World Musicians Find Harmony at Festival

Want to communicate spirituality, both culturally and traditionally? Try to make some miracles through music, says the founder of the Fez Festival of World Sacred Music.

Celebrating its fifth year, the eight-day festival closes today in the north-central Moroccan city. Its founder, Faouzi Skali of Fez, calls it the only international festival devoted to sacred music.

American jazz pianist Randy Weston played at Fez in 1996 and listened to many of the concerts.

“It was incredible,” he recalled by telephone from Paris, where he was making a recording. “It was like we were all going through a spiritual experience, the musicians, the audience, all of us, realizing how we connected . . . through music.”

The experience went beyond the music halls. “You heard God’s name all the time, in the streets and everywhere,” he said. “The spirit was in the air.”

This year’s program featured American opera singer Barbara Hendricks performing spirituals, the Irish choir Anuna singing sacred chants, Turkish whirling dervishes dancing in trances, a Jewish cantor and performers from across Europe and Asia offering such classical music as Byzantine and Hindustani chants.

As the festival’s director general, Skali promoted the idea of an international religious festival as a forum for healing after the Gulf War. First, he considered a film festival showing the world’s spiritual traditions. But language barriers seemed insurmountable.

Then, Skali opted for music, which presented no language problems. “I think,” he said, “we could almost do some miracle through music.”

Concerts “went beyond the problems of words and, we feel something deeper than we can say with words . . . it was something completely universal,” he said.