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Turkey

When the barbarian Europeans were just waking from their Dark Ages it was the Turks who faced them from across the Hellespont. The new rulers of Constantinople controlled a vast empire in the Middle East and their culture absorbed the Arabic and Persian cultures and musics too. (for a bit of background on that see: yunus.cmpe.boun.edu.tr/~hocaoglu/music/articles/aksoy.htm )

The Sufi followers of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi: (13th century), the Mevlevi dervishes, spun in ecstatic gyrations to radiant melodies. You can hear some at MP3.com:

artists.mp3s.com/artists/219/rumi.html

For an elaborate web site devoted to Turkish music, both classical and modern go to:

www.turkishmusic.org

(I was able to get the MIDI files to play, but had trouble with the Classical files in RealAudio. Might have been the time of day...)

An Alchemical Aside

The alchemists were a fraternity of researchers devoted to converting lead into gold. For centuries untold intellectual efforts poured into this arcane art throughout Europe. But beware lest you mistake fool's gold for the real thing. Michael Maier wrote musical Fugues upon the Great Art. Along with the pictures and text from Atalanta Fugiens, the fugues are at:

www.levity.com/alchemy/music.html

Today Alchemy has become influential in its spiritual guise thanks to in part to Jung's detailed investigations. The Campfire at:

thecampfire.scram.de/home.html

has Alchemical music from Spencer Kiser and Tanja Small direct at:

www.thecampfire.scram.de/vorfilters/7.html

The echoes continue ...

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