On the final day of their five month world tour, Turkish music scholar Latif Bolat and Jennifer Ferraro brought Sufi Mystic poetry and song to Albion College. They were sponsored by The Sixth Annual Daoud Family Lecture Series.

President Peter Mitchell presented lecture series founder Tarik Daoud with one of the most esteemed Albion awards, the Briton Medallion, and thanked him for his generous support of the series. Each year, Albion hosts a lecture designed to encourage awareness of Middle Eastern and Islamic issues.

Bolat, playing the Turkish lute, opened the performance with a medley designed to invoke humility in everyone present and Ferraro read a poem by the famous Sufi Poet Mowlana Jalaluddin Rumi. They also included a slide show presentation of images from Turkey during one of the songs.

Bolat explained the context of the each song they performed, stressing that in a traditional audience, everyone in the room would be dancing well into the morning hours. He also described the effect of different scales on the mood of the piece and the use of songs combined within a medley. Mysticism, he said, “looks beyond the words of the book, in this case the Koran, to find the deeper meanings of those words.” Those who practiced Mysticism were often condemned or killed by members of the orthodoxy throughout history.

Dr. Douglas Rose, Albion Choir Director, was intrigued by the connections he saw between the music in Bolat’s performance and the traditional chanting of monks in the Anglican Church. Each style contains repetitious elements that evoke a sense of serenity. In this case, the frame drum provided an ethereal feel. “I was thinking very much like a Western musician,” he said, “but you can’t always notate it or describe it. It just is.”

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