They are 14 accredited musicians from all corners of the earth but, now, together in western Sydney.
And, together, they make up Sydney's first World Music Chamber Orchestra.
As they rehearsed recently for kicking off the Sydney Sacred Music Festival in west-suburban Parramatta, SBS Radio was on hand to hear their stories.
"The orchestra sort of came to me. It was almost like in a dream, but I think I was sitting there just contemplating life, and then this feeling came that we have such beautiful instruments from all the diverse cultures around me, and I was feeling to take it to another level."
The speaker is Richard Petkovic, founder and music director of the World Music Chamber Orchestra, the first of its kind in Sydney.
"What I'm trying to do is create a music and a show that can change the chemistry of the people listening. So not their passive listening, but I want them to be engaged in a different way so, when they leave the show, they can feel that something inside of them has changed, has transformed, and so they've received something from the show that's universal."
When the musicians first met, they say, everybody talked about their refugee experiences, their music and what things were most sacred to them.
A bond developed, and a chamber orchestra was born.
Vietnamese guitarist Ngoc-Tuan Hoang remembers when he told the group what freedom meant to him.
"In our first musical gathering, I talked about freedom. For me now, the highest religion is freedom. And then I talked about my desire for freedom. I was telling about the fact that I had risked my life to escape from Vietnam on a small boat across the ocean, and after so many unsuccessful attempts, and after many years in prisons, finally I could escape and I could find freedom. Asim, the musician from Africa, cried when listening to my story. He said, 'Listening to you talking about freedom, I think of Allah. I am a Muslim, and Allah is highest. In your belief, freedom is highest. Therefore, Allah and freedom meet there, at the highest place, and they are one and the same.'"
Asim Gorashi comes from Sudan.
He plays violin and oud, along with whistling and vocals.
He says Sudanese traditional Sufi music is very spiritual.
"Always, the emotions are something from our nostalgia. Our yearning for our past. Our connection with our ancestors. Our connection with our homelands. That's the feeling we need always to have present, because, otherwise, we would be playing for nothing. So when I perform, I feel like I'm representing the whole African, or Sudanese, community, because I'm originally from Sudan. And that, I think, is the centre of music. Music is centred on spirituality and emotional."
The World Music Chamber Orchestra was picked to kick off the week long Sydney Sacred Music Festival at Parramatta's Riverside Theatre.
There are no music sheets, no scripts.
All 14 of them are together onstage.
A couple of them begin to play, and the rest improvise accordingly.
Ngoc-Tuan Hoang explains how it all developed.
"A musician made a sound from her voice or from his musical instrument, then, in a short moment, other musicians would join in, and they would develop the music, making it become many layers of sounds, more and more complex and interesting. Then, at a certain point, everyone would feel that the musical journey was coming to an end. That is human 'sympathetic resonance' in music. And it's difficult for me to describe it in words."
Gambirra Illume is the lone Aboriginal member of the group.
She says, under her Yolngu traditions, she has many parents.
So, she says, performing the tribal sacred language of Yolngu is quite a journey for her.
"It was important to get the blessings from my mothers to be able to use the appropriate words and to create a manikay, which is a song for this project, and the subject being, you know, 'Three Sides of Love and Death.' That's a tricky one to be able to translate that, because there are many different meanings of love and death. And it being related to the earth and the cosmos and ancestral beings and our totems, and trying to sort of encompass all of that without treading on sacred stories and words ... yes, finally I managed to get that, and it feels fantastic. I've been very blessed."
The song is called "Song of Love."
"The words are 'to love' and 'to be loved,' from past to present, and to call upon this, and to embrace."
Performances, as Sydney's World Music Chamber Orchestra begins its journey, include a vast range of sounds.
There are Ghanaian animist rituals and percussion, ancient Kurdish rituals, the Mongolian ancient art of throat singing and horse fiddle, and more.
