Healing Melodies

Both images by Gemini AI

In Steven Galloway’s haunting novel The Cellist of Sarajevo, music is a lot more than a form of art or entertainment. It is a profound act of resistance, a lifeline to humanity, and a mechanism for survival. Based on a true story during the Siege of Sarajevo, the novel centres on a cellist who vows to play Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor for 22 consecutive days – one day for each of the 22 people killed by a mortar strike while waiting in line for bread.  

The cellist exposes himself to falling mortars and shooting snipers. His music is a declaration that the warmongers can conquer people but not the human spirit. It is also a reminder of what Sarajevo was before the war – a cultured, cosmopolitan city – and what it could be again. The music breaks through the isolation of the people reminding them of their capacity for empathy, beauty, and love.

The Adagio is also a public mourning ritual in a city where public gatherings are fatal. It forces the citizens to stop, listen, and grieve. It honours the dead not as casualties of war, but as human beings whose lives had values and whose absence leaves a void.

The shells represent chaos, destruction, and the erasure of the future. The cello, on the other hand, represents order, creation, and the endurance of the soul.

Music is one of the most miraculous creations of human beings. As Thomas Carlyle said, music is the language of the angels. It is divine enough to bring us close to the infinite.

In my youth, music played in my rented residence in Shillong whenever I was there until I went to sleep. They were mostly Malayalam albums. The great hits of Abba were among my favourite English collection. Both Tracies, Huang and Chapman, delighted me in their own ways, one with her mellifluous charm and the other with her rebellion.

Chapman meant much to me in those days because Shillong always treated its nontribal population as undesirable ‘outsiders.’ The outsiders like me lived in what Chapman called the ‘subcity.’  “People say it doesn’t exist,” Chapman sang in her uniquely earnest and unflinching style, “’Cause no one would like to admit / That there is a city underground / Where people live everyday / Off the waste and decay / Off the discards of their fellow man.” I adored her deeply personal yet universally resonant lines.

Now all my music listening is confined to my drives. There’s a whole variety of songs in my present collection, mostly Malayalam, all utterly soothing kind. There’s one album that plays the flute for a stretch of eleven hours. Krishna’s flute – that’s the title of the album. With a gentle interplay of the tabla and the sitar in the background, the flute music is divinely soothing.

Of the two Tracies, only Huang lingers on in my present collection. The kind of tenderness that Tracy Huang exudes keeps me cool. And that’s what I want music to do for me.

PS. This post is a part of ‘Mixtape Mood Blog Hop’ hosted by Manali Desai and Sukaina Majeed under #EveryConversationMatters blog hop series.