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Edward Salim Michael was born in Manchester, England in 1921 and died near Nice, France in 2006. Composer of symphonic music, he is also the author of books on spirituality and meditation. He regarded himself as a Buddhist, but as his teaching was based on his direct experience, he did not hesitate to quote Christian, Hindu, or Sufi mystics. == Biographical Elements == Edward Salim Michael spent his childhood in Iraq, which was then under British rule. He experienced poverty and insecurity. He was approximately twelve years old when his parents left Baghdad for Syria, which was under French rule, then for Egypt and for Palestine (which was not yet Israel) and still at that time under British rule. His family returned to London just before World War II. As a British subject, he was enrolled into the Royal Air Force, as an airman on the ground, (which is how he spent the entire war). He was just nineteen years old when he enlisted. He had never been to school, could not read or write and barely spoke English. The Anglican Chaplain from his camp took an interest in him and taught him to read and write. The Chaplain's wife, who was violist in a string quartet, was surprised at Edward Salim Michael's amazing ability to memorize music. She decided to teach him the basics of composition, which he assimilated at stunning speed. Two years later, his first orchestral work, a scherzo for orchestra ("The Dionysia"), won a competition in London, where it was performed at the Royal Albert Hall by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by John Hollingsworth. After the war, he pursued his musical studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London where he worked with Berthold Goldschmidt (student of Hindemith), then with Mátyás Seiber (student of Zoltán Kodály) and also studied the violin (with Max Rostal). In studying the violin he demonstrated the same astonishing capabilities he had shown for composition. In 1947, he won a first prize in orchestra conducting and started a career as a solo violinist. He gave numerous concerts in which he performed the thirty-five or so concertos that he had in his repertory as well as some fifty sonatas and more than two hundred other pieces for violin before leaving for Paris in 1950 to study with Nadia Boulanger. Because of painful health problems he soon had to abandon the violin and conducting. From then onward, he devoted himself solely to composition. In 1949 for the first time in his life he saw a statue of Buddha. He remained petrified in front of it and, when he returned to his home, he immediately put himself in the same posture as the statue. Closing his eyes, he began to focus on an internal sound that he heard within the ears and the head, without even knowing that what he was doing was meditation and that the sound on which he focused was known in India as the Nada, a form of concentration known to both Hindus and Buddhists. Alongside his career as a musician, he undertook with passion a spiritual practice. Thanks to the exceptional ability to concentrate that he had developed as a composer, he began to have rapidly profound spiritual experiences. At this time in his life, he was living in Paris in extremely precarious conditions. After four years of a most intense spiritual practice, he had, at the age of thirty-three, an extremely powerful experience of awakening to what one may call his Buddha Nature as well as the Infinite in oneself. He continued to compose and struggle on a daily basis for his musical works to be played. He composed many orchestral pieces among them a Mass for mixed choir, two string orchestras, celesta, harp, glockenspiel and percussions. In 1954, he won the Vercelli prize for a Psalm for a male choir. Two years later, his Mass was performed by the orchestra of Radio France directed by Eugene Bigot. The next year, his Nocturne for flute and orchestra won the Lili Boulanger prize in the United States, given by a jury which included Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland. As his music (that he signed with his first name Edward) remained tonal, it was becoming increasingly difficult to get it performed. He finally decided to give up composing and he traveled to India, the country of his maternal grandmother, to dedicate himself fully to his inner life. He spent nearly seven years there, continuing the same practice of intense concentration and meditation. He returned to France in 1974, and began to teach Hatha Yoga, which he had practiced intensively for years. Soon, his students were more interested in his spiritual teaching than in Hatha Yoga. At their request, he began writing his first book, written in English, ''The Way of Inner Vigilance'', published in London in 1983, which he signed with his middle name Salim. Seven other books written directly in French followed before he departed from this world. He also published with his wife Michele Michael a translation in French (from English) of the famous Buddhist text the Dhammapada. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Edward Salim Michael」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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