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.
Pilgrimage brings new voices of musical narration and new journeys to European music history.
Symbolically, pilgrims return to the beginnings, to the places where Christianity took shape in the Eastern Mediterranean or Rome, or to the very origins of faith itself, in the mountains of Central Europe or in the shrines of Eastern Europe. The diaspora turns in on Europe, arriving again at these beginnings, creating new musics for the mapping of musical experiences of the pilgrims who cross the borders of the New Europe and form new communities from the music that brings them to the shores of the promised land.