Music and the Middle East: Ashkar performs
Helena Anrather
Issue date: 11/12/07 Section: Arts & Culture
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The panel discussion featured the world premiere of the film "Listening to the World: Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra at Brown," a documentary produced by the Cogut Center on the conductor Daniel Barenboim's visit to Brown last December with members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. With the late Palestinian writer and critic Edward Said, Barenboim created the orchestra to bring Arab and Israeli musicians together to play classical music. Roughly half of the orchestra is Arab and half is Jewish.
In the film, Barenboim calls the orchestra "a forum for the different people of the Middle East to have a dialogue with each other - a project for people to think and reflect," using the common language of music. "Music teaches you so much about how to live in society, about how to think about it," Barenboim said later in the film. "You can learn so much if you really learn to think in music."
In the discussion following the film, Ashkar spoke about music's ability to bring people to a common understanding. "It's the intensity of music-making and rehearsing heat that melts everybody together," he said. He spoke of the way music pushes people to work in harmony, towards a common goal, saying "there is something about concerto-playing that is dangerous if you approach it with the consciousness of the ego - that 'I have something to say.' "
The conversation concentrated mainly on music, refraining from political discussion other than some lighthearted jokes. In searching for the word 'nucleus' Ashkar said, "I don't mean nuclear. That's in Iran. Was that a politically incorrect joke?"
Even though it is called the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the orchestra plays only Western classical music. Though half of the orchestra speaks Arabic, its main working language is English, along with Hebrew and Spanish, the other languages Barenboim speaks in addition to German.