meditation on saving Egypt's antiquities

My album of Paul Horn's Inside the Great Pyramid is so worn that the blue cover is faded by shades. The records are in good shape, however. I am glad of this because I will listen to the full work in the next days for the first time in decades. I was happy to find these tracks on youtube because they are better than not hearing the masterpiece at all. The CDs are sold out right now at Amazon.com.....but you can order them from my favorite little Indie music store, cd baby, who has them in stock. Here is the link to the direct page: cdbaby has paul horn! cdbaby is "the largest online distributor of independent music" and they are based in great Portland, Oregon.



This is Track 1 from Paul Horn's 'Inside the Great Pyramid'. This track was played from within the "King's Chamber". Get a nice set of head phones for this one! ~youtube uploader


Paul Horn spoke about recording Inside the Great Pyramid in 1976 in an interview found here:

It was about eight years later (after the successful release of Inside the Taj Mahal in 1968). Someone suggested it to me because the Taj Mahal album had been so successful and people were probably looking for more of the same. When a friend was thinking about some very special places in the world the Great Pyramid came to mind. I thought it was a wonderful idea, so about a year later I was on my way to Egypt with a group of people and managed to get inside the Great Pyramid to do the recording. Again it was the same kind of meditative experience, but something a little different because the building is a part of the music too. The history and the mystery of the pyramids is different from the history of the Taj Mahal. There's a history in the Taj Mahal that's about three hundred years old. It's a marvellous world-famous building and it has wonderful acoustics, but there's no mystery to it. The Great Pyramid is five thousand years old, minimum, and there are lots of theories about how it was built, why it was built, when it was built, and all of that. But no one really has a definitive answer. So it's a very mysterious place, and it's a very powerful place. That feeling, that mystery and that history became part of the music.

The Great Pyramid is now in potential danger. From the Wall Street Journal, Feb. 1, 2011:

In the past Egypt also experienced outbursts of Islamic radicalism that claimed artifacts and monuments. Napoleon usually gets the blame for destroying the nose of the Great Sphinx at Giza, but historical sources blame the 14th-century iconoclast Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr. The outer casing stones of the pyramids at Giza were carried off, also in the 14th century, by the Sultan An-Nasir Nasir-ad-Din al-Hasan to build the mosques of Cairo. But today Egypt's past is one of the country's most important sources of income. Some 14 million tourists visited Egypt in 2010. Still, in the modern era the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has made it clear that it wants to Islamify all aspects of Egyptian life. This will inevitably reach into the Egyptian treatment of the past.

The only thing I can do to ease the stress from thinking about Great Pyramids suffering damage is to............ go inside.



Track 2


Track 3



Track 4
The Great Pyramid of Khafre (Chephren)





photo of Pyramids via PortPromotions.com




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