Imaginary

Music: Composers, artists, and major works

The Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sang homages to Allah with a joyful, passionate commitment that is unmatched among his peers in this or perhaps any other musical genre.

• His concert in Paris (1985), available on five CDs, is perhaps his finest.
• Yeh Jo Halka Halka Saroor Hai
• Yeh Jo Halka Halka Saroor Hai
• Live at Dorchester Hotel, London (1993)
• Live at Washington University (1993)
• Live at Digbeth Civic Hall, Birmingham (1983)
• Live at Bradford University (1985)
• Live in Holland (1993)
• Live at Small Heath Park, Birmingham (1985)
• Live at Wolverhampton
• Live in Central Park, New York
• Yaadan Vichre concert
• Qawwali collection
• Original recordings

Compositions:

• Raga Mishra Pahadi (Misra Pahadi) is a popular raga based on fok music (performances by Ajoy Chakrabarty, Kaushiki Chakrabarty and Chaurasia [dhun]).
• Scriabin, Symphony No. 4, “The Poem of Ecstasy” (Le Poème de l'Extase) (Le Divin Poème), Op. 54

Albums:

• Debashish Bhattacharya, “Madeira: If Music Could Intoxicate”
• Hal Galper Quintet, “Live at the Berlin Philharmonic 1977”
• Tal National, “Zoy Zoy”
• Lil Ed & The Blues Imperials, “Rattleshake”: “They’re led by Ed Williams, a ‘real deal’ singer and songwriter and a wildly exuberant slide guitarist showman who plays on his knees, on his back or running through an audience.” [Downbeat magazine, September 2021, p. 34.]
• Mind Over Mirrors, “Bellowing Sun” “looks to capture the ecstatic sensations that continued musical repetition can summon.” [Robert Ham, Downbeat magazine, June 2018 issue, p. 72.]
• Ivo Perelman, Matthew Shipp, William Parker & Bobby Kapp, “Ineffable Joy”
• Sonny Sharrock, “Black Woman” (1969), “. . . an album of ecstatic music . . .”
• Brad Mehldau, “Jacob’s Ladder”: Mehldau’s vision here is an ascent into ecstasy through renunciation of ego.

Poetry

Exhilaration is the Breeze
That lifts us from the Ground
And leaves us in another place
Whose statement is not found -

Returns us not, but after time
We soberly descend
A little newer for the term
Upon Enchanted Ground -

[Emily Dickinson, “Exhilaration Is the Breeze”]

Ecstatic bird songs pound
the hollow vastness of the sky
with metallic clinkings—
beating color up into it
at a far edge,—beating it, beating it
with rising, triumphant ardor,—
stirring it into warmth,
quickening in it a spreading change,—
bursting wildly against it as
dividing the horizon, a heavy sun
lifts himself—is lifted—
bit by bit above the edge
of things,—runs free at last
out into the open—!lumbering
glorified in full release upward—
                              songs cease.

[William Carlos Williams, “Dawn”]

Other poems:

• Sara Teasdale, “I Am Not Yours”
• Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, “Top of the morning, you’re already smashed”
• Henry Vaughan, “The Morning Watch”
• Baba Bullah Shah, “He who is stricken by love”
• Walt Whitman, “One Hour to Madness and Joy”
• Anne Brontë, “Lines Composed In a Wood on a Windy Day”
• Emily Dickinson, “Exultation Is the Going”
• Emily Dickinson, “Wild Nights – Wild Nights!”
• George Marion McClellan, “A September Night”

Books on poetry and poets:

• Derek Walcott (selected by Glyn Maxwell), The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2014): “One inescapable conclusion from reading hundreds of pages of Walcott at once is the feeling that this is the lifework of an ecstatic.”

Music: songs and other short pieces

• Paul Simon, Late in the Evening

Fictional Narratives

Novels:

• Rachel Urquhart, The Visionist: A Novel (Little, Brown & Company, 2014): “The true virtue of the story is the meditative consideration of the value of hardship and the transformative nature of ecstasy.”