Concert tours can be fraught affairs at the best of times, but a tour to the Palestinian Territories currently presents a series of particularly awkward – not to say deeply disturbing – challenges. First and most obviously, there are the basic problems familiar to any regular visitor to the region: a volatile security situation; unpredictable access; and the difficulty in securing adequate insurance cover.  

 

But staging collaborative concerts in the West Bank, involving large numbers of local and visiting musicians, throws up a range of additional hurdles.  How does one ensure that Palestinian musicians living in Ramallah can get to a joint concert in Bethlehem, and vice versa?  How do you minimise the risk of valuable instruments being held up or confiscated at a military checkpoint?  And how do you persuade an insurance company to underwrite those instruments?  

 

 

Of course, for the local performers and music students involved in the Festival, the logistical difficulties were anything but unfamiliar.  Palestinian singers and instrumental players face a barrage of basic obstacles to the study and performance of music: restrictions on travel mean it is often impossible to get to rehearsals and concerts; widespread financial hardship leaves little scope for spending on instruments and teaching; whilst a climate of fear and sudden violence militates strongly against the routine of daily practice.  

 

For the British performers – most of whom were visiting the region for the first time – those few days in the West Bank highlighted in vivid terms the enormous gap between the opportunities they enjoyed as young musicians growing up in Europe, and those available to the Palestinian students with whom they rehearsed and performed.

 

Yet despite the colossal difficulties, it was clear to us during that and subsequent visits to the Palestinian Territories that the appetite for performed music remains undiminished. The Palestinian National Conservatory of Music (NCM), recently renamed after Edward Said, is inundated with students keen to sign up for tuition at its branches in Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Bethlehem, and the organisation will open new offices in Nablus and Gaza over the coming months.  Concerts such as those which we helped to stage in 2004 regularly sell out: the Conservatory has no difficulty filling venues for the many performances (of both Arab and western classical music) which make up its twice-yearly concert series.

 

The NCM has been supported in its attempts to encourage young Palestinian musicians by a number of other Palestinian charities (such as the A M Qattan Foundation and the Al Kamandjâti Centre) and international organisations (notably European cultural missions such as the British Council; the United Nations Development Programme; and the much-fêted Barenboim-Said Foundation).  The efforts of these organisations have greatly expanded the teaching resources, facilities and performance prospects for music students growing up in the Occupied Territories.

 

There is, however, much still to be done.  One problem struck us as particularly pressing: although a certain number of scholarships do exist for music students who wish to pursue their studies at international conservatories, such awards are naturally made only to those who have already reached an outstanding level of performance ability.  By contrast, very little support is available for an equally important category of student: the younger, less experienced performer who has progressed to a good level of competency, but who now wishes to expand his or her horizons, boost a burgeoning enthusiasm for music, and further improve technical skills by attending intensive residential courses abroad.

 

Such courses are of course a standard part of the educational trajectory for players and singers growing up in the UK, and are very often instrumental in inspiring a young performer to begin realising his or her musical potential; as well as providing an insight into life in another country.  By contrast, for most young Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the prospects of taking part in such courses are vanishingly remote: financial hurdles combine with the severe difficulty of securing a visa to make participation all but impossible.

 

The Choir of London’s Bursary Scheme, launched earlier this year, seeks to highlight – and go some way to tackling – this problem.  Recipients of the Bursary will spend two weeks in the UK, first participating in a music summer school, then taking several days’ worth of private lessons at the Royal Academy of Music and the Purcell School in London.  The students will also attend a BBC Promenade concert at the Albert Hall, and will be invited to participate in a London recital alongside the Choir of London and its chamber orchestra.

 

Applications for the Bursary will be made through the British Council’s various contact points in Jerusalem, Ramallah, Hebron, Gaza, Khan Yunis and Nablus.  For the first year, we intend to make four awards; it’s our hope that additional funding will in future allow a gradual expansion of the scheme.   The awards are intended as part of a broader long-term programme of activities to encourage contact and exchange between British and Palestinian students and performers, including, for instance, an annual visit to the Occupied Territories by members of the Choir of London and Orchestra (the next of which will take place in May).  

 

It goes without saying that the Choir of London’s activities can only make a modest impact on musical life in the Palestinian Territories.  We are conscious, for instance, that the training we can offer in the shape of Bursary places and in-country workshops will directly benefit only those Palestinian musicians who maintain a specific interest in European classical music.  Equally, we are aware that such occasional, intensive teaching experiences as our organisation is able to facilitate must happen within the context of a regular programme of locally-based tuition and performance.

 

For these reasons we’ve been hugely encouraged by a series of other developments over the past couple of years: the establishment of a Palestine Youth Orchestra and an excellent national children’s choir; the development of an Arab music summer school in Jordan; the rise in numbers of visiting teachers living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip; and the opening of a world-class concert facility in Ramallah.  It’s our hope that our Bursary Scheme will make an important contribution to this broader programme of investment in Palestinian music.  

 

Working in the Palestinian Territories with the Choir of London continues to be an experience full of difficulty and contradiction, at once inspiring and frustrating.  Yet we remain more convinced than ever that we must continue to do all we can to contribute to the spectrum of Palestinian musical activity, supporting the large number of young musicians for whom European classical music can be a vital source of inspiration, a vehicle for resistance, or a means of dialogue.  

 

 

 

 

John Harte, April 2006.