Polyphony: An Interview with Nabeel Abboud Ashkar

“By enabling children to become artists, to make wonderful music, they become creative and constructive members of society, their community, Israeli society, and very quickly they become part of the international community.”

Nabeel Abboud Ashkar, 2011.

Polyphony: An Interview with Nabeel Abboud Ashkar

Kate Meng Brassel

In our Fall 2011 issue, NY Arts Magazine will feature Voices from artists of Middle Eastern origin. The status of the arts in the Middle East fluctuates between resistance and identity in individual expression. At the same time, there is a growing movement to ignite the arts at the grass roots level. To date, many of these projects have come from the world of performing arts. The world of visual arts should take note: this is a challenge and an inspiration.

We recently sat down with Nabeel Abboud Ashkar, a violinist in Israel’s Divan Orchestra, a teacher, a Palestinian, and, now, director of a new program, Polyphony. In 2006, Abboud Ashkar co-founded a conservatory in the Arab city of Nazareth in Israel with support from the pianist Daniel Barenboim and the Edward Said Foundation. Abboud Ashkar and ten of his students traveled around the United States giving performances last month, inspiring audiences with the quality and passion of their performances, and showing what it is that Polyphony can do.

NYArts: What was your initial vision?

Nabeel Abboud Ashkar: The whole thing started in 2006. After finishing my Master’s degree in Germany, I moved home to Nazareth to found the Barenboim-Said Conservatory. The vision was to provide for the first time in the history of our city—and probably in the history of our region—the highest professional musical training for young Arab kids in Israel, where 20% of the population is the Arab minority. In spite of our numbers, about 1.5 million citizens, there hadn’t been opportunities to start proper music schools in our cities and villages. We wanted to get the most talented students around Nazareth and provide them with the best teachers possible. We would have to bring teachers from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the cities in Israel with cultural lives. This meant that the musicians and teachers would have to drive two hours to come to Nazareth to teach for five hours, and then drive home in the middle of the night. I called some musicians in Tel Aviv and told them about it. Amazingly enough, it took them 2 seconds to say “yes.” So we ended up bringing the best young Israeli Jewish musicians to Nazareth to teach our kids. This is unprecedented.

NYArts: Why do you think it took them only two seconds to say “Yes”?

NAA: Because they believe that our students deserve this opportunity and were happy to provide this opportunity to our young students.

NYArts: There are many arts that one could teach to children. Why do you think that music—and classical music in particular—is so important?

NAA: Music manages to go directly to the heart of each one of us. It manages to turn our young students, a new generation, toward something that is much larger. To appreciate and to perform music immediately connects our students to a much larger community in the world. Classical music is a foreign set of aesthetics to these kids. By introducing this to our young generation, we open their minds, we open their hearts. They become active contributors first to their community, then to Israeli society, for a change, because our community in Israel has been very much left aside. By enabling children to become artists, to make wonderful music, they become creative and constructive members of society, their community, Israeli society, and very quickly they become part of the international community.

NYArts: How did Polyphony get off the ground?

NAA: Last summer I had the privilege of meeting with two wonderful people, Craig and Deborah Cogut. Cher also became involved. Our idea is to found an organization based in the U.S. that will support our initiatives in Israel and to take them to the next level. Next year, we will start music appreciation programs in five Arab schools in Israel. We will reach more than 1,500 kids on a weekly basis, providing these schools with music appreciation classes and a concert series so that the kids will also have the chance to experience what it is like to sit in a hall and listen to music. We’ll also build an orchestra in each school, so that music becomes an integral part of the life of the school. This is part of cultivating a generation who in the future will be the audience, the “consumers” of culture, people who will have the need for the arts and music. Mirav Meron, a Jewish Israeli musician, is working with us on the curriculum. In so doing, she is understanding better and better the Arab community, their background.

NYArts: So it goes both ways.

NAA: It really does go both ways. For the Jewish musicians, this is a very special mission to design the curriculum for Arab schools. And it’s wonderful for the Arab students. All of the concerts will be performed by young Israeli musicians, who will tour Arab cities and villages. Already some of our conservatory students play in the schools. What’s beautiful is that they rehearse on a weekly basis with young Jewish Israeli musicians from one of the neighboring cities next to Nazareth. Again, this is another example of how music and the pleasure of music making and the passion for music manage to bring both young Israelis and Arabs together.

NYArts: Otherwise they would not have common interests?

NAA: Otherwise they would never have a chance to be together. There is Nazareth, an Arab city, and there is Upper Nazareth, a Jewish city that was built next to it. One street separates the two cities, but they are very far from each other in every way you can imagine. And this little orchestra of 40 people, made up of kids from different schools, Arabs and Jews, manages to take that street away and bring the people together.

NYArts: Israel is a country of two languages, Hebrew and Arabic. What languages are the lessons conducted?

NAA: Our teachers speak mainly Hebrew. It’s a good question because when you teach a five-year-old kid who speaks only Arabic during a lesson in Hebrew, you have to have the parents present at the lesson. This is very important because the parents should be part of the educational process, to understand what is happening and to give support to the children at home. But also, the necessity of having parents at those lessons is another mode of communication between teachers and the parents and the kids.

NYArts: They have a shared investment.

NAA: Exactly. One of the most rewarding things for the teachers is the high appreciation that they have from the parents for what they’re doing. You know the parents in Nazareth feel that their kids are having an opportunity and a chance that they never had. And this is what they want to give to their children. They say to us, “We want to give our children what we never had.” And for them, these teachers are making this effort to give their children opportunity. This creates a very warm and very positive atmosphere.

NYArts: The Arab students are both Christian and Muslim?

NAA: One of the funny things is that we have Christian and Muslim students and Jewish teachers. And we don’t know which holidays to take! If you take everyone’s holidays, you’d end up never teaching at all! So we decided that we would work all year long.

NYArts: So what do we have to look forward to from Polyphony?

NAA: Polyphony is taking our initiatives and spreading them all over the country, hoping that more and more people will become involved. If you reach out to 1,500 kids and eventually 3,000 kids, if you bring 200 kids together to make music, something great can happen. Polyphony has an emphasis on civic society and we have a special curriculum on which we’re working as well with Brown University’s Cogut Center for Humanities. The aim of it is to take the shared interest and love for music as a starting point for dialogue between young Arab and Jewish musicians. So for example, in January 2012, Professor Steinberg is coming to Nazareth with a few students and gave a seminar on Mozart’s Magic Flute, which has wonderful music for the children to play together but also was written during a special point in history: the Age of Enlightenment. The story’s motif is how to deal with authority, how to be the person you want to be, but in the context of the regulations that are enforced on you. And we thought that this theme would be a wonderful thing for the students to think about, to reflect on their reality, to encourage them to question things and to look for answers.

NYArts: Your school’s patron, Barenboim, once said that your orchestra, the Divan Orchestra, has never been about pretending we’re all friends. How do you think that your project relates to that? Is it different to say that in theory and in practice?

NAA: Our teachers come to Nazareth, they get to know the people, but they don’t necessarily know every little thing about one another. They teach and go back home. To get to know the other is a very long process because they are not there to sit and talk, but to teach. So it’s knowing the other through experience, by working together. But, I know from my own experience that I really don’t agree with all of our teachers or with Israeli Jewish people about every little thing. And I know that there are things that we could argue about for days and never convince one another. But the main question is, “How do we learn to live together, despite these differences?” As long as these differences don’t compromise the integrity of the other, we can work together. And this is something that I personally and our teachers have come to terms with.

Polyphony is about creating equal opportunities for Arab and Jewish students in Israel, to compensate for the lack of opportunities for the Arab community. But at the same time, Polyphony is about a strong commitment to use these educational opportunities as a shared interest among the young people. To use that to start a dialogue, a discussion, to start asking questions. It’s a very long process. I don’t think that you bring Arab kids and Jewish kids together for two days and that they’re going to discover “world peace.” It is a long process—ten years, maybe fifteen years—to get people to get people really thinking. But we start. A long journey starts with one step. And we are taking that step.

*To view more information about Nabeel Abboud Ashkar and this project, please visit www.polyphonyusa.org.