Musician Hadi Parsley: When I play the violin, it becomes a part of me

Damascus-SANA

Musician Hadi Parsley is one of the most important contemporary Syrian violinists. He performed the most difficult pieces that require high skills and long experience in playing and music. He played for major artists in Syria and the Arab world. He led orchestras for decades in concerts and festivals inside and outside the country.

Hadi grew up in an artistic family and loved music. His father, the late composer Abdel Halim Parsley, died when Hadi was a young child, but he inherited a passion for art and the ambition to go far and study it academically and at the hands of senior professors.

Hadi was a student of the Greek Elia Dimitros, the Russian Marina, the Armenian Mahran for Western music, and Michel Awad for the Oriental, and graduated from the Arab Institute of Music under the supervision of the late musician Salhi Al-Wadi.

Hadi played at a young age with the Damascus and Umayyah radio bands, but his deep study of oriental music and the fundamentals of playing made him switch to playing solo to become the first violinist in the Al-Fajr Ensemble led by Maestro Amin Al-Khayat, and he has been affiliated with the Artists Syndicate since 1977.

On his relationship with playing and the violin, Hadi explains in an interview with SANA that music resides in him, and when he plays he unites with the violin, “and it becomes an integral part of it” to extract his feelings and feelings in the form of musical tones.

Parsley, who founded and led the Al-Nujoum Musical Ensemble, which played major Syrian and Arab singers and the Arab music quintet, through which he sought to spread the heritage through instrumentals and pieces by great authors criticizing dealing with the lyrical heritage by changing the distribution of its tones as we see it now, considering this as “a distortion and a violation of the law, custom and custom.”

Regarding his opinion of the prevailing style of singing, he saw that the wave of popular singing does not mean the death of heritage, because the audience is diverse, and there are those who relate to heritage and original art and choose the beautiful, as tastes are diverse, considering that the qualitative attendance of evenings held by the Opera House and the Directorate of Theaters and Music proves the importance of heritage and the presence of its audience.

He pointed out that he is trying to combine modernity, heritage and popular songs to achieve diversity for a diverse audience with different tastes, so he resorts to presenting well-known songs to the audience, such as the Devil's Dance by Amir al-Buzuq Muhammad Abdul Karim, Longa Shahnaz for musician and Anis Artnian, with the aim of bringing people closer.

But Hadi points out at the same time that the terrorist war on Syria and the economic blockade have led to a decline in the number of musical and artistic activities held in light of the financial situation of people and the difficulty of movement between governorates, which limited the ability of musical groups to move and attend the masses.

On the role of the Artists Syndicate in light of the current conditions, Hadi, as Vice-President of the Syndicate, confirms that this institution “plays its role towards the artists and exercises all its tasks, and what is rumored about its shortcomings is incorrect. It deals with everyone on the same level.

Bilal Ahmed and Hadi Omran