Music | Arts, Culture & Community | Palestine Museum U.S.
Ensemble Phoenicia performs at the Palestine Museum U.S. From left to right: Insia Malik, Charlotte Loukola, Amer Hasan, Robin Park, and Noémie Chemali. Photos Kapp Singer.
A buzz emanated from Noémie Chemali’s viola. The sound, enticing and unusual, caught the audience’s ears. Most players would have thought something was amiss—and indeed the instrument was not in its typical configuration. A small piece of tinfoil lay between the strings and the bridge. It vibrated as Chemali played, adding a raspiness to what are normally crystal clear tones.
The foil modification was meant to imitate the sound of a mijwiz, a reed instrument made of two parallel pieces of bamboo played throughout the Middle East. In his score for Palestinian Songs and Dances, Syrian-American composer Kareem Roustom instructs the string section to add the kitchen film to their instruments for the piece’s third movement. Alongside Chemali, cellist Robin Park and violinists Insia Malik and Charlotte Loukola also echoed the rhythmic hums of the mijwiz. Amer Hasan, on clarinet, played a series of high-pitched overtones—what are called spectral glissandos—also characteristic of the instrument. 
Malik places tinfoil on her instrument.
On Sunday, the New York-based contemporary classical music group Ensemble Phoenicia performed Palestinian Songs and Dances at the Palestine Museum US in Woodbridge. The piece embodied Ensemble Phoenicia’s goals to highlight contemporary Middle Eastern performers and composers and blend classical Western music with Middle Eastern folk sounds.
It was initially commissioned by the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music in New Hampshire for a young clarinetist from the West Bank. After his visa was denied and he couldn’t perform, Hasan approached Roustom to develop the arrangement for Ensemble Phoenicia. Sunday’s show was the third ever public performance of Palestinian Songs and Dances. Across its four movements, the piece reimagined festive wedding songs, hopeful melodies of resistance, and the vibrant, dissonant voice of the mijwiz.
Ensemble Phoenicia performs "Three Village Wedding Songs," the fourth movement of Palestinian Songs and Dances by Kareem Roustom.
The performance held particular weight for Hasan, who is Palestinian-American. Before the group began playing, he recounted to the audience an emotional visit to Bethlehem in 2019.
“I remember, from the bottom of the wall, looking up, and for the first time in my life I felt like I had been reduced to nothing, instantly,” he said, referring to the separation barrier that divides the West Bank from Israel, which the Israeli government began building in 2002 during the Second Intifada and rises up to as tall as eight to nine meters in Bethlehem.
“But then I took a few steps back, and I was somehow more awestruck in this brief moment because of all of the art that was on this wall—the paintings, the drawings, the poetry,” said Hasan. Since its construction, the concrete barrier has become a canvas for protest art.
“It was simultaneously the most beautiful and the most horrifying thing I had experienced in my life at the time,” he said. “Despite all the atrocity and injustice, the grief and the sadness, I think it’s more important than ever to celebrate and preserve the beauty and joy of Palestinian culture.”
Ensemble Phoenicia formed last summer on the cusp of a fragile and tragic moment in the Middle East. Their first performance was on Oct. 2, just days before Hamas attacked Israel, killing over 1,000 Israelis and taking about 250 people hostage, and Israel launched its subsequent counteroffensive, killing over 36,000 Gazans to date and displacing at least 1.9 million.
“It was so hard to deal with the pain of it all, but we had each other,” Hasan said. “And we knew that our mission was even stronger.” Moving forward, Ensemble Phoenicia plans to record an album and commission compositions from a number of Middle Eastern composers.
Amer Hasan.
Sunday’s concert featured two pieces inspired by the work of Edward Said, the Palestinian-American literary critic, musician, and public intellectual whose work has long been a touchstone for pro-Palestinian activists and which has been widely invoked following October 7. Tribute to Edward Said, composed by Kinan Azmeh and performed solo by Hasan, opened with a drawn-out crescendo. In its methodical swelling, the singular clarinet note somehow seemed to emerge from every corner of the room, ringing atmospherically—far away and then, in a moment, right there. The energy then grew as Hasan launched into flitting arpeggios that seemed to ascend out of earshot. His fingers struck the keys with such deliberate force as to become their own form of percussion.
Following this was Orientalism, a string quartet piece composed by Phoenicia member Sami Seif and inspired by Said’s iconic, eponymous book about Western portrayals of the Middle East. Seif noted that Said’s work helped him clarify the disjuncture he felt between his own Arab identity and the way he saw it portrayed in the media, and in the composition he tried to draw out a tension between individuals and systems.
Sami Seif.
The piece embraced a spate of extra-tonal elements. Players fiercely struck their bows upon the necks of their instruments in quick succession, creating sharp pings that punctuated the melodic thrust of the piece. It sounded as if objects were clattering across a large, empty room, or a CD was skipping at just the right intervals so as to turn a song into a collage of itself. He eschewed specifying a time signature, instead calling on the musicians to take turns measuring time throughout. Tiny instances stretched into eternities. Long, placid moments were compressed onto a pinhead.
“It’s really special to be able to make music in a place where Palestinian beauty is already uplifted and celebrated,” Chemali said after the show. “A lot of the time when we perform this music we’re trying to convince people to see the beauty in it.”
“People choose to see beauty or choose not to see it,” she added.” “And to be around people who choose to see that beauty is really special.”