Beautiful harmonies come through difficult struggles

Van Diemen’s Band is currently conducting a national concert tour that provides refreshed renditions of the classical music of the Baroque and Modern eras.

This is offered through a collaboration with Ensemble Kaboul which interprets the works of Erik Satie, JS Bach and Hildegard von Bingen through distinct Persian-Afghani musical methods. I recently attended their concert at our Recital Centre. Their performance was stunning.

I was not only moved by the music itself, but by the contemporary stories expressed through the music. Musical performers from diverse, Eastern and Western musical traditions honoured the rich musical and cultural spaces that they shared between themselves while also retaining their diverse origins.

From those spaces they produced beautiful sounds and wove stories that brought the audience to their feet in acclaim. The sounds were celestial, and the stories were derived from the wider human story. They were stories of dislocation and suppression, and of connection and daring performance. Far from any fear and rancour that might be tensely held within this diverse group, the human struggle and suffering that brought this ensemble together, honoured its diversity. This led to profound beauty and enrichment.

Our Southbank neighborhood is rich with human diversity, and I wouldn’t be without it. When, however, that diversity is considered only through limiting human categories, such as politics, religion, economics, culture or race, we risk diminishing our own and other people’s lives.

What would have happened to my recent musical experience if the Western musicians demanded that Satie, Bach and von Bingen could only be interpreted through Western musical values and on Western instruments? Or, if the Afghani performers remained only within their own stories with little concern for the origins of the music they performed?

In both cases the performance would likely have been unremarkable. Instead, each group of performers patiently and with gentleness opened themselves, with all that they had to offer, to each other to explore and enliven the remarkable new spaces that they shared between themselves.

Satie, Bach and von Bingen could not have sounded more magnificent not because the performance was faultless but because of what was happening between all who were in that space for that evening. We, performers and audience, experienced something good and greater than the sum of our individual parts. We were held together in those moments and that space by things that were very real, difficult and beautiful.

I write this as my gentle response to the anti-immigration and race rallies that were recently held in Melbourne. As my encouragement to value Australia’s and our neighbourhood’s constantly emerging human diversity beyond the limiting, apprehensive and even resentful categories such as I mentioned earlier. Those categories, when individually applied, can never fully disclose the exciting richness that emerges from the spaces that we share between us. They actually discount and degrade those spaces.

The spaces that we share are not for shouting across at each other, but to enter together. Just like performers and audiences working together, we need to be fully present and receptive to each other even when that’s difficult. Whatever happens in those spaces might not be faultless, but it can be magnificent.

We all inevitably begin as outsiders. From playgrounds to new neighbourhoods, romances, jobs, journeys, cultures and even ageing we are all trying to find our ways into life and its spaces together.

Sometimes we are afraid and frustrated and react angrily to that. My Christian faith teaches me that Jesus Christ mediates those risky and fraught spaces between us (Ephesians 2:12-13). His mediation dampens my senses of aggrieved entitlement and my angry need to have things all my own way by being the space in which I encounter even those I disregard or fear most.

Through Jesus’s mediating presence, grounded in his mercy, the spaces that I share with others might not be faultless, but they are beautiful. Beautiful harmonies come through difficult struggles.

Thank you, Van Diemen’s Band and Ensemble Kaboul. •