Music | Arts & Culture | Woodbridge | Palestine Museum U.S.
| Palestine Museum Photo. |
As Beethoven’s Violin Sonata no. 5 sent people on a journey of galloping violin and piano, children’s drawings depicted toppled trees and bodies covered with thickly drawn red crayon just a room away.
As strident piano complemented readings in Arabic and English from Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah, a parade of mannequins stood silent nearby, bedecked in brilliantly embroidered traditional dress.
As the audience applauded at the end of the first section, abstract paintings yearned for a free Palestine. Chopin and Bizet echoed through the walls, and the walls replied in kind with folk art and Arabic captions.
Sunday, that tension underscored a performance of Fantasia on Mourid Barghouti’s Ramallah from composer and pianist Karim Said and solo violinist Hisham Khoury at the Palestine Museum in Woodbridge. Held in the museum’s auditorium, the performance featured music from Ludwig van Beethoven, Frédéric Chopin, Georges Bizet and Pablo de Sarasate as well as Said himself. Both performers are Palestinian.
At the beginning of the program, Palestine Museum Founder and Executive Director Faisal Saleh praised the concert as “music by Palestinian musicians,” an appellation that seemed fitting as a number of Palestinian families and couples streamed in. In the room was a story of diaspora and displacement: tiny embroidered purses, fashioned in a similar style to the museum’s costuming, dotted the crowd. Chatter in Arabic seemed as common as conversations in English.
It made for an interesting juxtaposition when the pieces seemed to center Western “iconic classical works”—per the program notes—with the framing of poetry in Arabic and English set to strident, emotional piano music composed by Said.
“You will hear songs that are not from Palestine,” he said in his introductory remarks. “But they are, because I wrote them and I am from Palestine.”
Each part began with a recorded reading from Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah, presented in assured Arabic or unsettlingly cheery English in translation. Said’s piano was right on time, punctuating the phrases with chords that they seemed to cry out with the full emotional impact of the simple narration of the poem.
It made for a contrast between the strident and staccato piano of his own compositions and his interpretations of canonic pieces by Beethoven, Bizet and others. He closed his eyes and nodded along to the waves of melodic phrases, as if he was feeling out the tension, and the audience could too.
Then he transitioned to a very different sonic landscape. Sounds of the so-called “Western Canon” of classical pieces—Beethoven, Chopin, Bizet, Faure—occupied the bulk of time in the performance.
Which raises the question: what does it mean to have Western music at the center of a fundamentally Palestinian composition and performance? What if that performance is by a Palestinian artist, in a space dedicated to a forced Palestinian diaspora?
On one hand, placing Western music in the context of a Palestinian narrative is subversive: it flips the West’s tendency to frame Palestine in the lens of itself. But on the other, the genre of classical music adheres to a fundamentally Western point of view, because it has been taught across the globe with an overwhelmingly Eurocentric lens.
Listening, one couldn’t help but wonder if—by juxtaposing Palestinian poetry and composed music with the greats of the Western Canon—Said’s mission was (and continues to be) to place Palestine on the map as a vibrant interlocutor with the Western canon. To tell audiences, through his music, that it and he can contribute on the West’s terms as well as its own.
Said himself highlighted his mission to cultivate love of the art form across the Arabic and English speaking worlds, suggesting that “you don’t have to know anything about this music, you just need to like the way it sounds.”
But no one explained why these particular pieces—Beethoven’s Violin Sonata no.5, Chopin’s Fantasie in F minor, Fauré’s Violin and Piano Sonata in A major, and so forth—were chosen as foils to Said’s own compositions. Arabic always came first in the readings of Barghouti, but the English didn’t feel an afterthought either. Indeed, Said’s composition engaged with both on their own rhythmic and tonal terms, serving as a bridge between the two languages.
The room seemed split between English and Arabic speakers, with a sea of heads that nodded at different points in the poetry readings. In that way, this genre-crossing performance brought many pairs of ears on a journey usually reserved for the upper echelons of society. There was pure technical artistry at work on stage.