Music and Mysticism
Chair(s): Subash Giri (Assistant Lecturer of Indian Music Ensemble (IME) at the Department of Music, University of Alberta)
In his foundational research on comparative religion, pioneering psychologist William James (1902) took special interest in mystical experiences as phenomena described by adherents of many disparate faith and spiritual traditions across large spans of history. Paradoxically, the promise of unifying spiritual frameworks that these accounts may suggest is belied by the fundamental nature of mystical experience: it produces knowledge that is inherently personal and incommunicable. Nevertheless, the poetic-musical repertoires have played a vital role in many parts of the world, serving as vectors for inter-religious community formation providing counter-narratives against hegemonic or exclusionary forms of religion. This panel emphasizes connections between the personal and the social, the poetic and the inexpressible, to discuss the latent musical potency of devotional traditions in aggregating diverse communities of performers, listeners and devotees in the context of heightened religious extremism and communal violence across the globe. Informed by perspectives on Islam, Hinduism, and Judaism across space, time and media we aim to foreground instances whereby musical repertoire, performance, transmission and ritualisation create intentional overlaps within and between traditions. We wish to share our focus on how devotional music bridges piety, identity and sociality to build cooperative networks of faith and social belonging in the present; and evaluate how the persistence of these enmeshed music cultures pose a counterpublic to the postmodern economies of hate which weaponise identity, faith and devotion to create social and cultural discord.
This panel is sponsored by the SEM South Asian Performing Arts Section.
Presentations in the Session
Indo-Islamic Music in South Asia: Local and Hyperlocal contexts of performance
Shahwar Kibria Maqhfi
PhD candidate, UCLA
This presentation will study the local and hyper local contexts of sung and recited genres of Indo-Islamic liturgy such as qawwali, soz, salam, and marsiya in North India. Indo-Islamic music refers to musicalised aesthetic entanglements between Indic and Islamic idioms in the Indian subcontinent which have evolved from centuries of balanced socio-cultural contact between varieties of Muslim immigrants and Hindu natives and continue to define the demotic and lived experiences of Muslims in India. Casteism, colonialism, communalism, and religious / ideological extremism has routinely ruptured the balance of this collaborative plurality. Currently much of North India is being reorganised as an homogeneous entity where upper caste Hindutva is complemented by the resurgence of Islamist Wahhabism. Located between these two extremes, I follow ordinary hereditary Muslim musicians in North India to learn how they bridge the local and hyperlocal contexts of Indo-Islamic music through a distinct form of collaborative plurality to navigate musical repertoire, devotion, identity, and belonging in the Indian nation state. My ethnography in Barabanki, Raebareily, Manikpur, Pratapgarh and Kaushambi prioritizes Muslim musicians in North Indian ghettoes to learn firstly, “what can we learn when they sing?” (Seeger 1979); secondly how in their performance of Indo-Islamic music qasbati musicians honor history, belonging, collective identity and inclusivity to counter erasure and displacement; and finally how the Indo-Islamic musical repertoire may add to our awareness of lived everyday Islam and Muslimness in India which is counterpublic (Fraser 1991; Hirschkind 2001) to the notion of Wahhabised correct practice.
The Yoga of Sound: Mediating and Marketing a Unifying Spiritual Framework through Global Networks
Vivek Virani
University of North Texas Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Music Theory
Every week in India and throughout the world, new workshops, retreats, and trademarked systems are advertised promising an experience of nād-yoga – meditation based on sound or music. For potential customers representing a wide range of spiritual, musical, and cultural backgrounds, such opportunities are often subject to scrutiny on an imagined spectrum of “commercial” versus “authentic.” But a historicization of the many roles played by the concept of “yoga” in South Asian religious life over the centuries complicates this simple binary opposition. Yoga, understood not as a unified philosophy but rather a pluralistic web of practices and communities, has served as a crucial role as a vehicle for spiritual knowledge and techniques between socioreligiously disparate communities. Yoga networks disrupted divisions between nominally “Hindu,” “Buddhist,” and “Sufi,” communities and bridged knowledge between upper-caste and subaltern communities. In light of yoga’s pluralistic history, identifying consistent markers of legitimacy or authority is a fraught process, which becomes only more complex when mapped to the modern marketplace of sound-yoga teachers and schools that serve as the site for my ongoing research. Furthermore, contemporary academic frameworks of cultural authenticity (or rejections of the notion of authenticity altogether) often contradict the insider systems of knowledge intrinsic to yoga practice and philosophy. Building on a pluralistic taxonomy of sound-yoga practices I have presented at past SEM conferences, this paper employs a historicized and philosophically informed lens to ask: what markers and experiences do contemporary sound-yoga practitioners use to accept their practices as effective, legitimate, or authoritative?
Hearing tiqqun: Kabbalistic Music and the Rectification of the World
Yaron Cherniak
PhD student, UCLA
Moshe Idel, in his article “The Magical and Theurgic Interpretation of Music in Jewish Sources from the Renaissance to Hassidism (1982),” describes three conceptual domains exists in Jewish mysticism and Kabbalistic teachings, underlining the crucial role of music in making the divine realm accessible to the kabbalists via various mystical models. Idel's analysis of 12th, 13th, and 16th-century Kabbalistic texts reveals three key elements: the theurgical model, which involves the mystic’s impact on the divine intra-structure; the magical model, which attempts to manipulate nature; and the mystical model, which transforms the inner state of one’s consciousness. He extensively describes these concepts in his book Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic (45-145, 1995), which helps to broaden Gershom Scholem’s discussion on music and kabbalah in Abraham Abulafia’s prophetic kabbalism (Scholem 1946).
This study analyzes the evolution of musical and mystical concepts within Kabbalistic thought and practice, and their subsequent musical expression in modern Israel. Music filled an important role in accessing the divine realm and the drawing down of the divine influx (Idel 1982), attaining prophecy, entering ecstasy, and nullifying the self. To discuss this mystical apparatus that has theosophical, magical, and mystical applications, I explore the musical concepts in Rabbi Abraham Abulafia’s prophetic kabbalah; ratzo va-shov Hasidic concept in nigunei Hitbonenut; and viewing musical adaptation as an act of synthesis of a shared “nostalgia for Paradise (Eliade 1969),” of Sufi, Indian Yoga and other ecstatic types of mysticism in Jewish Kabbalah, as a means of world rectification (tiqqun).
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