For many people in the modern world, crossing cultures is an enjoyable pastime.  People seek out that which seems to them unusual for their holidays (so long as certain comforts are included), and it is a sign of metropolitan sophistication to have shops and restaurants of many lands nearby.  Few really understand, though, the challenge of leaving behind what you know and adopting a new culture, as Hazrat Inayat Khan did when he set forth from India in 1910.  

He was not a complete novice in exploring new lands, for he had travelled widely in the subcontinent, visiting many princely states, experiencing different languages, cultures, religions, classes and customs, but perhaps the hardest adjustment he had to face was the different understanding of music in the west.  For Hazrat Inayat, music and spirituality were inseparable, but in the west it was –often – not seen this way.  What is more, the western attitude towards his music was frequently uninformed and dismissive.  Western listeners, for example, were puzzled as to why eastern music does not seem to use harmony.

Western music achieves harmony through the sounding of several tones at once; a chord played on a piano is an example. This chordal structure usually drives the music forward, as the tension of one chord calls for another in which it can resolve.  An Indian singer, though, is unaccompanied except by a percussionist and the drone of a tambura.  It is not that harmony is absent from Indian music, but the harmony is implicit; a well sung note finds its welcome place in the raga, and in this way harmony is fulfilled.

There is a spiritual lesson to be found here.  The Sufi seeks the perfection of harmony, and the western form of musical harmony could be seen as its external manifestation, the collaboration of different voices to form a single music.  The eastern application of harmony requires the musician to be harmonious within her- or himself, a harmonization that begins when the singer finds their own ‘sa’ or tonic note, for there is no equivalent of western concert pitch (A=440 hz) in the east. Each musician discovers their own ‘sa’, sometimes after years of study.  In other words, it is only when the singer finds him- or herself that harmony is possible.

This comparison is not meant to cast aspersions on western music, not at all.  Nor is it meant to designate Indian musicians as saints, for they are seldom that.  It is simply an illustration of the difference between outer and inner harmony.  Collaboration in some worldly affair (and the singing together of a choral group is certainly an example) can be sublimely beautiful and may lift the participants into the heavens.  But the activity will end sooner or later, and then the participants are released back into the choppy seas of individuality in much the same state as before.  The attainment of inner harmony confers a certainty and peace which may sustain us through all disturbances; to put it poetically, we could say it protects us from the dragon, for in Gayan Boulas there is this saying:
Taking the path of disharmony is like entering the mouth of the dragon.