"Music as an Interfaith Tool: The Meeting of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan with the Novum Gaudium Gregorian Chant Choir"

The world of qawwālī is marked by the dazzling passage of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (1948-1997), to the extent that one could say that there is a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ Nusrat: before him, no qawwāl had ever released so many recordings or been so successful. The great majority of the Westerners surely listened for the first time to qawwālī thanks to Nusrat’s intense voice. His meetings with musicians from different backgrounds took him to the most diverse audiences, as did his appearances in various film scores. In this article I take into exam the reception of the qawwālī as a musical genre in itself in the West: even if the listeners could not understand its poetical mystical texts in Urdu, Hindi and Farsi, the genre was clearly perceived as ‘devotional’ and ‘spiritual’ mainly thanks to the intense climate typical of the musical genre itself and thanks to Nusrat peculiar voice that entered different spiritual Western circles. From this contextualisation, I focused on a case study, a particular interfaith musical meeting that took place in 1994 at the ‘Time Zones’ Festival in Bari, Italy, at the San Sabino Cathedral, between the Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan Party and the Gregorian Chant Choir Novum Gaudium directed by Benedictine father Anselmo Susca (1929-2012). After this meeting, in 1997, a CD entitled Oriente / Occidente was released for the label Materiali Sonori. The concert and its CD can be considered as an example of a true interest in interfaith spirituality that was typical of the epoch and that somehow vanished after September 11th 2001.