this is not about a mosque

I have been following online and in the papers the disheartening debate surrounding whether or not Lichfield should have a mosque. Some of what I have read comes across as extremely narrow minded, some of it outrageously close to being racist, and some of it completely irrelevant. This post does not concern the idea of a mosque.

The arts has for centuries sought out inspiration from other cultures, assimilated and distilled those influences, and often produced something that allows us to see the everyday in new ways. Visual arts, music, theatre and dance have always been ahead of society in the pursuit of understanding how different communities or different faiths overlap and interrelate.

I have regularly said that Lichfield seems to be the ethnic opposite of Birmingham, and I believe Lichfield is the weaker for it.

At the Lichfield Festival, we have been addressing the interplay of cultural ideas for decades, albeit in a small and gentle way. We are a secular event with the extraordinary privilege of using a sacred space as one of our venues every July. By many, certainly the many that have perhaps never been to a Festival event, we have been labelled an elite, Christian, classical music event. Yes, occasionally we do promote events that fill that description, but we do so much more, and have done for years.

I would like to think that the Lichfield Festival now has an even stronger spirit of welcome than even in our first years when we welcomed artists from Japan, America, Russia, India, Pakistan, Holland, France, Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Australia. All these people, like the artists visiting this July, are invited to perform here purely because of what they do rather than where they are from or what their faith might or might not be.

Amongst this year’s riches lie opportunities to hear a re-imagining of what music would have sounded like 16th-century Goa when local Muslim musicians played alongside the choral music of the Portuguese catholic churches, or to hear the deep sonorities of the Russian Orthodox Church, or to hear two very different takes on the ancient Jewish tradition of klezmer (here and here). For those who still think the Lichfield Festival is elite, Christian and classical, there is plenty for you too.