Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 3, No. 2, Summer/Autumn 2018 | Page 59

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
Chaya Czernowin’s At the Fringe of Our Gaze. The pieces Ramal by the Syrian artist Kareem
Roustom and Resonating Sounds by Ayal Adler, pianist and director of the Israeli
Composers’ League, followed in 2014. The 2018 summer tour might be considered as a
further turning point insofar as it includes the world première of a commissioned work
which is (for the first time) explicitly referring to individual identity conflicts that are
similar to most of the WEDO biographies: written by Barenboim’s assistant at the Berlin
State Opera David Robert Coleman, Looking for Palestine for soprano and orchestra
is based on an autobiographical play by Najla Said�Edward Said’s daughter�and
characterized by the integration of non-Western sounds and instruments, namely a part
written for oud. The work deals with the story of a Palestinian-born girl in diaspora, her
socialization in a Jewish–American and Christian environment and emotionally painful
return to Lebanon during the war in 2006. Not surprisingly, Barenboim once again
insisted that the piece should not read as a political, but a human contribution to the
Israel–Palestine complex (Mattenberger 2018).
Notwithstanding the fact that Divan musicians regularly played Arabian music for fun
after their concerts (Cheah 2009:243), this official selectivity queries the idea of a true
encounter between cultures compared with other experiments conducted by classical
musicians like Yo-Yo Ma with the Silk Road Project set up in 1998. In contrast to the
WEDO, whose effective approach is the integrative power of a common performance
of (primarily) Western art music, Silk Road relies on traditional music, transcultural improvisations
and genuine musical creations. Organizations of concerts, masterclasses,
but also educative programs for enriching the practice of music learning are part of the
project that transcends the frontiers and “brought together musicians from the lands of
the Silk Road to co-create a new artistic idiom, a musical language founded in difference,
a metaphor for the benefits of a more connected world” (Silk Road Project website).
Instead of following a postcolonial interpretation and criticizing the patronizing attitude
that some authors considered as structurally enshrined in the Western canon and even
the project itself (Beckles Willson 2009a, 2009b; Wakeling 2010), it could be argued�
in the opposite direction�that this “out-of-region” program might have avoided unfavorable
partisanship or the unbalanced musical representation of all national, ethnic or
religious groups participating in the orchestra.
(3) WEDO biographies: the heterogeneity of socio-professional motivations. With
regard to the variety of participants, it is questionable if their primary motivation is public
engagement. Joining the Divan does not necessarily result from an ideological conviction
but�at least as described by several musicians themselves�a strategic choice
of professional development: “I came to the Divan thinking I just wanted to play Mahler
with Daniel Barenboim and go on this great tour to Argentina and all over the place,”
remembers Yuval Shapiro, member of the WEDO trumpet section between 2004 and
2007 (Cheah 2009:122; similar accounts Cheah 2009:227). Although we would refrain
from the by far too narrow conclusions the Irish composer and activist Raymond Deane
drew in his essay devoted to the WEDO musicians by emphasizing that “the real glue
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