The Religious Affairs Office

With this activity, the OAR continues its collaboration with cultural institutions in the city, through programmes focused on themes that crosscut various religious traditions. Collaboration with the Reial Monestir de Santa Maria de Pedralbes on the role and importance of spiritual women began in 2019, and has continued until 2022. In 2020, the OAR (Office of Religious Affairs) and the Museum of Ethnology and World Cultures (MUEC) organised the programme “Rites of Passage: The Life Cycle of Religious Traditions”, linking the religious plurality of Barcelona with pieces from all over the world held by the museum, and looking at how social anthropology studies and conceives of religions through the concept of “rites of passage”.

Therefore we’re embarking on a collaboration with the Barcelona Music Museum: an agora for meeting and a place for debate, sharing knowledge and enjoyment that allows people to become more aware of how music forms part of the construction of collective identities.

MUSIC, RELIGIONS AND SPIRITUALITY

Music and spirituality are strongly linked within a relationship in which both are complex, diverse and difficult to define. Within the spiritual world, music has been understood as both the voice of gods and the cacophony of devils; worshipped as the purest form of spirituality, and condemned as the ultimate depravity. Music in the spiritual world has been consequence, conduit, devotion, worship, ecstasy, serenity: in short, transition.

The relationship between music and religions is a thread that runs throughout the history of humanity. Many religious texts have been sung, not written, over most of human history, and religious practice has found forms of expression through music in almost every religious tradition. Over time, priests, monks and the faithful have sung in Christian masses, Buddhist and Hindu pujas, Islamic prayers, Jewish festivals, and at other key events on religious calendars and everyday occasions. The values, uses and forms of religious and spiritual music are as diverse and culturally specific as the religious traditions on which they are based.

THE “TRÀNSITS” PROGRAMME

As part of a ten-session programme, the OAR is collaborating with the Barcelona Music Museum – Robert Gerhard Centre together with L’Auditori to offer a journey through six religious rituals rooted in different communities within the city where music is a central element. It’s not a programme of concerts, but rather a means of facilitating attendance, participation, and the sharing of a set of living practices.

The programme is organised under the title “Trànsits” within the thematic framework of Mort o Retorn [Death and Return] that defines L’Auditori’s 2022-2023 season. The term trànsit (transition) implies both action and state of being. A journey and a moment in time, the word becomes a transition between states, a living link that combines disparate elements. The concept of death and return runs through all religious traditions as a core element. Death, as a critical and extreme point in the life cycle, prompts a multiplicity of rites of passage in constant transformation.

Changes in the everyday soundscape, whether through music or through distinctive acoustic signals – such as the tolling of bells, the ‘matracas’ (rattles) during Easter Week or the muezzins’ adhan (call to prayer) – is the embodiment par excellence of sound, understood as a phenomenon that transforms the environment. This transformative power, which circumscribes and connects social, temporal and life spheres, is the key element of music as transition, as a sonorous realisation of the divine pneuma, and as a link between human beings.

The sessions will be structured around a previous discussion between someone from the world of music and someone familiar with religious practice, and a concert or liturgy. In 2022, the programme will begin on 20 October, and the key element will be Qawwali (a form of Sufi Islamic devotional singing). Under the guidance of the Barcelona Pakistani community Minhaj al-Qur’ân and the Minhaj Naat Group we will get to know one of the most authentic expressions of Punjabi Sufism, music whose goal is to bring ecstasy to both listeners and participants. The following session, on 18 December, will familiarise us all with Barcelona’s Jewish community, who will be inviting us to celebrate the blessings (Barak) of Hanukkah, also known as the Festival of Lights, at the Israeli community synagogue in Barcelona. Next, on 21 December, there will be a performance of the Song of the Sibyl of Mallorca, a Gregorian chant of medieval origin, classified as part of the Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO, in the Parish Church of Santa Madrona. In 2023 we’ll be able to enjoy the legacy of Byzantine music through the liturgy of the Romanian Orthodox Church, sharing it with the community of the parish of Sant Jordi, as well as the joy of Pentecostal worship thanks to the New Covenant Church.

INFORMATION (WILL BE UPDATED OVER THE COURSE OF THE PROGRAMME)

QAWWALI. THE MUSIC OF SUFISM:

• DISCUSSION: Thursday, 20 October, at 6.30 pm. The Sala de Teclats at the Barcelona Music Museum. FREE ADMISSION.

Musician, Islamologist, doctor of Arabic philology and specialist in Sufi mysticism Halil Bárcena talks about the musical and spiritual aspects of Pakistani Sufism and Qawwali with Hasnat Hashmi, lawyer and practising Sufi from the Islamic association Minhaj al-Qur ân in Barcelona, part of the Qâdiriya (tarîqa) brotherhood.

• CONCERT: Thursday, 20 October, at 8 pm. Hall 4 Alicia de Larrocha at L’Auditori. TICKETS.

Qawwali is one of the musical expressions most clearly associated with Islam in the Indian subcontinent. Understood as a song of praise that encourages the transition towards union with God, it is one of the fundamental devotional rituals of the Punjabi Sufi communities, both in Pakistan and in the north of India. This time, through the Minhaj al-Qurân community, which has deep roots in Barcelona, the renowned Minhaj Naat Group will be offering us the opportunity to delve into this rich universe of sound.

This musical genre consists of the singing of poetry from the tradition of Sufi mysticism by solo singers – qawwal– who are usually accompanied by the tabla, the harmonium and a plucked stringed instrument within a rhythmic framework that suggests the constant repetition of the name of God – the dhikr – on a path that leads listeners and participants to ecstasy: a feast for the soul and for the senses.

Formed in France in 2014 and made up of Amar Naeem, Yaseen Kaudeer and Aqibe Khawaja, the Minhaj Naat Group is one of the ensembles taking the lead in terms of new ways of presenting the Sufi repertoire of the Indian subcontinent. With an approach that unites modernity and tradition, they have performed all over Europe and received extensive media coverage.

BARAK. THE MUSIC OF HANUKKA, THE FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS:

• Discussion and liturgy: Sunday, 18 December, time TBD. Barcelona Israeli community. Free with registration. Registration will be open soon.

The music of Judaism is as diverse and varied as its culture. Inextricably linked with exile, liturgical practice, and the observance of rabbinical precepts, this diversity can be explained by the hybridisation of their own practices with those of non-Jewish host communities. Thus, the music of Judaism is the music of Diaspora or Galut: richly diverse, and the result of an accumulation of complex historical processes that are the bedrock of Jewish identity.

On this occasion, Barcelona’s Israeli community will be opening the doors of their synagogue – the first to be opened in Spain after the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula at the end of the 15th century – to share songs in celebration of Hanukkah. Also known as the Festival of Lights, this is one of the most significant events on the Jewish calendar, when the ritual lighting of luminaries commemorates the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem and the rebellion of the Maccabees against the Seleucid empire dominated by Hellenistic culture.

THE OATH OF JUDGEMENT. THE SONG OF THE SYBIL:

• Discussion and liturgy: Wednesday, 21 December, time TBD. Parish Church of Santa Madrona. Free with registration. Registration will be open soon.

The chant of the Sybil is performed on Christmas Eve in every church on the island of Mallorca as part of the Matins service. It’s one of the most vivid and deeply rooted practices in oral music tradition within the Catalan-speaking world: an a capella chant about the final judgement and the coming of Christ, sung by the Sibyl Eritrea, represented by a boy or a girl.

Although this chant was a widespread practice throughout Christianity as a liturgical drama, it was banned by the Council of Trent in the mid-16th century in an attempt to unify and bring order to the liturgy. This prohibition was not observed either in Alghero or in Mallorca, where the Song of the Sybil has continued to be performed right up to the present day; now, the rite is one of the undisputed focal points of the Mallorcan festive calendar.

On this occasion, the Parish Church of Santa Madrona will be holding a special service that includes the Song of the Sibyl performed by Inès Mas, a ‘sibilera’ from Campos, a town in the Migjorn area of Mallorca. The Malllorcan Song of the Sybil was declared a part of the Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2010.

You’ll find full information about the programme HERE.

See you there!

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