Ligeti in Palestine
25 February 2011
When I started to talk to the people at the Edward Said conservatoire, I knew what everybody knew, or thought they knew, about the Palestinian Israeli conflict. Having been to Israel a few years back, I was really curious to go to the Palestinian side. There was a determined group of young musicians who wanted to build (or rebuild) a National Orchestra of Palestine, made up of musicians of the Palestinian diaspora and some local talents.
The more I travel the more I think that no idea, however big or important, can encompass the depth of human experience. There is no way that the news from the Middle East can really shed any light on the real conditions of people living there. Sitting in front of your television and watching the news is like sitting in front of an aquarium and thinking you are looking at the sea.
Talking to the people in the West Bank, I didn’t think it was appropriate to make a political statement. They have enough big talk – if one place really shows the failure of politics, it is Palestine. But it quickly became very clear that everything in that part of the world is political. Simply the fact of going there, for example. On the one side none of my Israeli friends came to Bethlehem because many didn’t feel safe there – on the other side some of the Palestinian musicians couldn’t get a visa to visit their own homeland. A young Jordanian musician couldn’t come, because her father was so scared there would be repercussions back home that he took her passport and flew to Oman in order for her not to join the orchestra.
So when we finally started rehearsing, with people flying in from all over the world, some having spent entire days at checkpoints, there was a sense of something more than just music in the air. The programme was fit for the occasion: the Palestinian National Anthem, Ligeti’s Romanian Concerto, a Palestinian piece for oboe and strings, and Beethoven’s fourth symphony.
I thought exclusion is part of every day life, so the programme should have an inclusive character. Similar to Israeli sensibilities to Wagner and Wochenschau-type music, there is a Palestinian sensibility to being culturally and socially occupied. But Ligeti, being born in a place that became part of a different country, having lived through repression, fascism and communism, being Jewish and having lost his father in Auschwitz, but living a large part of his adult life in Germany within a climate of rigid aesthetics, had a history that both sides could identify with. On top of that, a lifelong hatred of grand ideologies and dogmas meant that the man didn’t look left or right to write music but used whatever he found.
But of course, there were discussions. Some people thought it was inappropriate for a Palestinian orchestra to play a Jewish work in its first concert. But bit by bit the music won people over – that’s exactly what I’d hoped for. There was a moment when one just forgot if a piece was Jewish, or Arab, or Palestinian, or German. And that moment was worth waiting and rehearsing for.
At the concerts you could feel the pride and the passion of the people who identified with the project. Many people had probably never heard an orchestra before, or at least not for a long time and in their own land. And above all one could feel the pride on what had been achieved. It was a great moment when the ideologies, the big talkers and the people who say they know best, shut up for a while and finally Beethoven had his word. And nobody was shut out. It didn’t really break down the wall or give anybody better living conditions, but at least for two hours, people listened, and the orchestra was their voice.
Ligeti would have liked the way the PNO played the Romanian Concerto: edgy, fierce and with more than a bit of joyous rebelliousness (one violin player played the whole concert with strings tuned the traditional Arabic way – g-d, g-d…). It was completely in the spirit of the master who must be sitting up there, somewhere, in his neurotic bit of paradise, approving of Ligeti in Palestine.