The New Europe, I wish to suggest, has formed from the Old Europe because of the return to the beginnings. Diasporic history has shifted back toward Europe and the Mediterranean, and music provides us with a means of recognizing its path and interpreting whether or how it might lead to the elusive promised land. The political problem that emerges is how to identify and differentiate the proccesses of returning and reconstructing the New Europe. The historical journey to Eastern Europe takes on a sacred character as one moves along the rivers and pilgrimage routes that defined the beginnings of Eastern European culture. What becomes clear to us as we witness the return to musical nationalisms, landscapes, and sacred sites in the New Europe is that music does narrate histories.
Music does point the way toward origins and beginnings.
Music also complicates the journey itself, because its symbols are multivalent. Its messages require constant clarification, and the process of returning turns back on itself, with the ultimate clarification for many in the sacred character that motivates the journey back to Europe from the diaspora. The return to and within European diaspora also has distinctively sacred forms. During the past decade or so, but especially since the political transformation of Eastern Europe in 1989-90, pilgrims have flooded the traditional routes to sites of miracles and healing. Well over 100 million Europeans go on pilgrimages of one kind or another each year in the 1990s.