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  • On Matters of the Spirit
  • Joseph Cermatori (bio)

Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.

John Cage, “Experimental Music”

What can “the spiritual” mean today to our supposedly post-metaphysical, increasingly globalized world? What usefulness could the concept have to an era in which spiritual belief has been utterly co-opted by radical rightwing cultural politics, and just as utterly commodified by the wellness and experience tourism industries? Of what might a uniquely contemporary spirituality consist, a spirituality appropriate to our times? At a moment when these questions—and many related ones concerning secularism and post-secularism, broadly put—have radically divided opinion across the worlds of contemporary political, academic, and artistic debate, Lincoln Center unveiled its first annual White Light Festival, devoted to the topic of “the spiritual dimension of music.” While the festival didn’t actively seek definitive answers to these questions, it nevertheless invited reflection on them. Moreover, it provided ample opportunities for audiences to begin thinking about these problems in the light of three weeks’ worth of performance events, ranging from concerts by the Icelandic “post-rock” band Sigur Ros in concert with the Latvian National Choir and the UK’s Hilliard Ensemble, to The Manganiyar Seduction, an evening of Hindustani classical music and traditional Sufi performed by a group of thirty-eight Rajasthani, Muslim musicians. The festival’s producers could hardly be faulted for a lack of ambition.

Still, there was no shortage of missed opportunities, not least of which was the festival’s seeming reluctance to take any clear stance on the topic of spirituality at its heart. Apart from a handful of the usual program notes, interviews, and a well-circulated marketing blurb, the festival’s programmers mostly opted to let the curated performances speak for themselves, an admirable aim in many respects, but one that left both the festival’s activities feeling divorced from the surrounding debates and its politics vulnerable to critique from the popular press. Seizing the opportunity to define the festival more explicitly than its own programmers had done, the New York Times’s culture section ran two headlines to air its skepticism: “Marketing device or access to our inner souls?” (November 17, 2010, by Daniel Wakin), and “White [End Page 24] Light: Is It Driven by the Soul or by Sales?” (November 22, 2010, a roundtable featuring the Times’s full suite of music critics). These features informed its readers, to no one’s surprise, that Lincoln Center is a bourgeois institution, catering to bourgeois patrons, operating within a capitalist economy, as interested in its own financial well-being as much as anything else. This was deeply regrettable: only weeks after proposals for a Muslim Community Center to be constructed in the vicinity of Ground Zero had drawn national and international debate, and a related series of threats about Qu’ran-burnings in Gainesville, Florida had amply demonstrated the urgent needfulness for dialogues on these issues, the White Light Festival was seen to be allowing a hostile press to set the terms of the discussion.

For all the white light that emerged from Lincoln Center last fall, there was, quite bluntly, precious little clarity on offer from the festival’s programmers when it came to the subjects of spirituality and spirit. Rather, the strongest articulations of these concepts came from the various artists themselves, sometimes through music, and other times through the opportunities they were occasionally given to articulate their opinions in words. One such opportunity occurred during the latter of the festival’s two scheduled panel discussions, on the topics of “Silence” and “Sound” respectively, which brought together musicians and numerous experts on comparative religion, cognitive neuroscience, communication studies, mindfulness meditation practices, and applied physics. For all the advanced learning in evidence at these discussions, they often wound up demonstrating only that we still fundamentally lack a common language—or, rather, a basic vocabulary—for speaking about matters of the spirit. (In both panels, the various interlocutors frequently found themselves speaking at cross purposes, compounding mysticism with even greater degrees of mystification, recycling familiar positions on how technology and media are...

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