Sounds Like Transcendence Spiritual matters, conveyed through music, course through this year’s Festival with fresh power By Larry Blumenfeld
Randy Weston at the piano, Spoleto Festival USA (2016), photo by William Struhs
“Why is music called the divine art, while all other arts are not so called? We may certainly see God in all arts and in all sciences, but in music alone we see God free from all forms and thoughts.” Those words appear on the first page of The Mysticism of Sound and Music: The Sufi Teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan. By the time of his death in 1927, Khan, a master player of the vina in his native India, was best known for bringing Sufism—the mystical form of Islam that emphasizes an inward search for God—to the West through lectures that were later transcribed into books. Spirituality is elemental to the history of music; musical expression figures into all forms of human devotion to a higher power. These reciprocal truths course through this year’s Festival with a particular focus on Sufism’s humanistic message, and a broader consideration of Black spiritual transmission throughout the African Diaspora. Such presentations help reconnect lineages torn apart but never lost, and guide us toward unity in defiance of that which separates us. I received Khan’s book 20 years ago from pianist Randy Weston, a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master
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who performed at Spoleto Festival USA twice (in 1981 and, two years before his death, in 2016), and whose music emphasized bonds between American jazz and African traditions. Years later, saxophonist Sonny Rollins, as eminent a jazz statesman as there is, recalled for me how his friend and fellow saxophonist—the late, great John Coltrane—had talked about Khan’s book. “Both John and I had ethical values we were developing at that time,” Rollins told me, “So this book was significant, because it showed us that music and those impulses go together in a natural way. It was a wonderful realization that music, if you're trying to play honestly, and the attempt to become a better person are of one piece.” In 1965, around the time of that exchange between saxophonists, Coltrane released A Love Supreme, an album-long suite from his classic quartet that stands among jazz’s biggest commercial successes and modern music’s most stirring expressions of spiritual awakening. (During the suite’s final section, “Psalm,” the phrases Coltrane plays amount to a recitation, syllable by syllable, of the original devotional poem included in his liner notes: To listen while reading along is a riveting experience.) The devotional verses that open the Qu’ran are the first words of Rhiannon Giddens’s libretto for Omar, which is presented in its world premiere at this year’s Festival. The
