Celebrating its sixteenth season in 2010, the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music has become a pilgrimage spot for musicians and arts lovers alike from all over the globe. This week-long event brings together disparate threads of artistic aesthetics, cultural traditions, and spiritual discernment, with musicians as diverse as the Blind Boys of Alabama, the duo Amadou and Mariam from the West African nation of Mali (a last-minute substitute for American singer-songwriter Ben Harper, who cancelled at the eleventh hour), and a huge range of local artists.
But since its founding, the Fes Festival has always included some of the most visionary and important early music performers from the European tradition. Artists who have performed at the spectacular setting of the Batha Museum’s courtyard, a garden shaded by a massive, centuries-old oak tree, include such world-renowned early music specialists such as William Christie, the Tallis Scholars, the Hilliard Ensemble, and Jordi Savall, the last of whom has become a regular at Fes. (Other classical artists who have also sojourned to perform at the Fes Festival in recent years include singers Jessye Norman, Barbara Hendricks, and Teresa Berganza.)
Fes el Bali, ("Old Fes") is a UNESCO World Heritage site in order to protect its unique identity. The medina ("city"), as this most ancient section of Fes is popularly called, has barely changed from the medieval era, a tangle of warrens, alleys and covered markets that course up and down steep hills. The narrow paths are crowded with people and with donkeys, mules, and wheelbarrows carrying supplies in and out of this area that is only open to foot traffic.
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The resonances of Fes ripple far beyond its picturesque and culturally entrancing location. Founded as a cultural counterweight to the emotional charges of the First Gulf War, the Fes Festival draws its point of view from the city's own history. A center of cross-cultural encounters for centuries and an important crossroads for Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and African strands of history, theology, and practice. This is where the great Jewish philosopher Maimonides once lived; for Muslims and Jews alike fleeing persecution in Andalusian Spain, Fes was a crucial refuge. The city also has a reputation for being a great intellectual and cultural center; its university, the Karaouine, was founded in 859 CE, making it the oldest continuously open university in the world, and world-famous long before places like Oxford or Cambridge existed.
So for early music performers in particular, a performance in Fes--and particularly in any repertoire linked to the era of Al-Andalus--provides fresh illumination on their work. Hearing such music in Fes, and side by side with the music of Moroccan artists in particular, enhances our understanding of the aesthetic, theoretical and stylistic conventions of medieval European music. The artistry of medieval Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East are not so far from each other: we hear this in the tonal similarities of Western early music modalities and Arab classical maqamat (tonal systems); shared or closely akin instrumentation, such as frame drums or the sibling relationship between the oud stringed instrument and the lute; or in similar styles of ornamentation.
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Few other artists are as sensitive or aware of these relationships as Jordi Savall, who brought his highly ambitious "Jerusalem" project to Fes' massive, outdoor Bab Makina venue in 2010 after exemplary performances of the project in such cities as Paris and New York. In an intriguing and coherent narrative arcing over the history of Jerusalem from ancient Jewish times until the present, Savall and his partners (who include his wife, soprano Montserrat Figueras and their two groups, the ensemble Hesperion XXI and La Capella Reial de Catalunya) as well as very fine artists of Israeli, Palestinian, Iraqi, Greek, and Armenian backgrounds, giving life, ardor, and an engaging narrative to the closely held passions that define Jerusalem for so many faith traditions. As Savall said in conversation just prior to the performance, "'Jerusalem' is, without question, the most ambitious program we've ever put together."
This year also included a fabulous late-night collaboration between the Montreal-based Ensemble Constantinople and the Corsican singers of Barbara Furtuna, whose magical set in the courtyard of the Batha Museum explored music of the Mediterranean rim to gorgeous effect.
The city of Fes is also one of the spiritual nerve centers of Morocco, where madrasas (religious schools), mosques, and the shrine of Moulay Idriss, the founder of this royal city and descendant of the prophet Muhammad. This area is also a crucial home to local Sufi tradition of mystical Islam in which a personal, ecstatic relationship to the divine is of the essence. Sufi practitioners from across the Muslim world are regularly invited to Fes; this year's groups hailed from locales as close as Fes itself and the nearby city of Meknes to the Indian Ocean island of Zanzibar.
The spirit of inter-cultural and inter-musical dialogue absolutely suffuses Fes. Sufis call this gem of a Moroccan city az-Zawiyya, "the refuge"; music lovers can only agree.
Please note: The Fes Festival, which is held under the patronage of His Royal Majesty King Mohammed VI, sponsored the airfare and travel for this journalist as part of a press trip to attend this event.
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