World-famous Palestinian-Israeli pianist Saleem Abboud Ashkar joined Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron and Michael Steinberg, director of the Cogut Center for the humanities and professor of history and music, in a public conversation on Friday about the ability of music to communicate across cultural or political boundaries. His visit to Brown also featured a solo recital in Sayles Hall on Saturday night, followed by a master class on Sunday.
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.
Despite the orchestra's focus on dialogue between the Arab and Western worlds, Ashkar said that classical Arabic music plays no part in the orchestra's project, and that, in his own musical career, Arab music has no conscious influence. "They are two separate worlds, I must admit," he told The Herald.
Ashkar was born in Nazareth, Israel, in 1976. The piano first entered his life when his father traded a rusty pickup truck for a piano with a neighbor who wanted to leave Israel. Ashkar began to play after a distant relative from Lebanon came to stay with the family during the 1982 war in Lebanon and would entertain Ashkar by playing the piano.
Ashkar commented on the remarkable connections between events in Palestinian-Israeli history and milestones in his history with the piano. "Almost every step of my development has something to do with (the Israeli-Palestinian conflict)," he said.
Jokingly noting the role of coincidence in his life, he added that if his father hadn't exchanged the truck for a piano, "I would be a truck driver - but with passion. Totally committed."
Though he is Palestinian, Ashkar's young career as a pianist embedded him in Israeli society, each musical milestone or competition bringing him increasingly within an Israeli infrastructure. He left Israel to continue his study of music at the Royal Academy of Music in London and at the Hochschule fur Musik in Hannover, Germany, but collaborated with Barenboim and Said in the West-Eastern Divan. He is also involved in the music school his brother started in Nazareth, still committed to using music to bridge the Palestinian and Israeli communities.
"I feel very lucky to be in touch with something that matters so much," he said of the Divan and of his brother's school.
Roommates Reem Yusuf '09 and Roxanne Horesh '08 attended the panel discussion together. Yusuf is a Palestinian from Ramallah and Horesh is a British-Israeli from Tel Aviv, and the two became friends at Brown. Yusuf was pleased that Ashkar was able to come to Brown, saying "usually Israeli-Palestinian stuff that takes place at Brown is merely political and creates a misrepresentation of Palestinian culture that they have no sense of education or art."
Horesh added that the talk underlined that "two people (from different cultures) can be best friends and really rely on each other, or that two countries can rely on each other."
Ashkar's stay at Brown took place in conjunction with Palestinian Solidarity Week, although it was not considered part of the week's program. His recital on Saturday night drew a considerable crowd to Sayles Hall, where he played a selection of Schoenberg, Haydn, Mozart and Brahms. This is Ashkar's second visit to Brown - his first was with the West-Eastern Divan last December.
