A Piano Master Class with Saleem Abboud Ashkar
To Listen: Get Adobe Flash Player, or download an mp3 at the bottom of the post.
The aura around the Palestinian pianist Saleem Abboud Ashkar — performing, teaching and talking at Brown this weekend — suggests a major musical career coming into bloom, and at the same time a world-historical conversation being extended to a new generation.
Saleem Abboud Ashkar: The Master in Class
Young Abboud Ashkar, just 31, could be the late Edward Said‘s successor in the exquisitely tantalizing dialog with the Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim. In counterpoint and close harmony, they are teasing out the implications of music for a world at war.
The must-see film version of the story is Paul Smaczny’s documentary on the Ramallah Concert of 2005.
The concert and the movie marked the triumph of Barenboim’s experimental leap with Said. What we saw and heard was a gorgeous collective of young Arab and Israeli all-stars — sharing music stands, probing identities, arguing politics and delivering masterpieces of the European repertoire in Spain, in Switzerland, on the West Bank.
The theory behind the brilliant execution could be fuzzy and subjective. Barenboim had major music directorships in Berlin and Chicago when he started this West-Eastern Divan Orchestra; it wasn’t as if he needed another job or another ensemble. Rather, he says, what the Middle East and the world needed was an exemplary working design of cultural and human interdependence. He doesn’t profess to lead an orchestra for peace. He says: “we are an orchestra against ignorance.”
Said, under a death sentence from leukemia when I last interviewed him, didn’t want to measure political effects. He saw the orchestra as a new frame for probing human differences and the epic struggles of his lifetime. The core problem, living with The Other, “has preoccupied me most of my life, intellectually and politically,” he reflected in our conversation:
I think it’s the main problem. I think fear and ignorance are the two main factors here–that somehow contact with the other will somehow threaten your identity; and second, I think we all have a mythological view of identity as a single thing that is basically intact and has to be protected. I think that’s simply nonsense. History teaches us that all of us are mixed, that every individual is made up of several maybe competing strands, and that is to be cherished. Rather than laundering out the strands that are competitive or contradictory, I think one ought to encourage them… well, in the way, in music, there’s this thing called counterpoint, where you manage the voices in a fugue and it makes it more interesting that there are more voices working together than less. And I think the same thing applies in society. And I think we’re moving gradually in that direction.
Edward Said, A Last Conversation… with Christopher Lydon
This is the conversation and the direction that Abboud Ashkar embodies on his second visit to Brown University. The first was with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra last December. Saturday evening he performed a giant one-man program of Haydn, Mozart, Brahms, Medtner and Schoenberg.
Saleem Abboud Ashkar and Chris Lydon at Brown’s Grant Recital Hall
This afternoon he gave an interactive, two-piano master-class with five students playing Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schubert and Scriabin. And then he stretched out in a gabby ramble with me, touching on Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Proust, a great deal of Brahms, and the moral example of Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said in “engaging with life.”
He is a child of Nazareth, an Arab town in Israel, and of middle-class comfort — his father an engineer, his mother a school-teacher. His life resounds with Edward Said’s description of the Middle East as “a place of possibility — not because there are these separations,” as Said once said to me, “but because there are these mixtures, you know… the incredible variety of lives there, and cultures that it’s possible to excavate.”
I see that day to day. Israel is full of Arab music… Our music schools in Nazareth are full of Israeli teachers. My life is exactly that story, that possibility of integration and enrichment.
Saleem Abboud Ashkar, in conversation at Brown University. November 11, 2007
His heart is Palestinian, and it does not soar with hope at the prospect of the Annapolis conference called by the US Secretary of State, the accomplished pianist Condoleeza Rice:
I have no way out but to say: if her Brahms sounds like anything I’ve heard from her till now, I don’t want to hear it.
As an artist, I would like my art to be outside politics, but I am Palestinian and you can’t separate the two. The region I come from is very political. It’s impossible.
There is a clear moral solution, which is to give the Palestinian people the human right to live. The rest is complicated, but it’s soluble.
Saleem Abboud Ashkar, in conversation at Brown University. November 11, 2007
After an encore performance of a Brahms’ late, magnificent cluster of short piano pieces, Opus 116, I asked Abboud Ashkar if there was enough Brahms in the world to tame the savagery in the Middle East, in all of us. He thought probably not:
I think… without certain savage instincts in us, there would be no Brahms. [Music] doesn’t tame the animal; it includes the animal. For me, music is what includes everything else, including the ugliness in human nature…
But once we stop and give in, there is no meaning anymore. In every aspect of life we have to aim for the impossible. Sometimes aiming for the impossible is easier than aiming for the merely difficult. You almost know that it will not happen, and yet you try to make it happen. There’s something very inspiring about that. When you aim realistically for the difficult, it gets more difficult.
Saleem Abboud Ashkar, in conversation at Brown University. November 11, 2007
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November 13th, 2007 at 2:25 pm
The last question and answer were superb. I too have reflected much upon this matter. That Proust passage is amazing. Thanks Chris … your Brahms swings, bops, and rolls … you keep drawing the Zorba out.
November 13th, 2007 at 2:37 pm
Dear OCP: You get it, brother. I will post that Proust graf in the next few days. It comes up in every conversation lately… with Oliver Sachs, for example, and with Jonah Lehrer, of “Proust was a Neuroscientist.” I am swinging with John Coltrane’s “Bessie’s Blues” at this moment. Music is the whole story.
November 13th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
Great stuff. OCP (and Chris before him) right to highlight that electric, musico-metaphysical passage from Proust. Who/what communicates by song instead of words? Birds, of course. This from J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year:
What Cartesian nonsense to think of birdsong as pre-programmed cries uttered by birds to advertise their presence to the opposite sex, and so forth! Each bird-cry is a full-hearted release of the self into the air, accompanied by such joy as we can barely comprehend. I! says each cry: I! What a miracle!
November 13th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
Thanks for the response Chris and I look forward to the Proust graf. And thanks for the Coetzee hurley. This kind of stuff truly expands the horizons.
And a belated thanks to Norman Mailer for inspiring Chris to get out the Proust. Perhaps, I’ll give Proust another shot. I’m guessing I need to wait a couple years, to feel a little more august, brittle, and mentally and physically bereft! Judging how I generally feel each and every morning, this day creeps closer and closer with predatory acumen.
I’ll leave off with this link to Christopher Alexander because I like the zen of his Brahms. From the timeless way of building: There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life and spirit in a man, a town a building, or a wilderness. This quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named.
November 14th, 2007 at 7:51 am
Saleem also sounded so much like an Israeli, like my nephew-in-law actually. Saleem seems to say the two cultures really are blended and drawn to each other and there needs to be a political reality that reflects that. Right! That’s what makes the wall so painful. Meron Benvenisti (thought to be radical) has been saying this for years. But in his generation, maybe also Said’s, I felt bitterness that I don’t feel from Saleem. Saleem is too much a product of those Israeli’s and Arab Palestinians, those too few of both cultures who have been reaching out to each other all along. Saleem is also so right when he says that it only takes one person to wreck fragile attempts at peaceful settlement. I agree that Oslo taught that there can be no gradual steps and that Oslo was not for naught. Unfortunately others have learned different and negative lessons from Oslo. But it was said and celebrated at the time that the achievements of Oslo meant no going back to what was. Something good remains; as Saleem says, the hope remains.
They are both the same generation, my nephew ( incidentally related to Artur Rubinstein)
and Saleem, the same age, and they have the same disappointments but still they hope.
Hurley-thank you for your post about birdsong.
Thank you Chris.
November 14th, 2007 at 7:52 am
(This was to be the first part of that post- sorry)
What beautiful interview and I agree on the track of something wonderful that is hard to find words for. Music is so basic… it may be that mechanisms in our brains have an evolved ability for music in order to survive. My husband who has spent his career in music reads about and is fascinated by this aspect. It’s one language of emotion (so is dance) the opposite of, or other than, logic. We get so caught up in logic.
It’s an absolutely brilliant endeavor the West-Eastern Divan orchestra bringing together two sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to play music. They live in their higher selves, embody a way and hope. For a 30 year old Saleems sounds lightyears further in emotional maturity.
November 15th, 2007 at 8:42 pm
I hope we see a lot more shows like this one. I’m so glad Chris highlights Edward Said’s contributions to the musical discourse, his work in that area is highly underrated. I particularly enjoyed his analysis of Aida in “Culture and Imperialism”, where he peeled back the layers of the work and its context to show exactly how entrenched empire can be.
As for Saleem, I didn’t know who he was before this show, and now I’m really glad I do! This is what ROS does best for me, it takes familiar topics and introduces new and refreshing voices, keep up the good work Chris! I can’t wait to check out the movie.
Saleem joins in a long line of musicians who have sought to bridge the gap between cultures. His connection to Zubin Mehta is notable, since he along with Ravi Shankar, Alain Daneilou, and Yehudi Menuhin (among many others) pioneered the “East-West” collaborations years ago. The musical discourse, which takes place in a parallel universe to the linguistic one, has waned in recent years, and I’m glad that people like Saleem are keeping it alive.
Is there enough Brahms in the world to tame the savagery in the Middle East? I think there is, but is it Brahms that the Israelis and Palestinians will rally around? I don’t think it takes much Brahms. To me it is a vessel with infinite capacity, though people must be willing to fill it. Sometimes the catalyst for change comes from unlikely sources – take Pete Seeger for example. He was no Brahms, but when he strummed a few chords on a guitar or picked a little banjo and got people singing, they REALLY got together!