This week’s theme is…A Musical High! Countless music lovers experience a “natural high” from listening to their favorite things. Music’s ability to change the chemistry of our moods is renowned. But musicians and other artists have long been associated with less natural highs, and the link between intoxication and creativity is strong, if somewhat ambiguous. This week we explore music related to the theme of intoxication, or created by musicians who regularly induced that state upon themselves. Disclaimer: The subject of intoxication as it relates to artistry is complex and ethically fraught; none of the writing on Smart and Soulful is meant to condone intoxication by any substance, legal or otherwise, in the pursuit of creative productivity. Enjoy your music responsibly!
A Musical High, Day 3 – Hashish by Sergei Lyapunov
I’ve heard many words bandied about related to the intoxicating use of the cannabis plant: weed, grass, hemp, marijuana, hashish. They are often used essentially as synonyms during casual speech, but they all have quite distinctive histories, meanings and resonances. Hashish, often abbreviated as “hash” in street lingo, refers to a very specific preparation of the cannabis plant, beyond merely smoking the buds or leaves.
Cannabis plants feature trichomes, hair-like projections that serve various functions on plants. The stingers on nettles are another example.
But in cannabis plants the trichomes are glands, essential for reproduction, that produce the intoxicating cannabinoids, chemical compounds that contain the signature mild psychedelic, tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC for short, that gives its users their desired high. Hashish is a resin, made from separating the trichomes from the rest of the plant and heating them. The resulting pasty substance may be eaten or smoked in any number of pipe devices for a very potent and concentrated version of the cannabis experience.
Hashish comes from an Arabic word, and has been historically linked to a certain sect of Shia Islam, the Nizari. For a few centuries just after the turn of the the first millennium, the Nizari used a small but powerful army of stealthy commandos called the fida’i as muscle to carry out their political dirty work. The fida’i employed ruthless, calculating, and often violent tactics to advance Nizari political power in Persia, against other sects of Islam and Christian crusaders. Sometimes these tactics were strong threats, and sometimes they were murder, what we today call assassinations. The Nizari fida’i were rumored, quite probably by their enemies of all political and religious persuasions, to use hashish to mentally prepare for their operations, and also in bizarre, theatrical, cult-like ceremonies to simulate visions of paradise. These visions were thought to motivate the fida’i to make the ultimate sacrifice in necessary, and the use of hashish before murders was thought to derange them and cool their blood sufficiently in order to unleash their inner demon. The name stuck, and they have since been known as hashashin or, as it is commonly transliterated into English, assassins.
Like many rumors and urban legends, especially dealing with subjects so unsettling, it is difficult to extract truth from exaggeration. Can you imagine being a Sunni caliph or a crusader, knowing that the Nizari commandos were out there, lurking, ready to strike violently and unexpectedly with their fearsome daggers? I would probably be tempted to invent or believe the outlandish stories which were handed on to me as well, magnifying the ferocity of their image to legendary status or insulting them as drug addicts, which are both possible motivations for propagating the hashashin label.
Whatever the veracity of the fida’i’s use of hashish, the legend has had staying power, still fascinating those who learn about it and adding to the mystique of the original assassins. I remember reading about it in Angels and Demons, a novel written by Dan Brown as recently as 2000, in which one of the prominent characters traces his ancestry back through the medieval Shia assassins and speaks of the hashish they used to hone their aggressive precision. The character is quite compelling and the legend fits well within the story, regardless of its veracity.
The legend of the assassins is not the only place in Middle Eastern lore to feature the evocative nature of hashish. It has been used, almost as a trope, to evoke the exoticism and seduction of life in Islamic lands. Composing in the early 1910s, the Russian composer Sergei Lyapunov, an artistic successor to Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, invoked the drug as the name of his steamy and bewitching orchestral masterwork Hashish, an Oriental Symphonic Poem. Bearing the opus number 53 (for more on the opus numbering system, see this post) out of a total of 71, it is a rather late work and betrays a thorough mastery of orchestral, thematic, and formal control.
Lyapunov, a minor and almost unknown name in the history of Russian music, is one of those composers found in seeming abundance within the corridor of academics between Rimsky-Korsakov and Prokofiev. Late in the nineteenth century the battle between Russian nationalism and the academics had receded, with both threads finding a place in the nation’s conservatories. For more about that topic see this post, this one, and this one. Sergei Lyapunov, by way of good example, was taught by Sergei Taneyev, a pupil of Tchaikovsky, and later came under the influence of Mily Balakirev, the godfather of Russian nationalism himself, who had previously guided the Mighty Five, and was guiding a new, lesser-known group of fledglings later in his life.
So Lyapunov took his conservatory training and mixed it with the messy, exotic spirit of the Russian folk, probably ending up more colorful than someone like Glazunov. In Hashish we hear plenty of Rimsky-Korsakov – it sounds very much like an imitation of the best of Scheherazade at many points – and Borodin, with his long lyrical melodies. Both Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov looked to the east for inspiration for their music; Rimsky-Korsakov with the aforementioned Scheherezade, and Borodin with his glowing tone poem On the Steppes of Central Asia, which dramatizes a meeting between Mongols and Russians in the picturesque landscape of the Caucasus Mountains, just north of his native Georgia, and with the savage Polovetsians depicted in Prince Igor.
It is easy to think of Russia as a European country, given that its most significant cultural centers are Westerly, but the sprawling nation borders countless Asian countries, and must therefore be rich with their historical and cultural influence, so it is not surprising that the flavors and stories of Asian countries seep into Russian music. Lyapunov evokes another exotic and titillating image of the Middle East: the harem. Hashish is said to depict the girls in a harem, cavorting in their intoxication under the influence of the concentrated drug. The scope of the massive and thickly orchestrated tone poem seems to sweep beyond the walls of the harem, although maybe the triumphant brass serves to illustrate the rich inner world of dreams and contemplation stimulated by the intoxication. Be sure to listen to the end for the soaring and masterfully orchestrated climax. Either way, Lyapunov’s tone poem evokes seductive and exotic images of the Middle East in homage to the mysterious region through the glow and grandeur of his fantastic orchestral craft, which has since been swallowed up by the abundance of Russian musicians active around the turn of the twentieth century:
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