The Visual Symphony – The Secrets of the Formative Canvas … Expressive Reflections on the Creations of the World-Renowned Artist Naseer Shamma
Prepared by Researcher and Critic Donia Sahib – Iraq
The spirit of will embodied by the world-class musician Naseer Shamma stands as the most defining trait of his inspiring character—one that has enabled him to ascend toward refinement, creativity, and the determination to craft his global music with the authentic essence of the oud. He presents his artistic works in a unique model that fuses music and visual art, employing his expressive vision to create abstract visual provocations as a source of inspiration, building upon the evolution of musical motion into tangible movement through colors imbued with luminous intensity—what is known as kinetic art.
Through his artistic approach, he narrates stories and tales as titles for spiritual Sufi and romantic compositions that encompass most of his musical works, drawn from the vast horizons of his imagination. The aesthetic quality of his music in general carries an interpretative character addressing a central issue or multiple themes related to the beauty of music, incorporating poetry, harmony, hypnotic allure, emotional expressiveness, temporal dynamics, resonance, painting, color, joy, and delight.
His melodies are distinguished by a sequence of dynamic gradations—a technique that allows the variation of sound levels (loud and soft) during performance, shifting between fast and slow, soft and strong, to evoke a spectrum of emotions and sentimental colors charged with energetic frequencies. These immerse the listener fully in harmony with the oud player’s rhythms, which weave into the diverse tempos of orchestral instruments.
Thus, Naseer Shamma has succeeded in merging music with visual art, poetry with emotional and spiritual expression, through the genius of an artist who unites the sensory archetypes of the fine arts and literature.
His style departs from traditional molds, yet he employs the system of Arabic maqamat, performing his compositions with spiritual, improvisational playing amidst a variety of instrumental voices. From these, he extracts aesthetic icons—visual artworks in velvety hues, painted by the manifestations of love through the alphabet of his Sufi philosophy—seeking to reveal the inner dimension. He utilizes form – rhythm – and strings in the service of color, aiming to create a symbolic system liberated from all external conditions, to express an “inner necessity.”
Shamma strives to create a new language of undulating melodic rhythms that stir the listener’s depths and affect them psychologically and physiologically, prompting imaginative movement and contemplation for the invention of new ideas—works classified as visual art, composed of intricate blends of tonal leaps and melodic phrases. The melody follows specific oscillating movements, ascending and descending without sharp breaks, a wave form identifiable as a rich mode of expression.
He masters this expressive style with the aim of elevating his creative potential to a global standard, maintaining discipline in organizing his daily work, structuring the visions and ideas he follows to construct the overall composition of his visual symphonies. Through research and experimentation, his innovative approach has reached new visions in the realm of visual symphonic movement, granting the audience freedom to receive the work according to the inclinations of their imagination. Naseer Shamma’s music has thus become the foundation of a purely philosophical language in which every note corresponds to a poetic verse and a specific color.
He embodies supreme musical harmony by orchestrating the consonance of sounds emanating from various instruments, then rendering them in a visual, fantastical form with an ethereal texture in perfect accord with the emotional hue of each sound—each note. This type of harmony is known as the ethereal texture, a structural system in the world of romantic, spiritual, and imaginative music.
From these artistic excerpts, the maqamat and the sounds they produce become the product of a comprehensive encyclopedic work rooted in the tones and strings deeply embedded in the traditional heritage of Arab culture and the musical identity of the Eastern region. With exceptional mastery, he performs spiritual Sufi, Andalusian, and other heritage-inspired pieces in most of his world symphonies—such as Nights of Divine Love, In Jabal Ikmah in Al-Ula, Cities of Narcissus, Journey of Souls, Tomorrow Is More Beautiful, Here Is Life, Erbil Citadel, Ishraq, Shakwat, The Road to Shaqlawa, among others.
Thus, he draws out the oud’s potential through immense technical skill within a balanced fabric of high and low frequencies, making use of the rhythmic essence of maqamat, which exist innately within human beings just as they are present in the movement of the universe itself.
He applies this understanding in his works by studying the psychological and visual impact of each color, within the framework of his suggestive style rooted in traditional music, yet in step with modernity and technological development. He critiques digital music for its absence of the “living texture” of human emotion—the essential touch of creative expression in visual art, musical composition, and other art forms.
This analytical description of the key elements in Naseer Shamma’s methodology on the oud reveals his pursuit of the fifth spiritual dimension—an entryway for people into the realm of musical rhythms with the transparency of psychological relaxation, in the harbor of musical comfort and repose. Two fundamental traits unite the majority of his compositions in stirring audience emotions: his love for improvisation in both solo and ensemble performance, and the predominance of traditional Arabic melodic imagery.
He organizes the maqamat according to their sensory impact—for example, he often expresses love, beauty, hope, and peace through Maqam Bayati, while Maqam Hijaz or Saba conveys melancholy, longing, and yearning. His mastery of the oud is not merely the standard of aesthetic excellence in performing the maqamat; it is deepened by the spirit of Sufism—by the spiritual passion of a Sufi lover.
This requires, above all, a high intensity of emotional charge during performance, with profound feeling for the notes and for the coloristic musical ornamentation—ornamentation that Naseer Shamma envisions with his eyes before composing, performing, or painting them. His musical taste lives in constant embrace between color and sound. He is devoted to the importance of variation in maqamat during oud performance, and to creating idealized paintings—silent or moving abstract evocations—rooted in the celestial depth of his canvases, which carry within them the artistic experience of four decades in the world of art and music.
Through symbolic forms embracing the myth of the artist’s historic identity, he makes symbols the suitable medium for encoding his philosophical ideas, just as myth represents expressive visions inspired by the cosmos, aimed at reflecting peace in both the inner and outer worlds.
Naseer Shamma also expresses his feelings with effortless depth and inspiration, while direct imitation of nature contradicts his process. He seeks instead to invent an ethereal expressive language that creates connection between his inner world and the outer one—moving through stages in which he tests his expressive and aesthetic capacities by assigning specific colors to each stage.
Beginning with flat experimental canvases, then moving to abstract expressionism of his inner world, he rises above material forms, distancing his essential essence from direct depiction of the external world, thereby creating deeper contemplation and a spiritual tone that unites the artwork with the viewer, on the principle of handling color much as one handles music and its effect on the human psyche.
He considers color as though it were the key to the painting, with his emotions as the hand playing upon it to produce musical vibrations in the human soul. The timbre of color resonates with the spirit and subconscious of the person, touching the ideas they hold within.
Even when the relationship between a person and a color begins with a deep intellectual impression—whether imaginative or realistically conceptual—it adapts into a positive emotional bond. This sensation varies from one audience member to another, depending on their individual historical, cultural, and social relationship with color and tone. Yet despite these differences, Shamma analyzes the effects of every color and tone according to human history—a history that may not differ greatly from one place or culture to another.
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