Hazrat Inayat Khan was, in a way, the embodiment of the Indian spirit of music, combining perfect musical mastery with deep awareness of the spiritual foundations of this art.  Here are a few paragraphs of his thoughts comparing the music of East and West, and giving a glimpse of his experiences in the West.

With all the richness of voice possessed by a Western singer, the intricacies of the Indian art of singing are such that he cannot easily render it.  Nor can a singer of India with his flexibility of voice and with its silky texture make his voice audible in the Grand Opera House.

After seeing the Western operas, where one hears the splendour of Occidental vocal culture, I was much impressed to see to what extent the art of singing has been developed.  This was a wonder to me.  No doubt, it has always been difficult to accustom my ears to enjoy singing accompanied by so many different instruments and different voices.  At the same time I saw what facility it gives to a singer to be so supported by the whole orchestra and by other voices so that he may have time to breathe and to give a better expression to his voice. And I saw how much more difficult the task of an Eastern singer was when the whole performance depended upon his one voice, accompanied by nothing but the tambura, which gives one chord to help him keep the keynote. This I found one of the reasons why the voice of the Eastern singers is not so large in volume and so widely audible to a crowd as that of an Occidental singer. However I noticed the quality to be different.  The quality of a Western singer’s voice is not such that could produce with facility what an Eastern singer could, whose voice is most flexible. But at the same time the Western singer excels in the volume of his voice, which is considered in the West as a mark of his development.

In the stories of operas I also found the difference of Eastern and Western taste.  To the Eastern mind the touch of vairagya, which is renunciation, makes the greatest appeal. Therefore in every drama the plot has something of it. If the same idea was produced in the West, it would perhaps be interesting, but not appealing.  What mostly touches in the Western mind is heroism, although it is the quality of heart which makes the greatest impression on man, whether he be of the East or West.

The European voice is classified in different voices such as tenor, baritone, bass, soprano. But in India there is no classification of voices for the very reason that there is no choral singing, which gives the Indian singer a great freedom of expression and an individual pitch, peculiar to himself.  In India what particularly appears to an audience is the sympathetic quality of a singer’s voice, instead of a large volume of voice. If there is anything which is common to India and the West in singing, it is what they call in the West, “oratorio.”  And there is a reason for this.  It is a religious music and it has its origins in the East. No doubt, one thing is remarkable in comparing the music of the East and West.  That is that the compositions of the great Western musicians which are called in the West classical, are of a similar character but in quite a different form, as dhrupad and khayal of India*.

However, Indian music represented in Oriental style in an Eastern voice, even to my own ears appeared poor, as a whistle before the noise of drums.  The very ideal is different from that of the West.  Indian music is for a few people sitting in solitude, having all their time their own to tune their instruments and to sing, even if it were the whole night, as suits that climate, where in the middle of the night music has more influence than at other times.  In the West if a man practices in his flat after eleven o’clock at night he will soon hear from his landlady. To an average Western person that music falls beneath his standard, and a thoughtful person takes it in another way, often out of politeness.  He says, “Your music is something which we cannot understand.”  But I saw some people in the West, most of them sympathetic to the East and its thought, who were more deeply struck by Indian music, which seemed to appeal to them even more than the music of their own land.  Some I have seen in the West who felt on hearing our music that this was the music that their soul had longed for all through their life, as if their spirit knew it already.  Some called it not music but magic, but such people were seldom to be found.

In whatever form Indian music was presented, I now and then met with people who became fascinated with the music I had to represent, and I met with some who even grasped the idea which was hidden beneath my music.  Several became so bewildered after having a conversation with me, thinking: how can a musician have such ideas? It was an unusual thing to them.  They thought that it was religion I was representing in my music. They thought that it was making a stage a temple, and a concert hall a church. Some saw that a moral and spiritual Message of reform I was giving from every place where I was allowed to stand, and they marvelled at the idea of someone doing that depending upon his own work for his livelihood, without any support from anywhere and yet not wanting to convert people to any particular religion, only fulfilling his life’s mission by showing those who came across his way the straight path that leads to the destination of life.

* ‘Dhrupad’ and ‘khayal’ are two genres of Indian classical music; they are distinctly different forms, but closely related, as khayal evolved out of the dhrupad tradition.