Musical magic from the universal idiom

The night's music was to begin in the leafy garden just after nine. Ross Daly and Cleopatra Vagia, ivory pale and dressed in black, took their chairs and tuned their instruments, plucking strings on bulbous cousins of the mandolin, heating circular drumheads over a brass Turkish charcoal brazier.

Behind them rose the rough trunk of a palm tree, a prickly pear cactus bearing dark red fruit, a spray of pink flowering bougainvillaea. The warm, still air was scented with jasmine.

The setting was Abu Faisal's Lebanese restaurant located in a two-storey villa in the heart of divided Nicosia. In the audience were Greek Cypriots and Arabs and a scattering of other foreigners.

Ross took up the rabab, a long-stemmed, stringed instrument from Afghanistan. Cleopatra lifted a great hoop with a drumhead.

The first notes were light, tentative. A repetitive motif established itself, accented by the beat of the drum. Throbbing fingers of music wound through the audience without benefit of amplifier, hushing conversation. Music with a Cretan flavour and an Indian rhythm, played by an Irishman on an Afghan lute delicately inlaid with mother of pearl, accompanied by a 21-year-old Athenian girl. Music with an insistent, bubbling flow like water rolling over warm stones in a dry river bed.

A young man in a peach-coloured shirt and tan trousers stood up and danced controlled Cretan steps, oblivious to the rest of us.

Shifting to a slender, seven-stringed Turkish saz, Ross, the master, took the lead. Cleopatra, the student, followed, sharply tapping the body of her saz with a finger to emphasise the beat.

Ross moved to the lyra, a squat, short stemmed Greek viol, stood up in the lap and played with a slightly bent bow. The music, a blend of Mediterranean, Arab, Turkish and Afghan themes, is touched by Indian classical ragas. A flash of a familiar lilting Irish folk tune, fitting comfortably into this exotic context, surprised and hushed the gathering. It should not have done.

Irish and Scandinavian music are related to the music of the Mediterranean and the East, says Ross. Mainstream Western music evolved to suit the requirements of the orchestra, while other traditions remain the provenance of the solo performer or of small groups.

Ross plays in Cyprus often, travelling from home in Athens, where in 1996 he established a music school which now has a dozen teachers and 60 students.

With the help of the EU's Leader-2 programme, he is setting up a new school in an old mansion in the village of Houdetsi on Crete, the island home of Greece's most famous novelist, Nikos Kazantzakis.

There Ross plans to hold monthly master classes, bringing masters and musicians from all over the world to play together and learn from each other. Music the universal idiom, breaking the barriers raised by nationalism. "Do you know there are lyra players in Turkey who don't know about the great musicians in Greece? And the same thing is true of the saz," he says.

He goes to Istanbul frequently to play. "It's easier to fly there than Salonika," he says.

Ross, the son of Dubliners, began his wanderings as a baby. His father, a physicist, researched computers in Japan, Canada and the US long before Ireland became a software centre. His mother taught music.

At four Ross chose the cello, at 10 he switched to classical guitar. He studied theory, harmony, counterpoint and composition at an Oxford college but remained restless, dissatisfied.

In the back of his mind echoed a magnificent performance in San Francisco by the great Indian sitar master, Ravi Shankar, and his festival group. Ross bought a sitar from a pawn shop, an instrument made by the Stradivari of Calcutta.

He studied in West Bengal with a master and roamed the sub-continent. In 1974 he settled in Crete, deciding the lyra would be his main instrument. To support himself, he worked as a deep-sea fisherman. In 1980 he began teaching.

His break came in 1982 when he cut his first disc of four traditional Cretan pieces and four of his own compositions based on Cretan themes. At midnight, 15 of us moved indoors to an empty room so the neighbours might sleep. Ross sat on the wooden floor, Cleopatra on a red cushion.

Around them the array of stringed instruments lay on their sides. Ross took up the rabah, stating a theme, warming to it, shifting, modulating, improvising; Cleopatra joined every surge, traced every curl of the motif. Abu Faisal, "Father of Faisal", whose given name is Ghazi Mroueh, sighed: "I've been waiting for 25 years for this day."

Since opening his restaurant 10 years ago Ghazi, who began his career as a publisher, has made Abu Faisal's one of the capital's cultural centres and galleries by staging photographic, painting and jewellery exhibitions, holding musical events and book launches.

Caught by the magic of the music, each of us thanked Ross and Cleopatra, kissed them on the cheek, before departing, as Ghazi watered his thirsty garden. Wednesday is his night for water on the rationing system in these days of drought.

The clock on the car dashboard registered 1.45 a.m. as I drove homewards through the empty streets.