Middle East Tour 2004

The Choir of London staged its first international project in December 2004: a series of workshops, masterclasses staged in the Palestinian Territories and Israel. To see photographs of the tour, please click here.

PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES

It was natural that the main focus of the Choir of London’s first visit to the Middle East should be the Palestinian Territories, for it was here that it was felt a contribution could most usefully be made. The catastrophic effects of military occupation – severe restrictions on access, a crushed economy, and a climate of violence and fear – have taken a heavy toll on ordinary Palestinians.

Music, inevitably, has been one of the unsung casualties. Palestinian musicians face a barrage of basic obstacles: the difficulty of travelling to lessons, of managing to collect performers together for rehearsals, of finding funds for instruments, of summoning the courage to continue when the prospects for the future often seem impossibly bleak.

Despite these hurdles, a number of organisations are working hard to ensure that music continues to flourish against the odds in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Chief amongst these is the Palestinian National Conservatory of Music, which has recently been renamed after one of its main supporters, the late Edward Said. The Conservatory runs courses and offers individual tuition to young musicians throughout the Palestinian territories, and also manages to stage regular concert series of very high quality.

International assistance is vital to the Conservatory’s work, since funds and teachers are limited. The Choir of London’s project incorporated a major collaboration with the Conservatory and its students in the shape of a Palestine Bach Festival – an event staged over three days in Jerusalem, Ramallah and Bethlehem, and supported by the United Nations Development Programme, the French Cultural Centre, and the Goethe Institute.

The Festival included a series of workshops and masterclasses designed to benefit Palestinian student musicians of all ages and backgrounds. It also provided a framework within which Palestinian musicians could take to the stage alongside British musicians for major joint performances in Ramallah and Bethlehem of sections of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.

Another Palestinian partner in the Palestine Bach Festival was the Jerusalem Chorus. Founded in 1955 in Jerusalem, this Palestinian choir has established a distinguished reputation throughout the West Bank, singing a wide spectrum of repertoire in Arabic and a variety of European languages. In recent years the 35-strong choir has been forced to relocate to Ramallah because of the difficulties many of its members face in travelling to Jerusalem: the Choir of London’s visit provided its members with their first opportunity in over fifteen years to engage professionally with a visiting group of international artists.

The interaction between visiting and local musicians during the Festival was quite unforgettable. A number of highlights stand out: the Choir of London’s first introduction to Arabic folksongs during a workshop in Ramallah; a wonderful masterclass – led by Tim Brown and a trio of visiting string players – for a group of young Palestinian instrumentalists; the warm reaction which greeted the Jerusalem Chorus as they finally arrived on stage in Bethlehem after a courageous three-hour journey through several military checkpoints.

The Bach Festival concerts themselves were musically rewarding, particularly given the very limited rehearsal time available. And the response from local audiences was breathtaking: each of the venues was sold out, with over 700 in attendance in Ramallah and more than 400 watching in Bethlehem.

ISRAEL

Any regular visitor to Jerusalem knows that the seemingly monolithic struggle between two peoples which appears on our television screens need not be the pattern for future relations between Israelis and Palestinians. The city is characterised by an extraordinary heterogeneity: a rich diversity of relations and often startling overlaps between a seemingly endless list of religious and ethnic groups. It is a particularly appalling tragedy of recent years that this dialogue has been badly undermined, and that relations between most Israelis and Palestinians are currently both minimal and hostile. It’s all a far cry from the days in the mid-nineties when students from Tel Aviv would travel to Ramallah to immerse themselves to the city’s then-famous jazz scene.

There remain, however, important glimmers of hope in the shape of collaborations between individual Palestinians and Israelis. One particularly significant area of potential is that of joint projects involving Israeli Jews and Palestinians living within Israel. The Choir of London’s hope in incorporating an Israeli dimension into its first project was that it could lend support to one such collaboration: a partnership between two children’s choirs, one composed of Jewish Israelis, the other of girls of Palestinian extraction from the lower Galilee.

The Efroni Choir was founded in 1981 at the Ben Gurion High School in Emek Hefer. Since then, the Choir has gone from strength to strength, and now boasts both a wide and versatile repertoire reflecting the spectrum of musical traditions of the many ethnic groups in Israel. One of the most striking characteristics of the Efroni Choir has been its commitment to build bridges to other local performers – and particularly to the Palestinian community both within Israel and in the Palestinian Territories. This commitment has manifested itself in a previous joint project with Bethlehem-based Palestinian singers; a collaboration with a choir from Nazareth; and most recently in its joint work with the Sawa Choir, an ensemble of girls drawn from the Arab-Israeli town of Shefar’am. The Sawa Choir regularly sings in both Hebrew and in Arabic, and is similarly dedicated to musical projects which bridge the divide between Jewish and Palestinian communities living in the region.

The Choir of London’s time spent working with these two choirs – in a church at Abu Ghosh, just to the north-west of Jerusalem – was enormously rewarding and intensely moving. Hearing the girls sing together with equal conviction and enjoyment in both Arabic and Hebrew was genuinely inspiring, as was the evident warmth of the relationship between the two sets of singers. The collaboration between the choirs seemed to us amply to vindicate the approach of their conductors, which they describe as ‘not waiting for the politicians’.

RESULTS AND FUTURE PROSPECTS

A complaint often legitimately leveled at collaborative events involving unusual partnerships between local and visiting musicians is that they are artificially contrived events: transient affairs whose impact does not extend beyond the very short term.

Conscious of this danger, the Choir of London’s approach was to make a sustained and intensive investment, over the course of several months before the Israel/Palestine project, in building meaningful relations with a limited number of carefully-selected partner organisations. Plans for collaborative workshops and concerts were therefore developed in very close co-operation with local partners, and were designed to respond to specific local needs.

The result of these sustained partnerships - particularly those involving the Jerusalem Chorus, the young musicians of the Palestinian National Conservatory of Music, and the Sawa and Efroni Choirs – was a series of hugely memorable and rewarding events. Connections were forged between individual British and local performers that now look certain to continue and grow.

Members of the Jerusalem Chorus have been enthused and inspired by their participation in the Palestine Bach Festival, and are already planning their own follow-up event: a series of collaborative concerts involving Palestinian choirs from all over the West Bank. The Jerusalem Chorus also hope to travel to the UK in 2006, where they will build on the partnership with the Choir of London with joint performances in Cambridge and London.

The Efroni and Sawa Choirs are also planning a second co-operative project with the Choir of London, to be held in London in 2006. It is an exciting prospect for the Choir of London to be supporting the work of these two choirs, whose members are engaged against the odds in a genuine process of rapprochement; working consistently and with quiet determination to build a shared future.