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SYMPHONY OF HOPE

July 26, 2007 6:23 PM

We look hard for signs of hope in Iraq.  And so we were pleasantly surprised when we went to a music festival in Erbil  -- about 300 Iraqi musicians and dancers had been flown in to the northern city, and were given the run of an enormous performing arts center, courtesy of a grant from the US government.  On hand were nine American music and dance teachers, who were giving classes on such subjects as Baroque keyboard technique, hip hop dancing and contemporary jazz.  It was fun to see the Iraqi musicians soaking it all in.  For 10 days, in the relative safety of Kurdistan, they got to act like most musicians in the rest of the world who don’t have car bombs and gunshots constantly disturbing their sense of harmony.

Michael, the hip-hop teacher, was from Texas and very extroverted -- the young Kurds who wanted to learn hip-hop quickly lost all their shyness and inhibitions in the face of his antics.  His first task -- to update their musical knowledge.  They had been downloading most of their music on their cell phones, which Michael thought was cool -- until he heard it.  “There is a definite time lag,” he said.  “I had an argument about it yesterday.  They still feel Michael Jackson is the King of Pop.”   Once that issue was settled, he began teaching them a robocop dance routine.  They loved it.

Other inhibitions melted away.  Iraq is in the midst of a bitter sectarian conflict, and today people are usually very slow to socialize outside their own group -- it is a simple matter of safety.  At the festival there were Sunnis, Shiites, Christians, Kurds and Arabs, flown or driven in from all over the country.  On the first day the organizers noted that people pretty much stuck to their own cliques when they sat down for lunch or gathered in the hallways.  But after about 24 hours thrown together in class rooms and the concert hall, religious and ethnic differences began to be pushed aside, as the musicians and dancers found common interest in their craft.

By the end of the festival they had put together what they called a “Unity Orchestra”, made up of musicians from various cities around Iraq, who were to give a performance on the final evening to an invited audience.  A conductor from Baghdad, Mohammed Amin, said the whole point was “to show that we are still here, that there is still hope for Iraq”.

The music festival in Erbil reinforced my sense that, if they are given a modicum of security, Iraqis can lay aside their differences fairly quickly.  In the context of today’s violence, provoked by some very vicious extremists, that is a pretty massive “if”.  But as the conductor says, the moderate, non-extremist, non-sectarian majority of Iraqis is still here.  And so, there is still hope.

July 26, 2007 | Permalink | User Comments (3)

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Posted by: Dale Sonnenberg | Jul 28, 2007 6:23:22 AM

Posted by: kurdistan | Sep 1, 2007 10:42:32 AM

Posted by: Boran | Jan 6, 2008 9:23:30 AM

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