:: Music :: A clockwork of interfaith performance
BEITEDDINE: There’s plenty of musical miscegenation that goes on in this part of the world. Between Peter Gabriel’s Womad world music enterprise, the more hip foreign music delivery systems like the Seattle-based documentation project-slash-record label Sublime Frequencies and local explorations of oriental jazz, it’s hard to read an article on the region’s music that’s not trying to find another way to say “hybrid.” All this began long before somebody decided it would be a good idea to fly airliners into American real estate, and various Western writers started publishing articles and books about “the clash of civilizations.” Since 2001, though, religious – that is to say ecumenical – world music has demonstrated itself to be a marketable commodity. Where secular world music juxtaposes different sonic traditions because it sounds neat (and occasionally generates something completely new), the religious stuff can reassure worldly consumers that people who believe, and believe different...