The Brooklyn Rail

The World Music Institute (WMI) is celebrating its fortieth anniversary this year. Because of this great organization, New Yorkers have been able to experience top-tier music and dance from Afghanistan, Cuba, India, Mexico, Gambia, Ireland, and scores of other countries. Founded by the couple Robert and Helene Browning as a concert series at the Alternative Museum in the mid-1980s, it was established as an independent presenter in 1985.

Now led by the Vienna-born Gaby Sappington, the WMI continues to provide a platform for a hugely diverse range of artists to share their work. I met with Sappington recently, and she reflected on the role of the WMI in the current political climate: “Introducing our concerts, I often use our tagline, ‘Many Cultures, One World.’ Lately, just saying that phrase has drawn applause, unintentionally. You get the sense that people need to hear this and to remember it.”

Listening to music from faraway places often feels like a chance to travel the world. I may never get to visit Bamako or Jaipur, but hearing Salif Keita or Krishna Bhatt, especially in concert, gives me easy access to a different culture than my own. Somehow, music sung in another language is less a barrier than an enticement, a chance to immerse myself more fully in an alternate mode of expression.

Sappington acknowledges the travel aspect of music from distant countries—“with no passport or jet lag,” she adds—but wanted to bring another dimension to the presentations from the WMI this season. She initiated a new series called “Sacred Sounds of Healing” in order to “celebrate and promote the transformative power of music and sounds from diverse spiritual and ethnic traditions.” In doing so, she emphasizes that music is not just an escape, an outward source of enjoyment, but may also guide an inner journey.

The first concert and panel discussion, held in November, were led by Chandrika Tandon, who also provided financial support for the series. Tandon is the rare musician who also made her mark in the world of business, and she has alternated between her work as a management consultant and her performing as a vocalist in the Hindu spiritual tradition. The panel, entitled “Where Sound Meets Science,” sought to explore the healing aspects of music, in particular the nature of sacred chants and mantras. This will be followed by a workshop and concert on February 21 led by oud player Yuval Ron and featuring Sufi musician Khawaja Ibrahim Ehrari. Ron shares Tandon’s interest in locating a scientific basis for music’s propensity to provide restorative energy. He once recorded an album called The Healing Power of 40 Hz, investigating the physical effects on wellness of music played at that particular frequency. Through his compositions, he seeks to induce meditative states that quantitatively improve health and well-being.

His latest project, linking Sufi and Hebrew sacred sound practices, also has religious and political overtones. By combining these related but distinct traditions, Ron is modeling coexistence via music. This approach focuses first on an acceptance of and engagement with the mystical. The American Judaic practices I grew up with were almost entirely focused on the practical, and there was a conscious effort to move Reform and Conservative Judaism away from what were regarded as esoteric concerns. But recent years have seen an increasing openness to those views. They seem especially relevant in a world where division and intolerance are given free reign.

It's interesting and more than a bit sad to note that, despite both Sufi and Jewish Kabbalistic teachings engaging with the mystical, their messages of universal acceptance still struggle to be heard and understood today. As the Sufi poet Rumi wrote in the thirteenth century, “Christian, Jew, Muslim, shaman, Zoroastrian, stone, ground, mountain, river, each has a secret way of being with the mystery, unique and not to be judged.” The poet links not just religions and world views, but the physical properties of the earth itself, suggesting a universality of experience that demands our mutual respect.

For Ron and his ensemble, an underlying unity of Jewish and Islamic belief systems can be located within music. The plaintive minor-key melodies and simple string, percussion, and vocal instrumentation locate the work within Middle Eastern song traditions. In a recent performance, Ron’s expressive oud playing sketched figures around Ehrari’s grave and searching vocal line, sometimes punctuated by his free, piercing playing of the ney, a traditional Turkish wind instrument. Several percussionists playing the daf, a large tambourine-like instrument, propelled the music forward, and a whirling dervish dancer (integral to the Sufi tradition) added swirls of color and movement.

There is an undeniable appeal to drifting into the sounds of this ensemble, which suggests that the keys to peace, both within the self and between cultures, are close at hand. Of course, in the world at large, the solutions can feel far more elusive. The current conflict between Israelis and Palestinians dragged past the two-year mark in October, and even as peace plans have been floated, violations of the terms are regular. The wholesale destruction of Gaza has resulted not only in many, many thousands of deaths, but in a deadlock of despair over what is possible for the region.

Modeling peaceful coexistence, then, is much more than a dreamy exercise, but an urgent necessity. Hundreds of years ago, the city of Toledo in Spain was a home for tolerance, a place where Christian, Muslim, and Jewish segments of society lived together amicably. What will it take to produce places where this type of arrangement can flourish? In a recent New York Times interview with David Marchese, the peace activist and scholar Raja Shehadeh suggested that education was the key to creating lasting understanding and true peace:

Start teaching about the other, teaching the literature of the other, teaching that there were times in Palestine when the Jews and the Arabs lived together amicably and peacefully, and they were important times. They could concentrate on these issues rather than concentrate on the massacres that took place.… Palestine has always been a place for three religions, and the three religions lived side by side and enriched life, because it’s enriching to have the differences.

This fundamental truth about the enrichment provided by multiple cultures applies just as much to the United States and other countries around the world as it does to the Middle East. The fact of coexistence is not going to go away just because one group seeks to dominate and displace another. The music we play, the stories we tell, will emerge through the cracks in mainstream narrative, and instruct us on how we might live together in some kind of harmony.

Conversely, the demonization of diversity is one of the most shocking aspects of the current American administration. This is a bitter and hollow form of retrenchment. The efforts of the World Music Institute, among others, point to a world of possibility. When we are guided not by hatred and suspicion, but by love for others, we stand a chance of redeeming the world. Despite all the forces marshaled against this project, it is always the chance worth taking.