Talented Baha’i musicians
One of the great joys of the Baha’i summer school in Bath was the music. I wish, I wish I could have been a competent musician, a singer-songwriter like the members of the Smith family from Cornwall. Sadly I drive good people to distraction with my piano playing, but I utterly lack the natural musicianship of Geoff and Michaela Smith and their daughter Rosie Smith. Their son Jordan is also part of the family band.
The Smiths kept us in music throughout the the recent Baha’i summer school in Bath. I could have wished them to play on and on and never stop. I can highly recommend their albums, particularly Fragile Leaf, Geoff and Michaela’s latest output, which I listened to about five times yesterday.
One morning they sang the prayer Baha’is know as the Long Healing Prayer to a setting of their own devising.
This was one of the most uplifting, spiritual experiences of Baha’i worship that I have ever had: Geoff Smith played a continuo on guitar, Rosie Smith on drum, Jordan Smith on maraccas, Michaela sang the verses - starting with “I call on Thee O Exalted One, O Faithful One, O Glorious One!” and led the chorus. Those of us sitting in the auditorium sang:
Thou the Sufficing, Thou the Healing, Thou the Abiding, O Thou Abiding One!
It was a kind of musical meditation.
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5 comments
I like your point about musical meditation; I feel grateful the Smith family are able to help us all in this way.
I found out about this concept while listening to Ravi Shankar back in my teens, he has a universal popularity which I have used very successfully in order to build relationships with other people.
If you watch the people playing with him in concert, they attain a meditative level with him which I quite envy!
It must be such a wonderful feeling…
I first heard Ravi Shankar at a gig at Exeter University in 1966. He played an evening Raga.
I happened to catch part of a Ravi Shankar concert on BBC4 last night. He was as wonderful as ever and the effect was meditative. There was a wonderful musical conversation between him and his tabla player - just like two people talking to each other, but through music rather than words.
Yep, saw that too last night…sigh.
Tanya got us tickets to see him at the Royal Albert a couple of years back, and it was truely wonderful.
The whole process of cultural expressions of the sacred is one fraught with difficulties and yet one we must engage as our youth encounter and adopt cultural norms and we perpetuate our successes and failures.
There is a line where individuals create their own expressions and where cultural ones are the spreading success of a particular experience - the 1960’s folk music version of the Queen of Carmel vs the 1990’s gospel version of the Queen of Carmel for example. There are songs “everyone knows” which can be a group expression of spirituality but which belong to one group or place and not another.
The Baha’i faith has some rituals, likely less than most religions, but I think the key is when the “sin that cannot be forgiven”, or people “confined the lands of knowledge within the wall of self and passion” is at stake - when people engage in a practice which shadows themselves or others from God’s grace through and among us by way of arts, respect, mutual aid and assistance, and love. The hard part is when one person or group has a taste for an expression that violates the sensibilities of another person or group. Here we have to raise ourselves to a greater portion of radiant character to not demean another’s expression, but to appeal to the deeper feeling of spirituality we all need. And yet we may not being doing this enough. We have a glorious future in the Most Great Peace and we’re a long way from it - and yet we have to incrementally struggle in that direction.
What do you think?
My wife and I were discussing the music at summer school this year compared with the kind of musical entertainment that used to be provided at summer schools in the 1960s. An elderly Baha’i lady has recently passed away. In the 60s she, together with her brother and sister, used to sing light classical songs in that rather plummy style so beloved of Edwardian parlour entertainers. My wife, who was about 12 at the time, remembers that she and other Baha’i youth & children used giggle at this kind of singing and hated it.
Our kids, I’m ashamed to say, used to have the same kind of reaction when they were in their teens to one of the dear friends who liked to sing in a similar style while accompanying herself on a guitar. The Baha’i youth of their generation used to egg this lady on to sing more songs, so that they could giggle some more.
I like a broad range of music: classical, jazz, rock, folk and lots of things in between. In a way, I don’t really mind what genre people adopt to express their spirituality and what is sacred to them. However, I definitely have a preference for skilled and high quality performances, whatever the genre or the cultural origins of the particular form of music that is being performed.
And yet, a sincere, but less skilled, expression of the sacred through music, can be deeply moving and perfectly acceptable.
We have a long way to go in developing widely acceptable cultural expressions of Baha’i spirituality and sacredness. This may well be an area in which we can learn to practise the virtue of forbearance.
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