Music
This page is part of Project Nightingale, a project initiated by the Penang Bahá’í community, to document and to record Bahá’í inspired songs, especially original compositions, from all over the world. A lot of Bahá’í songs exist only in songbooks that have been out of print for years or even decades. For the few lucky songs that manage to be included in songbooks, their future is still uncertain, for the books usually only provide the guitar chords and lyrics to a song and not its melody. The melody of most Bahá’í songs are passed on from generation to generation orally. Unfortunately, like all things passed on using an oral tradition, it only takes a single lapse in teaching the next generation a song for its melody to be lost forever.
Project Nightingale is a long term project to preserve this treasure trove of Bahá’í songs which serves as an invaluable resource for those in the forefront of teaching the Faith. We also hope that these Bahá’í songs will inspire a whole new generation of Bahá’í composers to rise up and compose music to help proclaim and spread the teachings of the Faith. Another goal of this project is to help new and old believers learn (or relearn) songs that have been an integral part Bahá’í community life during the mid-20th century until the present day.
All the recordings are performed by the Penang Bahá’í Community Band, a group of amateur musicians from within and outside the Penang community, who volunteer their time to perform, record and produce the recording to accompany the songs which was be released in the form of a printed songbook of 138 songs in 2015. The project currently gives priority to songs which have never been (or rarely) recorded as these songs are at the most risk of becoming extinct.
The recordings are made from live jam sessions of the band and which are by their nature imperfect and improvised but are of sufficient quality to be an indispensable aid to those who are interested to learn the songs.
You can follow the progress of project at : Project Nightingale
IMPORTANT: All the recordings of the songs on this website are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial CC BY-NC license.
You must first read the terms of the license below before downloading any recordings from this website.
We regard any takedown notice from legitimate copyright owners of the songs very seriously. Although the owner of this website has endeavored to take all reasonable measures in order not to infringe on rights of the copyright holders of the songs knowingly, however, if you are a copyright owner and you have concerns regarding any of the recordings, please do contact us at music@bahaipenang.org and we will be glad to assist you to resolve the issue.
