Sunday, July 31, 2016
Palestine Youth Orchestra’s triumphant UK debut
By Sarah Irving
True to form, the rain is
hammering down on Glasgow. In the foyer of the Royal Concert Hall young men in
sharp black, wearing scarves bearing the unmistakable checkered print of the
Palestinian kuffiyeh, are prowling around moodily. One detects pre-performance
nerves.
This is the second night of
the Palestine Youth Orchestra’s six-night debut tour of Britain. On the first
night of their tour, the orchestra filled the concert hall in Perth; their show
in Glasgow’s monumental concert hall sold out. The remaining tour stops include
Leeds, Birmingham, Cardiff and finally London.
If there were indeed pre-show
nerves, they weren’t necessary: the Palestine Youth Orchestra received a full
standing ovation. Not even greats like the St. Petersburg Philharmonic get that
when performing in Scotland.
The Palestine Youth Orchestra
know their audience. Their diverse program showcased their skills, but also
allowed for the fact that, as a newcomer to the international scene, ticket
sales will for the moment rely as much on solidarity as on attendees with a
passion for classical music. With a range of different styles and feels, the
ensemble’s selections were clearly – and successfully – intended to appeal to
all tastes.
First up was the Leonore
Overture No.3 from Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio. As Layth Sidiq, the
orchestra’s skilled concertmaster, pointed out in one of the many short
introductions and commentaries made by different members during the evening,
the opera’s plot resonates strongly with the group of young Palestinians, as it
tells the story of a young woman disguising herself to free her husband from
political prison.
Following this, the orchestra
performed with vocal soloist Nai Barghouti three 20th-century Arabic songs: two
written by the Lebanese Rahbani brothers for the great singer Fayrouz, and a
third by Zakariyya Ahmad, with lyrics from a work by Egyptian poet Bayram
al-Tunisi, originally composed for the Egyptian diva Umm Kulthum.
Up-and-coming star Barghouti –
born in Akka, a graduate of the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, and
a composer and flautist as well as singer – has a stunning voice. With deep,
rich tones beyond her years, she doesn’t try to emulate Fayrouz or Umm Kulthum,
but makes these songs her own with a more naturalistic style and open, frank
delivery.
The first half of the
performance closed with “Metal,” a short piece by contemporary composer Graham
Fitkin, a celebratory work inspired by modern British classical music. This
bold, pacey, upbeat work is the result of an open competition held by the
Palestine Youth Orchestra in 2015.
Chosen from more than 30
entries, Fitkin’s work highlights the orchestra’s tightness and sense of
timing; with a lively, almost pop-like core, the pronounced percussion needs to
be spot-on to sound right, rather than random. Fortunately, it was.
The second half of the program
consisted of an international touring orchestra favorite, Mussorgsky’s Picture
at an Exhibition. A series of vignettes responding to paintings by the
composer’s friend Victor Hartmann, interspersed with a Promenade theme which
represents the composer walking between the images, it is a varied piece which
showcases the talents – or, in unlucky cases, failings – of different soloists
and sections of the orchestra.
The Palestine Youth Orchestra
tackles Mussorgsky’s work beautifully, alternating between the limpid, moving
Promenade and the various “pictures,” ranging from the lively, even funny
“Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks in their Shells” to the menacing “Catacombs.”
When listening to this skilled
orchestra, it’s easy to forget that the musicians’ ages range from 26 to just
14, and that their very presence in one concert hall, on one night, involves
overcoming huge political and logistical challenges.
Although the Palestine Youth
Orchestra has sprung from the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, which
has branches in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, the orchestra’s members
are spread across historic Palestine, including within the State of Israel.
Indeed, two musicians were
unable to join this tour, despite being scheduled to perform: from Gaza, they
were denied exit by Israel.
Their far-flung origins, and
the reality of Israel’s severe control over Palestinian movement, means that
the players only get to rehearse as a full orchestra when on tour. The program
for this tour was honed in Britain, workshopped with tutors at the Royal
Conservatoire of Scotland, and finalized alongside guest musicians from the UK.
The backgrounds of many of the
orchestra’s members show the additional political obstacles it faces. Violist
Omar Saad, for instance, is a young Druze citizen of Israel whose musical
talents have often been overshadowed by the many
jail terms he has been sentenced to since the age of 17 for refusing to
serve in the Israeli military.
Omar’s brother Mostafa, who
plays violin with the Palestine Youth Orchestra, also faces jail time for
refusing to be conscripted.
Some members of the orchestra
hail from refugee camps in the West Bank and the wider Middle East.
Others are citizens of Israel
who grew up detached from fellow Palestinian musicians; flautist Nardin Ballan,
for instance, was raised in Nazareth and studied and performed in Tel Aviv with
Israeli musicians.
According to a spokesperson
with PalMusic, the Palestine Youth Orchestra’s representative organization in
Britain, Ballan’s first-ever visits to the West Bank were with the orchestra,
and have been “life-changing” for her.
Ultimately, though, the
Palestine Youth Orchestra was formed to play music, and in Glasgow, they
overcame all their challenges to do so wonderfully well. To see this orchestra
perform is not an act of solidarity, it is a musical treat.
Sarah Irving is author of a biography of
Leila Khaled and of the Bradt Guide
to Palestine and co-editor of A Bird is not a
Stone.
Long Live the Queen of Chaos
by Rob Urie
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/07/29/long-live-the-queen-of-chaos/
For those to whom this hasn’t
yet occurred, if Hillary Clinton is elected President she will be President.
The Democratic Party platform, Bernie Sanders’ program proposals and Mrs.
Clinton’s theorized move Left will be but distant memories. If Mrs. Clinton
brings with her a Democratic Congress (or not) she will use it to pass the TPP
and TTIP ‘trade’ agreements, to launch ‘liberal’ wars across the Middle East
and rattle sabers against Russia, she will re-launch the ‘Grand Bargain’ to cut
Social Security and Medicare under the pretext of a fiscal crisis and should
Wall Street falter, she will ‘hold her nose’ and once again bail out her
benefactors. This is the program her supporters are voting for.
By analogy, when Barack Obama
entered office with a Democratic Congress in 2009 he had the best opportunity
since the early 1930s to enact a new New Deal in favor of social justice and
against the forces of neoliberal militarism. After bailing out Wall Street and
institutionalizing the worst ‘unitary President’ excesses of the George W. Bush
administration Mr. Obama ran and won again in 2012 on the well-instantiated
delusion that once freed from having to run for office again he would be the
‘progressive’ his supporters always thought him to be. This despite his
self-description as a ‘moderate Republican’ and his actual record at the center
of the Democrats’ three decade turn to the political hard-right.
The Democratic Party line that
a vote for Green Party candidate Jill Stein or a write-in vote for Bernie
Sanders is a vote for Donald Trump overlooks that establishment Democrats
rigged the primary process in favor of Mrs. Clinton and that it is their
policies that are responsible for widespread political disaffection. The odds
have it that if a vote were taken to exile both Party establishments to poorly
provisioned outposts on Mars they would be on the way there now. What is so
frighteningly irresponsible about Mrs. Clinton’s insertion / assertion as the
Democratic Party candidate is the same problem posed by Barack Obama’s posture
as a ‘progressive’ President— it leaves the radical right as the only
alternative for disaffected voters.
Graph: prime-age employment—
jobs for those who must work to live, have been declining since 2000. Each
subsequent economic ‘recovery’ has proceeded from a lower, and more desperate,
base. Democrats had available to them the New Deal economic template to work
from. But they chose restoration of the unstable, destabilizing neoliberal
project instead. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.
The illusion of political
choice only works as long as the status quo functions in some basic sense. The
recurring financial bubbles from Savings and Loan deregulation (1980s),
privatization and equitization of government-funded research in the tech boom –
bust (late 1990s) and the housing boom – bust demonstrated the fleeting nature
of Wall Street fueled ‘prosperity.’ With the Middle Class on the ropes, the
working class all but disappeared and the poor desperately clinging to the few
crumbs that fall to them, the U.S. is but one recession away from being
economically (and politically) untenable. The only programs that Democrats
have— ‘free-trade,’ private debt fueled consumption, deregulation,
privatization and Wall Street bailouts, are proven losers for all but a few in
2016.
One of the reasons the
American political leadership needs foreign ‘enemies’ is to divert attention
away from the damage that nominal Americans do— Wall Street, corporate
executives, the NSA and carceral state, trade deals that act as firewalls
against social and environmental resolution and local government actors for
corporate power (ALEC-American Legislative Exchange Council). Another is the
‘business’ of nominal governance, the nexus of state and corporate interests
that promotes geopolitical tensions, fear and paranoia as business ventures
from which profits are earned through mass destruction (Vietnam, Iraq). As the
most despised candidate for U.S. President in recent history, Hillary Clinton
needs foreign enemies.
Flip the Democratic Party
script for a moment to consider that Vladimir Putin might have a point. Hillary
Clinton is the most dangerous person on the planet because she is a neoliberal
militarist who is absolutely immune from the consequences of the crises she
creates. Armed with nuclear weapons freshly ‘upgraded’ by Barack Obama, Mrs.
Clinton and the neocon cabal she hopes to lead have destroyed Iraq,
Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, have surrounded Russia with NATO troops and
weapons, staged a neo-fascist coup in Ukraine, supported a right-wing coup in
Honduras and have indicated their intentions to proceed apace turning entire
regions of the planet into chaotic rubble with body-counts already in the
millions.
This isn’t speculation about
some future state of affairs. Hillary Clinton sold U.S. sanctions against Iraq
in which one-half million of Iraq’s most vulnerable citizens were starved and
denied life-saving medicines to ‘teach Saddam Hussein a lesson.’ And the
Clinton-Bush war against Iraq cost one million more innocent lives and created
chaos across the Middle East. ISIS is a direct result of Clinton-Bush policies.
The liberal pretense that the U.S. War of Aggression against Iraq was ‘Bush’s
war’ requires overlooking the eight years of liberal bombing and sanctions that
preceded it and that Bill Clinton gave Mr. Bush political cover for the war as
his wife voted for it. The U.S. war against Iraq— catastrophe that it was / is,
was as bi-partisan as they come.
The system that Mrs. Clinton
and Donald Trump— past friends who attend each other’s public functions and
private affairs and whose children thrive together in the closed lootocracy of
officialdom, are vying against one another to ‘lead’ a spoils system where
‘leadership’ means the ability to arrange profitable outcomes for private interests
through ‘public’ means. Neoliberal militarism is private profits created
through public death, destruction and misery. The profits explain why Hillary
Clinton is never held to account for deadly sanctions, gratuitous wars that
turn into geopolitical catastrophes, social policies that turned the poorest
40% of the country into a beggar class and racist strategies like mass
incarceration to divide the working class. Given her actual record, Black
support for Mrs. Clinton is akin to choosing between AIDS and cancer.
Americans exhibit near-heroic
aversion to history and the consequences of American policies that now
constitute the core of the Democratic Party’s domestic agenda. The IMF has been
pushing these policies on ‘client’ (victim) states for the last half-century.
The capitalist lootocracy that the Democrats (and Republicans) serve has long
installed puppet governments to reign with impunity as long as they deliver
local wealth to back ‘up’ to it. The Clintons are corrupt puppets who serve
this system of un-enlightened self-interest as domestic agents of international
capital. The sooner the youth of America and the residual Left realize that
there is no hope for a better, or even livable, future through establishment
politics the sooner we can get to the task at hand: a (real) political
revolution.
The title of this piece is
taken from Diana Johnstone’s book Queen of Chaos.
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