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Ensemble Ambitions in a World Divided by Daniel J. Wakin

From time to time, the Palestine Center distributes articles it believes will enhance understanding of the Palestinian political reality. The following article by Daniel J. Wakin was published in the online edition of The New York Times on 19 June 2009. To view this article online, please go to http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/arts/music/21wakin.html?_r=1.

"Ensemble Ambitions in a World Divided"

By Daniel J. Wakin

WISPS of mournful tunes from a cane flute mingled with the plucking, jangling arabesques of the zitherlike qanun, the oud and gentle drums. The sounds arose from a quartet of Arab musicians who call themselves the Oriental Music Ensemble as they shared a precious moment of togetherness in the Miller Theater at Columbia University in March.

Despite the cohesion implied by the word “ensemble,” these four men are rarely in the same city, much less the same room. The politics of the Middle East confine them to four separate spheres and have turned them into a living metaphor for inescapable division.

“It’s our story,” said Suhail Khoury, who plays the traditional flute, or ney, and clarinet in the group. “It’s like summing up Palestine.”

The men are a cross section of the Palestinian experience in miniature: two Muslims, a Christian and a Druse. They live in Israel, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and abroad. The West Bank member cannot go to Israel because of Israeli travel restrictions on Palestinians. The Israeli Arab cannot go to the West Bank because of Israeli travel restrictions on Israelis. The one who lives in Sweden has a Jordanian passport but can travel to neither the West Bank nor Israel. And the one who lives in East Jerusalem said he is denied entry to Jordan for what he called “political reasons.”

So when do they rehearse? Not very often. If they do, it is in places like Istanbul; New York; Bonn, Germany; or Morocco, where they are to perform at a festival in July. They gather in hotel rooms for intensive sessions before performances. When they go back to their homes, they exchange computer files of music, both written and recorded. The system is shaky; because so much of their music is improvised, rehearsal becomes even more crucial.

“Basically we have to get together in some place that has nothing to do with Palestine and Israel,” Mr. Khoury said. “I just think how better we could perform if we were all the time together.” He mused about what the simple act of gathering at his house in Jerusalem to jam would be like but sounded resigned that it might never happen. “Maybe this is it,” he said. “This is how it gets energy.”

The ensemble’s artistic mission is intertwined with a more prosaic impulse: to make the case for Palestinian rights.

“We have to keep on,” said Ahmad Al Khatib, who plays the lutelike oud and is the group’s musical brain. “It’s part of our identity, this cultural struggle.”

The group started in 1997, when Mr. Khoury; Yousef Hbeisch, the percussionist; and Ibrahim Atari, who plays the qanun, were teaching at the recently founded National Conservatory of Music, now named after the Palestinian-American scholar Edward W. Said. Mr. Khatib replaced the original oud player in 2002.

The musicians gave a joint interview in a hotel room when they were in New York in March. They spoke further in April, in separate conversations. Mr. Khoury met with me in the Bethlehem branch of the national conservatory; Mr. Hbeisch, at a trendy seaside cafe in Haifa; and Mr. Atari, in his office in Ramallah, where he is director of another branch of the national conservatory. Mr. Khatib spoke by telephone from his home in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Their tale is the story of Palestinians in other ways. Mr. Khoury and Mr. Atari were politically active in their younger days, participants in the first intifada. Mr. Khatib grew up partly in a Jordanian refugee camp. Mr. Hbeisch feels the conflicting currents of Israeli Arabs. Mr. Khoury is a Christian; Mr. Atari and Mr. Khatib are Muslims; and Mr. Hbeisch is a Druse.

Though unabashedly political, they must walk a fine line in their music.

“We are playing classical instruments and music,” Mr. Khatib said. “That’s rare.” For a performance to have honesty “it shouldn’t be so connected to the political situation,” he said. “Otherwise it becomes another form of music.”

“We try to compose music that has a connection to the political situation but still sounds Oriental,” he said. “Sometimes it succeeds. Sometimes it fails.”

The classical forms in the Arabic music the ensemble plays generally do not use voices, so it is difficult to sing protest songs. But while the music sounds neutral, the group gives it a political cast in its program notes and discussions from the stage.

At the Miller Theater concert Mr. Khoury introduced a piece called “Oriental Tale,” written by Mr. Khatib while Ramallah was under siege by Israeli forces. “From misery and darkness, sometimes a light, a flower has to come out,” Mr. Khoury said. Then he took up his ney, inclining his head to the left, the ney extending to the right as he blew across its top from the right side of his mouth.

The final piece on the program was called “Atleet,” after an Israeli prison where Mr. Khoury said he had been held for six months. There, he said, he fashioned a ney out of the plastic insulation for an electric wire by poking holes in it with a heated nail. He played music off in a corner, he added, out of the hearing of guards, as a few fellow prisoners listened.

Mr. Khoury, 45, the dominant extra-musical personality in the group, took the lead in the joint interview despite a quiet, almost motionless manner. He is a major presence on the Palestinian music scene, having helped found the national conservatory and now serving as its general director, in East Jerusalem. A composer, he also led other arts groups and served as an official in the Culture Ministry.

“He feels the burden of the occupation heavily, trying to run an institution in that situation and have it grow and expand,” said Kathryn Habib, a former official of the American Near East Refugee Aid organization, who arranged the ensemble’s American tours in 2006 and 2009.

Mr. Khoury was born to a music-loving family in Jerusalem, he said. He listened to Western classical music as a child and pretended to conduct. He studied clarinet, then picked up the ney. He spent two years at Birzeit University in the West Bank, where he became politically aware.

Then came clarinet study at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. In 1993, around the time of optimism for Palestinians after the Oslo peace accords, he and several fellow musicians opened the national conservatory.

Mr. Atari, 37, joined the faculty soon after and now runs the Ramallah branch. He studied music briefly at An-Najah National University, then catch-as-catch-can with various Turkish and Egyptian masters, learning both the Arabic and the Turkish forms of the qanun. (The Arabic qanun plays half-tones; the Turkish, quarter-tones, he explained.)

Mr. Atari, a burly, balding man, worked as an electrician to earn money, at first playing mostly at weddings, a major source of earnings for many Arabic classical musicians in the Palestinian territories. Then he joined the conservatory and built up the qanun program. He met his future wife, an Israeli Arab, in Ramallah, and the couple have two daughters. He cannot visit them in Israel because of the travel restrictions, but his wife can slip into the West Bank.

For Mr. Atari the ensemble is a source of comradeship. “We are not just a group, together just for performance,” he said. “We are friends.”

The youngest member is Mr. Khatib, 34. He produces many of the group’s compositions and arrangements. His father, a poetry-loving amateur oud player, fled his village as a boy for Nablus in 1948. As an adult he went to teach in the Irbid refugee camp in Jordan, where Mr. Khatib spent the first 10 years of his life.

Mr. Khatib started studying the violin in school. He switched to the oud after three years, studying with an Iraqi teacher. Iraq at the time was a center of oud virtuosity. At Yarmouk University in Irbid, Mr. Khatib tried computer engineering.

“I couldn’t do it,” he said. “Music was much more appealing to me.” So he changed to cello, which has fingering distances and shifts similar to those of the oud.

Mr. Khatib went to work at the national conservatory in Ramallah in 1998. He left the West Bank briefly in 2002, around the time he joined the group, after overstaying a visitor’s permit, and because of a bureaucratic tangle and the denial of permission by the Israeli authorities, he has been unable to return. He found refuge in Sweden, which supports music in the Palestinian territories. He received a master’s degree from the University of Gothenburg and now coaches ensembles and teaches theory there as well as leading oud master classes in Jordan and Sweden.

The long fallow periods between meetings of the ensemble put a strain on the music-making, Mr. Khatib said.

“We all need to generate energy and the ideas again from zero almost,” he said. “You have to be so delicate. To be tight you have to play with the members a lot. It’s not an issue of knowing what you want to do. It’s playing, playing, playing. This is very difficult to do if you don’t live in an easy situation, if you don’t meet once a week.

“Every time we meet, we have to remember where we are. This makes the job very hard and not so satisfying musically. It’s obvious we have a problem in communication musically due to where we live.”

Mr. Hbeisch, 42, the percussionist, spends half the year in Haifa and half the year in Paris. In France he plays with an assortment of world music, classical and jazz groups. When in Israel, he occasionally slips into Ramallah to teach at the conservatory.

He was born in the village of Yirka, in Galilee, to a Druse family. Druse are an Arabic-speaking minority whose secretive religion is an offshoot of Islam.

His father would sing sacred Druse songs to the young Yousef. A brother began teaching him percussion, and he showed early expertise.

Mr. Hbeisch was drafted into the Israeli army but aggravated a spine injury in his first weeks of training. Surgery left one of his legs partly paralyzed, and he was forced to stay in bed for months. To practice he worked on complex rhythms by chattering his teeth, an art he demonstrated for me. Later he suffered macular degeneration, a loss of central vision, and he is nearly blind in his right eye.

“All these illnesses pushed me to go further and further,” he said.

At 25 he went to the University of Haifa and studied philosophy and, later, music. He played in a rock band there.

Mr. Hbeisch’s place in society is, in a sense, more complicated than that of his ensemble colleagues. He identifies with Palestinians displaced by the Jewish state but has the benefits of Israeli citizenship. At the same time, he said, he feels slighted as a member of a minority, the Druse. Mr. Hbeisch used to play for a mixed Jewish-Arab group, he said, but he came to see his presence in the group as tokenism, especially in the eyes of the audience.

“You see that they hate you, but they love it because you are playing with Jews,” Mr. Hbeisch said. “They never invite you unless you are playing with Jews. It’s pathetic.”

With his Oriental Music Ensemble colleagues, the feeling is something else.

“I love this group and the music we are doing,” he said. “It has a special character. There is something that unifies us on a personal level, and the experience we share together.”

Daniel J. Wakin is a reporter in the Culture Department of The New York Times.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Jerusalem Fund.