| Among the very most forms in which human spirit has tried to express its innermost yearnings and perceptions, music is perhaps the most universal. It symbolizes the yearnings for harmony, which oneself and with others, with nature and with the spiritual and sacred within us and around us. There is something in music that transcends and unities. This is evident in the sacred music of every communitiy-music that expresses the universal yearning that is shared by people all over the globe, said the Dalai Lama at the opening of the World Festival of Sacred Music in 2001. The Festival of Sacred Music pursues the fundamental idea that the dialogue between cultures, today more important than ever, is always also a dialogue between religions. The "disenchantment of the world" may have spread to all areas of life in modern society, but myth and occultism, spirituality and religion have survived the 20th century. At the beginning of the 21st century it even seems that it is religions and spiritual traditions that are in fact becoming the points of reference for cultural redefinition and demarcation. A central question for the Festival of Sacred Music is how artists transpose the content and form of sacred music into modern societies. The question becomes all the more interesting the more the European milieu opens up to developments in the Arab Islamic world, in East Asia, Africa or Latin America. How do these positions relate to the western model of a clear separation between the secular and the sacred spheres? Can we enter the spiritual space of these musical cultures without living the ritual context? The theme of encounters, so characteristic of the Festival in previous years, will also be central in 2003. The "clash of civilizations", produces static cultural identities which are defined strongly by religion. The Festival of Sacred Music can be seen as an antithesis to this, and builds entirely on the fruitful encounter of differences, on mobile cultural and artistic concepts. It presupposes the development of new forms of encounter, based on sensitivity, aesthetics and sensory experience. The topicality of religious experience here gains a utopian aspect of postmodern society.
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