The impact of cultural diplomacy in China

This article describes the impact of Isaac Stern's 1979 tour of China. His master classes and violin recitals with David Golub helped open relations between China and the West, and the 40 million young Chinese students of violin and piano today can testify to the enormous effect cultural diplomacy can have at its best.

Recording of "Dialogue"

My composition for two violins, entitled "Dialogue" and premiered this past Tuesday at Indiana University, deals with the concept of dialogue between cultures. You may listen to a recording here. You can listen to the rest of my recital, which also featured works about cultural dialogue, here. Erin Aldridge was the violinist for my piece and the Bartok; Cory Smythe played piano on the Mozart, Cowell, and Ranjbaran.

Review of cultural dialogue concert

String Academy alumnus Harvey takes the spotlight
By Peter Jacobi
H-T Reviewer
7/2/2009

The roster printed in the program book for Tuesday evening’s concert in Recital Hall evinced equality: The music would be performed by violinists William Harvey and Erin Aldridge and pianist Cory Smythe, their three names set in same-sized type.

As things turned out, though Aldridge and Smythe certainly contributed to the affair, this was Harvey’s show. He had planned its content. He had composed a major work as centerpiece. And he was stage front fiddling audaciously from start to finish.

The concert was billed as the IU String Academy’s 25th birthday celebration. In that regard, before the music got under way, founder and director Mimi Zweig had memories to share. So did Emeritus Dean of the Jacobs School Charles Webb, he who had said yes to Zweig’s proposal to start the academy and now praised its accomplishments.

Violinist Harvey, a product of the String Academy and recipient of a degree from IU, then took charge. The warm-up came in the form of four selections taken from Bartok’s multitudinous Duets for Two Violins, which he and Erin Aldridge handled adroitly, every twist and trick therein.

The two followed by bravely wading into 30 minutes of roiling musical waters, these of Harvey’s own devising. What the audience heard is called “Dialogues,” a demanding and often arresting exercise commissioned by Mimi Zweig for the String Academy’s birthday. Nothing of much greater difficulty could have been written for a pair of violinists. The plucking and the sawing, the contrapuntal calisthenics, the elaborate passage work, the extreme dynamics stretching from the barely audible to screeches and screams, the sudden shifts from rhythmic madness to almost prayerful calm and back again, all put tremendous pressure on the performers, pressure they handled masterfully.

In program notes, Harvey addressed what drove him as he composed “Dialogues.” He is founder of Cultures in Harmony, a nonprofit working to promote international understanding through music. “Dialogues,” he says, speaks of the need for improved relationships between Islam and the West. The music is said to express the composer’s reaction to the 9-11 attacks, a terrorist killing of a young ballerina and her family, the contrasting beliefs of Muslims and non-Muslims on moral issues, and the need for prayer and dialogue in the search for peace.

A listener, of course, can read anything into wordless music, leading to very different reactions from what a composer intended. And who, on Tuesday, was likely to remember Harvey’s explanations while listening to a score of such intensity and diversity? Let this listener simply say that “Dialogues” made a strong impression, one that might have been even stronger had its duration been shortened. Length began to sap the music’s impact about two-thirds of the way through.

The remainder of the program also bore witness to Harvey’s international enthusiasms: an attractive “Fantasy El Mansora for Solo Violin” by a prominent Egyptian composer, Attia Sharara; the cavorting Rondo from Mozart’s Violin Concerto Number 5, K.219, “Turkish;” Henry Cowell’s striking and stirring “Homage to Iran,” and a “Moto Perpetuo” by the Iranian Behzad Ranjbaran, who studied music at IU. Harvey’s technical skills and ability to evoke moods from his violin were at all times in clear evidence. For the last three items listed, Cory Smythe provided exemplary partnership on the keyboard.

Recital tomorrow

If you live near Bloomington, Indiana, USA, please come to my cultural dialogue recital tomorrow, Tuesday, June 30, at 8:00 p.m. at Indiana University's Recital Hall. I will play a recital program consisting of music by composers making a conscious effort to understand a culture other than their own. Here is my essay, which will accompany the program:

The events of September 11, 2001, shocked Americans deeply. After our initial anger at the attacks, many of us were surprised to realize just how little we knew about Islam, the world’s second largest religion. Similarly, the vast majority of Muslims were horrified at the acts perpetrated in the name of a religion that gives their lives dignity and peace. As my personal response to 9/11, I founded the non-profit Cultures in Harmony (www.culturesinharmony.org). I wanted to do what I could to bring Muslims and non-Muslims closer together at a time when each development in global politics threatened to drive us further apart.

I began playing violin in 1986, composing in 1996, and conducting cultural diplomacy in 2005. Tonight’s recital brings those three threads together. Each piece compels the listener to confront the relationship between Islam and the West. Referring to Islam and the West as monolithic concepts does a disservice to both. I do so here for convenience, and have chosen a wide variety of music in order to represent the diversity of expression within both traditions.

Bartok’s devotion to Hungarian folk music is well known, yet he contributed much to the preservation of other folk traditions as well. The four brief duos presented here showcase a variety of heritages, though for all Bartok’s scrupulous fidelity to eastern European musical idioms, the “Arabian Song” shows only a cursory resemblance to Arab music. It uses a few of the intervals common to that music, yet does not conform to any of its scales, or maqamat.

My duo for two violins, commissioned by my former teacher Mimi Zweig for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Indiana University String Academy, is self-consciously concerned with the concept of dialogue. The two violins take the role of two very different individuals discussing Islam and the West, with the first violin as the more aggressive viewpoint and the second violin looking for solutions and common ground. Five sections loosely inspired by the Muslim call to prayer, or adhaan, thread throughout the work. You can hear the adhaan five times daily in any Muslim city, but I should emphasize that since it is sacrilegious to represent the adhaan in music, these sections are only a non-Muslim's impressions of the adhaan, rather than the adhaan itself.

In the first movement, the section entitled "8:46 A.M." refers to the moment when the first plane struck the World Trade Center. This event belatedly catalyzed a spirit of dialogue between Islam and the West that should have begun earlier. A ferocious fugue forms the bulk of the movement.

The second movement contains an ode to an Iraqi ballerina. My friend John Ferguson is the director of another cultural diplomacy organization, American Voices, which runs Camp Unity in Erbil, Iraq. He found out that one of the ballerinas who attended Camp Unity in 2008 was subsequently visited by terrorists who killed her and her entire family simply because she aspired to practice a Western art form. The story affected me deeply, so this movement is dedicated to her memory. Astute listeners will detect a couple quotes: an excerpt of Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings symbolizes the fascination that ballet holds, since Balanchine's "Serenade" (using this music) was one of the first ballets I loved. The Turkish tune "Gül yüzünü rüyamizda" comes from the Sufi tradition and represents a peaceful interpretation of Islam in which the whirling dervish ceremony is simultaneously a form of dance and a form of prayer.

The third movement, "Obscenity," considers the different ways Muslims and non-Muslims interpret this concept. In rendering both pornography and the infamous Danish cartoons in music, I hope this movement leaves the listener thoroughly disgusted, so that this disgust in turn may lead to empathy for those who find obscene that which others find acceptable.

In the fourth movement, an adhaan progresses to a further development of the Sufi tune, before leading triumphantly to a March. Is the March the bellicose cessation of dialogue, or the joyous conclusion of dialogue in which contrapuntally distinct voices finally fuse together in harmony? A final adhaan pleas for peace.

During a Cultures in Harmony project in Egypt in January 2009, I asked an employee of the world-renowned Bibliotheca to provide outstanding Egyptian examples of Western classical composition. He gave me an entire book of the compositions of Attia Sharara, the reigning living master. I found his light Fantazy El Mansora thoroughly charming.

After my first visit to Turkey in 2004 with the Bloomington Muslim Dialogue Group, I wondered why people referred to Mozart's Fifth Violin Concerto as "Turkish," when it sounds nothing at all like Turkish classical music. What I learned is that the appellation "Turkish" was frequently applied to eighteenth century works featuring bass drum and cymbals, since those instruments distinguished the music of janissary bands. The Ottoman Empire used janissary bands both to intimidate enemies on the battlefield and for cultural diplomacy, sending them to Vienna, where Mozart may or may not have heard one. Here I make the Turkish connection explicit by playing Turkish improvisations, or taksimleri, whenever Mozart calls for a cadenza. I am indebted to my friend, oudist Mahmut Celiker, for giving me a lesson on this process. Because it was fashionable in Mozart's day for pianos to have a Turkish stop which would imitate the sound of bass drum and cymbals, Cory will "prepare" the piano to recreate this sound.

The final two works on the program present an American composer inspired by Persian music, and a Persian composer inspired by American music. In 1956, Henry Cowell won a Rockefeller grant that enabled him to travel to Turkey, Iran, India, and Japan to learn about their music. "Homage to Iran" received its premiere in the shah's palace on July 3, 1959. Behzad Ranjbaran, once a political prisoner under the shah, came to the United States in the 1970s, where he studied here at Indiana University. I was proud to make my New York concerto debut on April 10, 2006, by giving the New York premiere of his violin concerto with the Juilliard Orchestra conducted by Gerard Schwarz. I am delighted to present a work by my fellow Jacobs School of Music alumnus as the virtuosic conclusion to tonight's meditation on cultural relations.

*

Thank you to Erin Aldridge and Cory Smythe for joining me for this evening of musical dialogue. Thank you to Mimi Zweig for being one of the most significant influences on my life as a violinist, composer, conductor, and cultural diplomat. What Mimi and the String Academy have given to me over the past twelve years can scarcely be measured. Imagine the impact she and the Academy have had on thousands of kids like me over the past twenty-five years!

ART in Embassies

The ART in Embassies program still aspires to create dialogue between cultures, according to this article. The long-standing commitment of embassies to visual art is outstanding. Though not all embassies are as committed to using music, Cultures in Harmony is deeply grateful to the Embassy in Pakistan for funding our project there.

I am now in Bloomington, IN, teaching at Indiana University. Please come to my cultural dialogue recital on Tuesday, June 30, at 8:00 p.m. in Recital Hall (3rd St. and Jordan Ave.).

In Seoul

I'm now at the airport in Seoul, Korea. If you ever pass through here, I highly recommend the Korean Traditional Cultural Experience Center. It is the most aesthetically pleasing exhibit I've ever seen in an airport.

This morning, we had to say goodbye to our friends as we left Sacred Heart Novitiate to go to the airport. This is always especially hard with the youth from the Tala-Andig, who are very sweet, loving, loyal, and emotional. They crowded around us to give us small cards and big hugs. Many tears were shed; I pretended I had sweat in my eye. Here is an excerpt of a message from Rose-Ann to Danielle: "Cultures in Harmony is the one who help the Tala-Andig people to develop their cultures." Though I believe that the Tala-Andig youth have developed and preserved their own culture, I am honored and touched that they feel we have played a role.

Gala concert last night

I'm at Ninoy Aquino International Airport, and the buzz from last night's concert at Cultural Center of the Philippines still hasn't gone away. Certainly, it was far and away the biggest, most prominent, and most successful event in our four-year history.

The Cartwheel Foundation organized every detail beautifully. The big bus with the seven CiH musicians and all the indigenous peoples (Tala-Andig and Umajam tribes from Bukidnon province, and the Ichananaw tribe from Kaling province) arrived at CCP just before noon. After a quick lunch, we ran through the entire show. It went well, but the excitement only continued to build for the big show.

I went out to the lobby to admire the exhibits. Truly, what Cartwheel has accomplished in just ten years is incredible. They have built schools in indigenous communities, built a college for indigenous peoples, and convinced the scholars who go to college to return and give back to their communities. They have empowered tribes throughout the Philippines, enhancing their quality of life by improving their access to education, encouraging them to preserve their heritage, and helping them feel like an integral part of Filipino society.

After the national anthem and a couple speeches, an elder of the Ichananaw tribe began the first act with the ulalim, which is a spontaneous form of solo singing. The rest of the act consisted of the three tribes giving presentations involving dances about courtship, war, planting, harvesting, and welcoming visitors.

Cultures in Harmony opened the second act with two pieces: Danielle Kuhlmann's medley of American folk tunes, followed by "Visayan Caprice," a piano trio by the Filipino composer Nicanor Abelardo. Then, I gave a speech honoring Cartwheel--in a slightly whimsical fashion--by recounting times during our four-year partnership with Cartwheel when I have wanted to do a cartwheel. I closed by asking: "What would inspire the indigenous youth on tonight's program to want to do a cartwheel?" My suggestion: always celebrate and honor the rich indigenous heritage of the Philippines, and support the Cartwheel Foundation.

After a speech from Cartwheel founder Gina Alfonso, the PREDIS program from St. Scholastica's College closed the second act with three Filipino songs.

The third act began with the three years of compositions Cultures in Harmony has co-created with the Tala-Andig, Umajam, and Ichananaw tribes. The finale was an emotional rendition of Joey Ayala's hit "Magkaunay" (in an arrangement by Chris Burton) by the whole company. On stage right, Jeremiah played cello, Melinda played piano, seven people from all three tribes played percussion, and I played violin and directed. On stage left, Jeanine played violin, Danielle played horn, Frank played viola, Galit played oboe, and ten Cartwheel scholars sang the song. In center stage, director Floy Quintos had blocked out a stunning progression to the dance, culminating in all three tribes dancing around the audience as everyone clapped along, smiling and crying, moved by the pulsating, infectious joy of the music as much as the message of its words: we are all connected. We are all similar.

Congratulations to Cartwheel on ten wonderful years. Here's to many more, and many more partnerships with Cultures in Harmony!

Day of the final concert

Today is the day for our gala concert with the Cartwheel Foundation. If you are in Manila, come to the Little Theater of the Cultural Center of the Philippines at 6:00 p.m. Hurry, up as there are only 20 tickets left!

Here is a picture from a recent photo shoot we had with a photography class from the University of the Philippines. They happened to be sharing a beach house complex with us in Matuod, Batangas province.