“There is a realm beyond our material realm,” said Asani, who taught him in a 12-person freshman seminar in which students read literature by prominent Muslim authors from around the world.
“We are so obsessed with the material world. But there’s a world of the soul,” Asani said. “Music was the vehicle by which he could access that world.”
For one of his first assignments, Laramie wrote a “beautiful, beautiful” song called “Desert Wind” about the Prophet Muhammed. Laramie had listened to examples of the Koran being recited in Asani’s class and heard a chord.
Laramie took the chord and wrote a new song. In it, he sings of the prophet walking in the desert. The wind represented the divine, Asani said.
“This is somebody’s second week at Harvard, responding to something that was in a totally foreign language he didn’t even understand,” Asani said. “But he got the music.”
In a commentary for Asani’s class, Laramie wrote that he felt music spoke to an “internal rhythm” and an “unconscious memory.” Regardless of how it’s done, he wrote, music can have profound meaning.
“Humans learn the world through sound,” he wrote, “a mother’s heartbeat, before they know anything of sight,” he wrote.
Music led Laramie to poetry, Pepin said.
via A brilliant light cut off too soon – www.concordmonitor.com.
Ismailimail 