This morning I listened to an inspiring interview with Elena Cheah and Mariam Said about the West-Eastern Divan, the orchestra founded by the late Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim to bring together young musicians from both Arab nations and Israel to make music on neutral ground (their permanent home is now Seville in Spain) and to share ideas freely about the ongoing Middle East conflict.
Edward Said was born in Jerusalem and raised in Jerusalem and Cairo; Daniel Barenboim was born in Buenos Aires to parents of Jewish Russian descent. A chance meeting in the lobby of a London hotel in the early 1990's led to an intensive friendship. "These two men, who should have been poles apart politically, discovered in that first meeting, which lasted for hours, that they had similar visions of Israeli/Palestinian possible future cooperation. They decided to continue their dialogue and to collaborate on musical events to further their shared vision of peaceful co-existence in the Middle East. This led to Mr. Barenboim's first concert on the West Bank, a piano recital at the Palestinian Birzeit University in February 1999, and to a workshop for young musicians from the Middle East that took place in Weimar, Germany, in August 1999." (http://west-eaterndivan.artists.warner.de)
Daniel Barenboim continues: "The orchestra is a humanitarian idea. It became the most important
thing in Edward Said's life, as it still is in mine, and through it his
ideals will always live on.
Our project may not change the world,
but it is a step forward. It is an ongoing dialogue, where the
universal, metaphysical language of music links with the continuous
dialogue that we have with young people, and that young people have
with each other.
We don’t see ourselves as a political project, but rather as a forum where young people from Israel and all the Arab countries can express themselves freely and openly whilst at the same time hearing the narrative of the other. It is not necessarily a question of accepting the narrative of the other, let alone agreeing with it, but rather the indispensable need to accept its legitimacy. We believe in only two absolutely necessary political ideas:
- There is no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
- The destinies of the Israeli and Palestinian people are inextricably linked and the land that some call Greater Israel and others Palestine is a land for two people."
I have not (yet) seen Daniel Barenboim conduct, however I did have the good fortune to hear Edward Said interviewed at the Brighton Festival a few months prior to his death. The same feeling of hope in the power of individuals making real connections that can bring lasting change arose in me this morning as when I listened to Edward Said in the spring of 2003. The photo from the orchestra's website says it all...
Comments