Sacred Music

Throughout the year, the Moroccan city of Fes offers visitors intoxicating scents and noisy souks - it's not hard to imagine that it wasn't so different when it was founded more than 1,000 years ago.

Sacred music "celebrates the desire to unite the divine."

But come each springtime, the city transforms into a modern mecca for music lovers from all over the world. Its annual World Sacred Music Festival, now in its 12th year, might be the closest the world ever comes to uniting in song and prayer. The week-long event, hosted by the King of Morocco, attracts people from across the globe to celebrate music with a common goal: to reawaken the spirit.

Instead, you'll get spiritual songs being sung en masse at dawn, and colloquia on achieving world peace.

Festivities this year begin on June 2, with an outdoor concert at the walls of Bab Makina, the largest of the ancient gates to the town square (or medina in Arabic). The French baroque ensemble Les Arts Florissants will play 17th century Renaissance music using original period instruments. The royal family - based in Morocco's capital, Rabat - is scheduled to attend this opening concert.

Other artists at the festival will include the acclaimed young flamenco singer Esperanza Fernandez and Mali's Salif Keita, who has been described as the "golden voice of Africa."

For a primer you can check out CD compilations from previous festivals. They include one of the highlights of recent years - in 2004, Gabriel Meyer, an Argentine-born rabbi's son, opened a concert in duet with Yacoub Hussein, the Palestinian son of a Sufi sheikh - together, they sang Hebrew and Arabic calls to prayer while the audience showered the stage with rose petals.

It was a moment that embodied the spirit of "sacred music" and the goal of the festival, which, according to its U.S. director, Zeyba Rahman, "celebrates the desire to unite the divine." With some of the best spiritual world music on the planet being performed under a star-filled sky in the Andalusian Gardens and the old palace courtyard in the old town, it's easy to imagine having a sacred moment of one's own.

Posted on May 01, 2006