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Episode details

Radio 3,29 Mar 2018,15 mins

SeriesIs Music a Civilising Force?

Jameela Siddiqi

The Essay

Available for over a year

Jameela Siddiqi remembers her own relatively late discovery of the power of Indian classical music in the hands of the Sufi singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. A successful TV news producer with a stable job and a casual enthusiasm for music from Bach to the Beatles she found her world turned upside down by a concert by Khan in the late 1980s. She describes what happened to her, the musical world into which she felt inducted and the qualities of that world that she believes are entirely civilising.

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