The Western world was first introduced to Indian music sometime in the early 1900s when a musician and sufi scholar called Hazrat Inayat Khan travelled to America and introduced audiences to a sound they had never heard before. He played the veena and sang, but did not gather much of an audience. Gradually, he stopped playing what he called ‘struck music’ and turned his attention to exploring the mysticism of sound, how ‘unstruck music’ flows in and around us. He integrated sufi thought and music into a series of beautiful essays.
