This NBC article, "Baghdad symphony strikes a hopeful note: 73 musicians play on despite death threats," is curious: it mentions death threats in the subheading but not in the article. Still, there are two main reasons why they probably have received threats: music is forbidden by Islamic law, and the music they are playing is Western. (Thanks to Skeetstreet for the link.)
BAGHDAD — It was a gala classical concert with favorites by Beethoven and Schubert. But in Baghdad Friday night that meant blanket security — dozens of undercover police blended into the invitation-only crowd of 300.Just performing is a victory for the 73 members of the Baghdad Symphony Orchestra and it's why Iraqi soloist Karim Wasfi chose the Dvorzak [sic] Cello Concerto.
“It has this will of survival,” says Wasfi. “It has this winning feeling in it. The music makes you feel a winner, somehow.”
The orchestra knows all about survival. The first in the Arab world, it struggled through two wars and economic sanctions under Saddam Hussein. The best talent fled Iraq. Musicians who stayed earned $1 a month and instruments fell into disrepair.
Still, the group, somehow, played on. And after Saddam's fall, life — and salaries — improved. There were also gifts of new instruments and a trip to America — all funded by the former U.S. authority in Iraq — highlighted by a concert in Washington, D.C., attended by President Bush.
Life improved? What about those death threats?
Hey people, just wanted to start the weekend off with a happy song.
Here are the words, you’ll know the tune.
73 musicians in the Orchestra Hall
73 musicians full of cheer
If one in the band should happen to explode
72 musicians in the Orchestra Hall.
72 musicians in the Orchestra Hall
72 musicians full of cheer
If one in the band should happen to explode
71 musicians in the Orchestra Hall...
Classical music is the artform in which the West has most outpaced any other culture. There is nothing comparable in Indian, Chinese, Mayan, etc., culture - nothing with the same intellectual dignity and complexity. We are the only civilization that has turned music from a pleasant entertainment to a vehicle for spiritual and philosophical content.
(That is not to say that there are no arts in which other cultures have not outpaced us. Western gardening, for instance, is at its best a cold and external thing compared to the art of garden design in Japan.)
Other cultures have recognized this and eagerly taken up Western classical music. African, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, even Indian musicians (conductor Zubin Mehta is from Bombay) have thrown themselves with vigour and success into this new (to them) artform.
Only one culture has almost wholly rejected it. Can you guess which it is?
Which is why this is more than a joke story. This is the only permanent symphony orchestra in the Arab world. If it is squashed, it will be one more case of the best influences of the West being rejected, expelled, crushed.
For these people are quite happy to take up the worst of our culture. From the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, nothing has been so coarse and perverted that the Arab street would not take to it. And in their own private little homes, these folks are also keen consumers of pornography.
They are also capable of absorbing what is morally neuter, indifferent. They have taken up professional sports rather late in the day, but they have done so with enthusiasm.
What they have not had, ever, is the centre of our culture: the best and the sanest, the uplifting and ennobling, the spiritually central - the things that breathe and embody those values without which our civilization would never have existed.
We must support the Baghdad Symphony Orchestra by any means available. End of story.
You Need Beethoven to Modernize
by Daniel Pipes
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/297
When the Baghdad symphony plays Mendelssohn, Bloch, Copeland, Offenbach, Meyerbeer, Gershwin, Berlin, etc., etc., etc., without fear, there will, indeed, be freedom in Iraq.
M.O.T.
M.O.T.-
Somehow I think they would be playing "Death and The Maiden". (By a lapsed Catholic.)
(The melodies of "pigs and apes" will have to wait another lifetime or two.)
Since everything but praying, killing people, drinking milk and beating women seems to be forbidden by Islam, I hope the orchestra is (non-fatally) harassed to show the world, once again, how useless this entire cult really is.
Then we can all play the "Gotterdammerung".
That is not to say that there are no arts in which other cultures have not outpaced us. Western gardening, for instance, is at its best a cold and external thing compared to the art of garden design in Japan...
Only one culture has almost wholly rejected it. Can you guess which it is?
What they have not had, ever, is the centre of our culture: the best and the sanest, the uplifting and ennobling, the spiritually central - the things that breathe and embody those values without which our civilization would never have existed...
We must support the Baghdad Symphony Orchestra by any means available. End of story.
Posted by: Paolo at June 11, 2005 03:39 PM
Hi, Paolo,
"Art" is the selective recreation of reality according to the artist's values.
Gardening is certainly an art form, if not one of the arts per se. The Japanese style is not superior to Western gardening, just different. The Japanese emphasize the calm of green, and a small scale designed to give the illusion of a large one, in the midst of a crushingly large population where space is hard to come by.
Calm is particularly valued in Japan, which has been terribly crowded for centuries. A small scale, which gives the impression of distance, and the majesty of large size, can satisfy the craving we have for both, at least to some degree, in crowded circumstances where they are rare.
In turn, many Japanese visitors to North American gardens (and European ones, I would assume), appreciate the exuberance and freedom seen in many Western gardens.
As an example, when our family visited the world-famous Butchart Gardens of British Columbia, Canada, we ran into a large tour group from Japan. There is a place in the garden where you walk up a slight incline, and then, very suddenly, you see open below you, at the bottom of the former quarry, an absolute riot of barely disciplined color and form. It is impossible not to gasp and smile--and the Japanese tourists did not disappoint in this respect. They are not immune from the message of the Western garden, which takes advantage of the wide open spaces and low population densities which prevail here.
Art is a means by which we can communicate values without saying a word. We can tell a great deal about someone by discovering just what it is in art that appeals to him.
I guess most people know that Islam, as so forcefully stated by Khomeini, forbids all music whatsoever. What he understood from his own experience in France is that music can lift one's spirits. It goes directly to the "emotional" right brain, without first being processed by the "logical" left brain. In short, it can bypass the virulent anti-life program of Islam, and momentarily give those living under its heel an "emotional vacation" from its repressive commands.
Can't have that, now, can we?
It's no puzzle that Muslims destroy ancient Buddhist (etc.) statues, and won't permit any art of their own to represent life. They understand very well that their own anti-life philosophy cannot tolerate any exhultation of life.
It's also no puzzle that art--esthetics--is one of the five major branches of philosophy; it's that important.
Mu hat is off to these musicians. They know the seriousness of the threats, yet they make music. May whoever wants to bomb them blow up himself far from anyone else he wishes to harm.
cubed-
Masterfully put.
Aesthetics under Islam turned to curlicues on tiles to sublimate their constricted spirits.
All because one tin-eared dictator walked into someone's tent, saw a drawing stitched in the design on a pillow, and was offended for God that humans dared be creative.
Like Hitler's saying about modern Art:
"Anyone who paints a green field blue should be locked up!"
(That would be every child on Earth.)
No imagination allowed!
Islam's fatal flaw.
This is such a sad story. Seventy-three musicians desperately wanting to play, even under death threats. If they are stopped, how bleak life would be for them, to be denied the freedom to express themselves through music!
It has this winning feeling in it. The music makes you feel a winner, somehow
It makes you feel, that's the problem. Feeling anything in Islam is verboten. You're not supposed to feel under submission. Just mechanically, automatically operate. Do this, say that, don't do this, face this way, step that way, etc.
Their "prophet" knew what he was doing, when he invented this "religion". Keep everyone joyless so that you can convince them to do your bidding, for the reward of promised joy in the afterlife. (For men, that is. Still haven't figured out what fun women have in "paradise" other than watching their husbands bonk everything in sight.) If they got too preoccupied or enthralled with the joy of creativity and beauty while alive, they'd not want to risk their lives slaughtering and pillaging for you.
“It has this will of survival,”
Which is why orchestras are credited with the survival of some musicians in concentration camps. Although there was also the factor of the guards forming those orchestras in the first place for their own entertainment.
But that was not the case in the "voice" orchestras formed by the women interned by the Japanese in camps such as Irenelaan and Palembang, described in "Women beyond the Wire" by Warner & Sandilands pub.Hamlyn 1982.
Or the concerts and recitals of besieged Leningrad.