Printing Shop, unknown