Bahá'í or Spiritual Themed Musical Works

by Michael Knopf

Summary of "Baha’i or Spiritual Themed Musical Works" by Dr. Michael D. Knopf (1955-)

This work was collected with the specific purpose of making it available at the Baha’i World Centre Library, then was also shared with the Bahá'í Library Online. Most are also in the collection of the Australian Music Centre in Sydney.

This collection contains works in the following categories:

1. Choral works with Baha’i texts or themes
2. Other choral works on spiritual texts and themes
3. Large choral/orchestral works with Baha’i texts or themes
4. Instrumental and vocal works Baha’i/spiritual texts or themes
5. Works purposed for Baha’i Community and Devotional Music Making
6. Academic Writings that pertain to Baha’i Community and Devotional Music Making: see bahai-library.com/author/Michael+Knopf.

This collection excludes Dr. Knopf’s large instrumental output for solo instruments, chamber music, other vocal works and orchestral pieces. It does not include any of his creative output in Jazz music or other academic/creative writings.

Dr. Knopf states the following about this collection:

My creative output has had historically three distinct sources of inspiration: spiritual themes and Bahai’ literature; nature, art and science; and musical idea, mood and practice.

Much of my creative work from 1974 until about 2010 was often concerned with spiritual themes, often possessing Baha’i ideas or texts. I habitually found impetus for music writing from the goals and world-view of the Baha’i Faith as well as its profound mysticism and its real-world pragmatism. Concurrent was my inspiration from nature, and this included scientific knowledge. Lofty aims and the nobility of human life were thus at the forefront of how I perceived the purpose of living, and my reaction was to create music that I thought would be of value to society and the art form through the music's various emergent forms.

From around 1991-2, I began to compose music for choir and for community singing having witnessed a dearth of live, quality approaches to devotional and music making in Baha’i community life. This resulted in a swathe of vocal and choral pieces, and some pedagogical aids to assist development.

Over many years, I imbued universal principles into the goals I set for my creative life which led me to diversify my artistic disciplines across style and genre in music. This culminated in my doctoral study of 2011. My study, through the composition of varied new works, demonstrated and revealed my particular approaches to the blending, juxta-positioning, influencing, etc. of music choices from both cultural and historical musical practices. This became a major stream of strategy in my music-making and is now subsumed in the musical personality, to the extent that my music flows naturally from a variety of experiences and influences.

My recent works is now mostly instrumental and mostly for my primary instrument - the classical guitar.

Click on links below to download a zipped folder, or download individual files. The extension ".musx" is MakeMusic Finale and ".pc" is Personal Composer (see defordmusic.com/transposing-using-personal-composer).

Download entire archive, knopf_music_scores.zip [41 MB], or click the links below.