He’d started to understand some of the fundamental musical concepts that he used to encounter only through reading, and therefore would comprehend only in a vague, theoretical way. Thanks to the piano, he could now understand - in practice - the concept of pitch in sound, from raising by sharpening, to lowering by flattening, and what key and meter were. It occurred to him that poetry, like music, was organised according to certain moulds, described in Arabic poetry as scales, or buhoor. He could now read the most rudimentary essentials of music in the score.
Whenever he confronted music, he felt like the same child who had first learnt to read in Abbas Square. Read, in the name of your Lord, Who has created. Reading was one of life’s greatest miracles. So too was the act of decoding the
