Some months ago Salzburg, Austria, the birth place of Mozart, and the city of churches and bell-towers, was chosen to showcase a 10 day Spiritual Overture. Zubin Mehta, the celebrated Indian conductor, led the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in a symphony centering on the Holocaust, and appropriately titled “Revival of the Dead”. In the coming year the focus will switch to Buddhism and then in the years ahead to other religions. This particular spiritual musical ensemble, we learn, was based on artistic director Alexander Pereira’s belief that humanity is reaching out beyond rationalism to an idealism best articulated through aesthetics in general, and music in particular. And he’s not alone. Jane Moss, vice president for Programming at New York City’s Lincoln Center and self-described ‘secular mystic’ believes people are ‘looking for larger experiences in a cyber-world’. Humanity, Moss argues, is becoming desensitized by the surrealistic tendencies of modern technology. And in the absence of organized religion—which many in the industrialized world now turn their backs on—only music remains, she says, as humanity’s “live experience left in the world.”
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