Music in a community: a festival

This lesson asks you to identify and describe the ways music is used in a community, and to identify, by performing or listening, musical forms from different communities, times and places. The museum offers one case from the Islamic world: a festival of sacred music in Fez. The performing, the listening and your own community are for your class to bring. ¹

The expectations ask you to describe ways music is used. Think of three questions to put to any community: who makes the music, who listens to it, and what it does for the people who gather around it.

An annual festival in Fez, begun in 1994, has a record in the museum. ² The record says it brings together Sufi chants, qawwali and hymns with the music of other faiths on the stages of the old city. ² It is held in the courtyards and gardens of the palaces of Fez. ²

The festival puts the music of different faiths on the same stages. What could people in a town learn by listening to music that is not their own, and why might listening teach what talking cannot?

• The Fez Festival of World Sacred Music: the year it began and where in the city it is held.
• Fez: the city that hosts it, as the museum's records describe it.

Read about the Fez Festival of World Sacred Music. Draw a chart with two columns, "what I read" and "our community", and fill the first from your reading and the second with what music is used for in your life.