Sharing our story in music
Every year, after Remembrance Sunday, the UK celebrates Inter Faith Week. It is a time devoted to highlighting diversity, engaging in interfaith dialogue, encouraging unity, and promoting understanding.
Over the years, the University of St Andrews has marked the week with panels, lectures, dialogue groups and social events that bring people together across cultural and religious boundaries. This year, our community celebrated Inter Faith Week with an interfaith concert called ‘Sharing Our Story’.
Held at the Laidlaw Music Centre, the concert gave students the opportunity to share the music of their religious traditions in an open, inclusive setting. Many traditions use music as an expression of worship, praise and religious devotion, and the event was designed to provide a way to hear music from a variety of traditions that would otherwise be reserved for worshippers.
By providing a common stage to showcase these traditions, the evening created a musical dialogue as rich as any intellectual exchange.
“Music is a universal language that gives expression to the joys, sorrows and inner states common to all human experience,” says Bill Shackman, Assistant Chaplain, Interfaith, Environment and Digital Engagement at the University of St Andrews.
“Speaking directly to the heart, it provides a medium of communication that transcends divisions and unites people in harmony. Yet musical expressions are shaped by their specific cultural contexts. Listening to one another’s stories in music provides a unique opportunity to appreciate different expressions of religious sentiment with an emotional immediacy that goes beyond the limits of language.”
The evening featured performances of Persian stringed instruments, the santoor and tar, Indian sitar, a Jewish Klezmer ensemble, an organ recital, and a variety of eastern and western Christian choral arrangements.
Abi Collins is the student Music Centre President and performed at the event. “This concert, to me, represented a space that allowed me to share the music of my own culture with others,” says Abi. “So much of the ‘day to day’ music making at St Andrews is centred around Anglican church music or western classical music, to have a platform where students of other faiths get to showcase their talent and repertoire close to their hearts is very special.”
“From a personal perspective, I find Judaism to be just as – if not more – important to me as my culture as it is my religion. Music particularly allows me to connect with the cultural aspect of my people, especially playing the klezmer music tradition of Ashkenazi Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, where my family originally hails from.
“Orthodox Jewish women don’t usually participate in music making in the way that men might in a synagogue service, for example, my synagogue back home has cantors and a choir, but they are only men, so it’s lovely to be able to make music as a woman in a more secular context.”
Abi’s group performed a repertoire of traditional folk song at the celebration, before branching out into popular culture with music from Fiddler on the Roof.
“The latter in particular shows how religious music can evolve with the times to be accessible by the masses and help share the story of the Jewish people and our experiences through song,” Abi says. “Coming from a family who fled Eastern Europe during the pogroms, just like the main characters in Fiddler on the Roof, it’s a wonderful opportunity to share my family story through music.
“Many people haven’t heard the word ‘pogrom’, but if I mention Fiddler on the Roof, they understand the events I’m referring to. This is what ‘sharing our story in music’ means to me.”
Abi views music as a “shared language” that allows us to express ourselves. “In my experience, having attended synagogues abroad, people may all speak different languages at home, but we all sing in Hebrew, and we all know the same words,” she adds.
“The same goes for secular contexts in that music allows us to express our emotions even when a spoken language is not shared.”
Music can bring a lot of joy in faith communities. For Abi, it’s a reminder of home, and of family.
On stage, Abi’s sax trio’s first piece was Hava Nagila, which is a Jewish folk song that is famous throughout the Jewish diaspora. “We all know it and feel a sense of belonging and community because of that,” she explains. “We may have slightly different tunes for prayers, but everyone has danced to Hava Nagila at a wedding or bar mitzvah!”
Put simply, ‘Sharing Our Story’ was an inspired and inspiring exchange of music that illuminated our commonalities while celebrating our difference, and that is what Inter Faith Week is all about.
This article appeared in the Kaleidoscope Alumni Network newsletter, published in November 2025.