The Form Outlasts the Instrument

Hazrat Inayat Khan spent his youth mastering an instrument at royal courts, then spent the rest of his life speaking in its grammar without ever picking it up again.

Composer and pianist Michael Harrison, who made his professional and artistic mark as a second-generation Minimalist, was also known by the Sufi name Sarmad. He had been an initiate of that mystical path, specifically the Inayati Order, since the 1970s. The Inayati Order was founded by and based upon the teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan, the man who introduced Sufism to the Western world in the early twentieth century.

Harrison made a specific claim about Khan’s pedagogy, that the mystic’s lectures worked the way a raga works. Khan had his topic, and then he improvised with words the way one would with music. Harrison was highly qualified to recognize the structure; he trained for years in Hindustani classical music under Pandit Pran Nath, the same teacher who taught La Monte Young and Terry Riley, and he spoke publicly at Inayatiyya programs specifically on this material (the Inayati Order renamed itself Inayatiyya in 2020). For Harrison, calling a lecture a raga was literal. He’d spent his life learning to build and working in the raga structure himself.

As had Hazrat Inayat Khan.

Khan was not a spiritual teacher who happened to communicate in musical language. At twenty-one, he was given the title Tansen, or master musician, at the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad, the hereditary ruler of what was then the largest princely state in British India, for his playing on the vina, a large plucked stringed instrument central to Hindustani and Carnatic classical music. He performed at courts across India before he ever taught anyone about the Divine. He sailed for the West in 1910 and spent his first two years giving concerts and lectures on the same tour. At that point, the music was still the draw.

Khan’s outward emphasis was different by the time he delivered the lectures that came to be collected in his magnum opus, The Mysticism of Sound and Music, in the early 1920s. His Sufi Order was established, the concert tours were over, and the vina had been set down for good. What was left, on paper, was a man standing in front of a room talking about God. He had stopped performing in the traditional sense. But musical performance lived on in the lectures, as Harrison described: a small set of terms, note, interval, keynote, consonance, dissonance, returned to again and again from different angles, a claim about music becoming a claim about nature becoming a claim about conduct and back again. Nobody asked or inspired Khan to keep working that way. Raga was simply the shape he thought in. It was his very expression. The form outlasted the instrument.

Additional evidence that transcends the metaphor: Khan spoke without a prepared text. His students took his talks down in shorthand as he spoke, and he was specific that the wording be preserved exactly, without smoothing it into conventional prose. A man who trained for years to generate spontaneous musical material inside a fixed structure, live, in front of listeners, did the same thing with ideas, and he insisted the record of it stay as unedited as a field recording, transcribed as dutifully as any improviser’s horn solo. Khan carried his method from his instrument to his lectern, and he never stopped working within his form.

A century on, students in Inayatiyya study circles still read these lectures out loud. They go in turns, one voice picking up where another leaves off, no single reader carrying the whole chapter. A teaching about individual notes and voices losing their separateness inside a shared harmony gets delivered by exactly that, a room of individuals that stop mattering as individuals once the reading is underway. The fixed written material still has the same grammar Khan gave it, and a room full of people supplying the rest is still, structurally, a performance of a raga.

Harrison died on April 17, 2026, at the young age of sixty-seven, in the middle of what he’d called his Raga Cycle, a lifetime of study of the form that is always unfinished. A raga has no final version to arrive at. It’s a grammar. Grammars don’t finish; they get picked up by whoever goes next. Khan understood that a hundred years ago when he kept teaching in the shape of an instrument he’d already put down, and Harrison understood it well enough to spend a life working the form. Neither man got to finish inside it, Khan died in 1927 at the even younger age of forty-four, but neither needed to. The shape is still being played and it always will be.