PROVIDENCE, R.I.

MY grandfather had one question for the young man who asked for his daughter’s hand in marriage: “Do you like music?” His daughter — my mother — had a beautiful voice, and he would never accept a son-in-law who would stop her from singing. Luckily, my father answered correctly. When I was a boy, my mother used to sing herself to sleep. Nowadays she falls asleep to the thuds of cannons and the whizzing of bullets.

Aleppo, Syria, my home, is famous for its love of music. It is said that every house in the city contains at least one instrument. My anxiety over the city and the news of its destruction is intimately connected to my anxiety over the survival of our musical traditions, what we all stand to lose when shrapnel and rage reduce a cultural nexus to rubble. These days, the bombed-out residential streets are lined with the splintered wood of ouds.

I left Aleppo over a year ago. (I am a writer, and it is dangerous to tell the truth when you are inside.) Now, each time there is news of another bombing or attack, I rush to the phone in a panic and begin my round of calls to check up on my loved ones there. I call my mother, now 86, and she reassures me that she is safe. I call my son, to ask about him and his wife.

They were married eight months ago. I was not able to get back into the country to attend the wedding, but he told me he’d prepared for the celebration by stocking up on candles and batteries for the sound system. They had to crank the volume of the speakers all the way up to drown out the gunfire.