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<\/a>Mais Hreish and Saleem Ashkar<\/p><\/div>\n
We imagine Israel as the quintessential polarized society, for decades before Trump showed the US how divided we are ourselves. \u00a0I was keen to hear from Polyphony, an Israeli group whose mission is to bridge the divides through music. \u00a0Walking to the house concert in Providence, I mused if such a thing is still possible. I wondered if the conversion of “opposition” into “enemy” and now “devil incarnate,” has exhausted our chances for coexistence. \u00a0Has humanity, though our horrid behavior, outstayed our welcome?<\/p>\n
The stage was a rotunda in host Lynn Holstein’s elegant 19th century house. \u00a0Mais Hriesh, a delicate beauty with tendrils of dark hair, had come to Providence via Bard College, where she now studies, via hometown of Nazareth. \u00a0She began playing her thin flute, and the music floated. \u00a0 She made Claude Debussy’s composition “Syrinx” into pure conversation: threads of thoughts, feeling, indelible mode of intimate expression.<\/p>\n
Saleem Ashkar came to the piano and lifted his metaphoric tuxedo tails. An international star of the concert halls, also born in Nazareth, Saleem immersed himself in a different tone of musical conversation. He took us through darkness and back with Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata. It’s an extraordinarily demanding piece with wrenching passages that had him pounding and wailing and hovering on the keyboard.<\/p>\n
The music implicitly answered all questions: “the indomitable human spirit” that Saleem mentioned in conversation was vibrating in all of us. \u00a0With his suave but relaxed charm, he brought up the image of oppression and freedom. \u00a0Chess player Bobby Fischer once said that if he were in prison cell, he only needed a chess board to be master of his world. \u00a0The Arab-Jewish Polyphony venture, which involves 10,000 Israeli students, offers the invaluable: “When you master a thing, you create your reality,” Saleem said. \u00a0“We overcome outer reality with an inner reality that is creative and constructive, and constructs a new reality. \u00a0It begins with the inside.”<\/p>\n
Polyphony is based in Nazareth, the largest Arab city in Israel, and grew out of East-West Divan conducted by Daniel Barenboim. Saleem’s younger brother, Nabeel Abboud-Ashkar, is the co-founding dynamo who helps organize the pyramidal structure of music education, conservatories, and youth and professional Jewish-Arab orchestra. \u00a0Polyphony, the beauty of the many-voiced conversation, is not only beautiful, it’s survival.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We imagine Israel as the quintessential polarized society, for decades before Trump showed the US how divided we are ourselves. \u00a0I was keen to hear from Polyphony, an Israeli group whose mission is to bridge the divides through music. … Continue reading