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Wednesday, 20 December 2017
Monday, 18 December 2017
The Opening
Ivan Prskalo’s offce was full of bleeding Christs and weeping Marys. Chequered Croatian fags were on each side of the door. The mayor of ‘Croat’ West Mostar greeted me wearing a shiny blue suit. This divided town had two mayors: Prskalo on the west side and Safet Oručević on the east. I was there to invite Prskalo to the opening of the Pavarotti Centre. This was an important political act, as the centre would only work if it had support from both of Mostar’s communities.
His secretary placed a tray of coffee and biscuits on a side table. Before leaving the room, she turned down the volume on the Spice Girls. Unsurprisingly, the brand of biscuits were Paprenjaci whose wrappers said, ‘These cookies refect Croatia’s history, combining the nation’s suffering – pepper, with its natural beauties – honey.’
Prskalo told me it was offensive to be invited to the east side of his home town by an Englishman. I wanted to answer that people didn’t normally bomb their homes, but I felt that it was better to be diplomatic. I said that I was English, but I was of Scottish and Welsh ancestry with a Jewish frst name and a Christian family name, but that I was neither Jewish nor Christian nor, strictly speaking, English. Instead, I told him that my ex- wife was Croatian, that my children were half-Croatian, that I had made a flm for the BBC and Croatian TV about the war there and that my association with the country stretched back more than a quarter of a century.
It was a short meeting. As I walked down the corridor, I could hear the volume being turned up on the Spice Girls’ ‘Who Do You Think You Are’.
A week later, Safet Oručević’s office rang to say that both mayors would attend the opening and that they’d visit the centre together the next day.
I gave them a tour of the building and invited them to my offce. I had placed a large plate of baklava on my desk and, as we sat down, Hamid, the bar manager, came in carrying a tray with a Bosnian copper coffee jug and three small porcelain cups. All very Ottoman.
Prskalo turned to Oručević . ‘Doesn’t Mr Wilson look young for his ffty-two years? That is because he is married to a Croatian woman.’
‘No,’ I answered. ‘It is because I divorced one.’
Oručević laughed. Prskalo said he had another meeting to go to.
After he left the room, Orucevic smiled. ‘Don’t worry. He’ll be at the opening.’
Ivan Prskalo was never going to be my friend. We had already been criticised for calling the centre ‘Muzički Centar Pavarotti’ because the Croats had recently discovered an ancient Croat word for music, glazba. They were offended that we were not using that in place of a word recognised from Beijing to Buenos Aires.
Soon after the wars in former Yugoslavia, politicians from all sides actively ‘xenophobised’ their languages. Antun Vrdoljak, Croatian TV chief in the 1990s, declared that,‘Language preserves the nation’s history and culture ... language is the womb.’ At its worst, the Croatian Education Minister, Jasna Gotovac, said, ‘The fght for our language and culture is a part of the war.’ Alija Isakovic, a linguist who published a Bosnian language dictionary in besieged Sarajevo warned against a purge of Turkish words. ‘If they do,’ he said, ‘none of them will have a kidney.’ The common word for kidney being bubreg.
This might all seem to be archaic thinking, but this process applied to contemporary words as well. In Croatia, ‘helikopter’ was to be zrakomlat, ‘telefon’ – brzoglas, ‘aeroport’ – zra na luka; making the internationally comprehensible into a jumble of incomprehension. Behind arguments over words, there was something much darker. The radio station on the west side questioned why we’d built the centre on the ‘Muslim’ side of town, an accusation repeated when my old friend Darko Glavan visited me and said, ‘There are too many Muslims here.’ ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘and there were too many Jews in the Warsaw ghetto.’
Oslobodenje, the Sarajevo daily newspaper, asked me to contribute an article on the situation in Mostar. II decided to deliver my piece in person. I was eager to visit them and meet their staff. I had briefy visited their offce after it had been shelled and they were operating from a bomb shelter. I hoped to see they now had better circumstances.
When there, I told them of my experiences in Mostar. One of the journalists told me, ‘Only
three things grow there: snakes, stones and fascists.’1
The atmosphere at the Pavarotti Music Centre in the days leading up to the opening was documented by Pay-Uun Hiu, writing in the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant:
‘Director David Wilson does not waste time on greetings and formal chit-chat. Six days before the offcial festive opening on December 21 ... time is running out ... “Just follow me,” says Wilson, while running on the shiny-tiled foor through the courtyard to one of the performing areas, “we’re just unpacking a grand piano”. At the same time, he explains about the building: the central courtyard where a fountain still has to be placed, a section for music education, a special section for music therapy, rehearsal areas, concert areas and a professional recording studio in the basement. Finally, there are two apartments in the semi-circled towers on the top-foor. These are meant mainly for guests, but Wilson also wants to use one of them as a healing and meditation area ... “It sounds romantic,” Wilson says, “but Mostar lost its bridge and the Music Centre could well be a new bridge, a bridge to the future, a bridge between music cultures, a bridge to the peace.”’2
Six weeks before the opening, Nicoletta Mantovani visited us. She wanted to check on progress with the building. I took her inside where the floors of the reception area and bar were still being laid.
‘Are you sure it will be ready, David?’ she asked.
‘Of course it will be,’ I said as I stumbled over a pile of bricks.
In fact, I was as worried as she was. We’d had endless delays and problems with the construction company, Hydrogradnja. But I had put my faith in Mike Lawless who seemed to be practically living in Mostar. He and the local team were doing their best to make sure the building would be completed to the contract schedule.
Mostar does not have the snows of Sarajevo and central Bosnia, but it does have rains and vicious winds which sweep down from the east into the Mediterranean plain of the Neretva Valley. The forecast was bad for December 21st, the day of the opening.
Pavarotti, Bono, Eno, Zucchero, Paddy Malone of the Chieftains, Bianca Jagger and half the Italian press were to arrive in Split on a chartered plane that had set off late from Stansted. It was to pick up Pavarotti and his party from Bologna for its fight across the Adriatic to Split in Croatia. There, the British military had arranged for two Chinook helicopters to bring them all to Mostar.
Until the last minute, we were unsure whether Pavarotti would agree to fy. A few years before, he’d been in a helicopter crash in South America. He was understandably nervous, but he’d told Nicoletta that he would not let the children down and nothing would stop him from opening the centre that carried his name.
The weather closed in. Rumours spread through the building that the Chinooks were unable to make the journey. We later found out that the pilots had been so concerned they almost didn’t make the journey. They fnally decided to fy the long way into Mostar. Instead of taking the direct route over the mountains, they followed the coastline south and headed inland up the Neretva Valley.
By mid-afternoon, the streets were packed with children and young people waiting for the Maestro’s arrival. The building was full to bursting. When I stepped out into the street to see if Pavarotti had arrived, I saw Spanish APCs and thought this must be one of the few occasions in history when the opening of a cultural centre was protected by soldiers.
The delayed fights meant that it was going to be a long wait and that Pavarotti and his party would only have time for a quick visit. The chartered plane had a 7pm deadline for its return from Split to London, via Italy. Meanwhile, my job was to keep the guests of honour happy as they sat waiting in a draughty hall. In the front rows were Bosnian politicians, diplomats and military brass and I was horrifed to see that there were not enough chairs. Mohamed Sacirbey, Bosnia’s UN Ambassador, and Safet Oručević made light of it and stood at the back in good humour. Ivan Prskalo decided that he was not to be outdone in this display of civic populism. Unsmiling, he stood up and offered his chair to someone else.
The atmosphere at the Pavarotti Music Centre in the days leading up to the opening was documented by Pay-Uun Hiu, writing in the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant:
‘Director David Wilson does not waste time on greetings and formal chit-chat. Six days before the offcial festive opening on December 21 ... time is running out ... “Just follow me,” says Wilson, while running on the shiny-tiled foor through the courtyard to one of the performing areas, “we’re just unpacking a grand piano”. At the same time, he explains about the building: the central courtyard where a fountain still has to be placed, a section for music education, a special section for music therapy, rehearsal areas, concert areas and a professional recording studio in the basement. Finally, there are two apartments in the semi-circled towers on the top-foor. These are meant mainly for guests, but Wilson also wants to use one of them as a healing and meditation area ... “It sounds romantic,” Wilson says, “but Mostar lost its bridge and the Music Centre could well be a new bridge, a bridge to the future, a bridge between music cultures, a bridge to the peace.”’2
Six weeks before the opening, Nicoletta Mantovani visited us. She wanted to check on progress with the building. I took her inside where the floors of the reception area and bar were still being laid.
‘Are you sure it will be ready, David?’ she asked.
‘Of course it will be,’ I said as I stumbled over a pile of bricks.
In fact, I was as worried as she was. We’d had endless delays and problems with the construction company, Hydrogradnja. But I had put my faith in Mike Lawless who seemed to be practically living in Mostar. He and the local team were doing their best to make sure the building would be completed to the contract schedule.
Mostar does not have the snows of Sarajevo and central Bosnia, but it does have rains and vicious winds which sweep down from the east into the Mediterranean plain of the Neretva Valley. The forecast was bad for December 21st, the day of the opening.
Pavarotti, Bono, Eno, Zucchero, Paddy Malone of the Chieftains, Bianca Jagger and half the Italian press were to arrive in Split on a chartered plane that had set off late from Stansted. It was to pick up Pavarotti and his party from Bologna for its fight across the Adriatic to Split in Croatia. There, the British military had arranged for two Chinook helicopters to bring them all to Mostar.
Until the last minute, we were unsure whether Pavarotti would agree to fy. A few years before, he’d been in a helicopter crash in South America. He was understandably nervous, but he’d told Nicoletta that he would not let the children down and nothing would stop him from opening the centre that carried his name.
The weather closed in. Rumours spread through the building that the Chinooks were unable to make the journey. We later found out that the pilots had been so concerned they almost didn’t make the journey. They fnally decided to fy the long way into Mostar. Instead of taking the direct route over the mountains, they followed the coastline south and headed inland up the Neretva Valley.
By mid-afternoon, the streets were packed with children and young people waiting for the Maestro’s arrival. The building was full to bursting. When I stepped out into the street to see if Pavarotti had arrived, I saw Spanish APCs and thought this must be one of the few occasions in history when the opening of a cultural centre was protected by soldiers.
The delayed fights meant that it was going to be a long wait and that Pavarotti and his party would only have time for a quick visit. The chartered plane had a 7pm deadline for its return from Split to London, via Italy. Meanwhile, my job was to keep the guests of honour happy as they sat waiting in a draughty hall. In the front rows were Bosnian politicians, diplomats and military brass and I was horrifed to see that there were not enough chairs. Mohamed Sacirbey, Bosnia’s UN Ambassador, and Safet Oručević made light of it and stood at the back in good humour. Ivan Prskalo decided that he was not to be outdone in this display of civic populism. Unsmiling, he stood up and offered his chair to someone else.
As rain fell diagonally against the windows, young people had formed a conga line in the courtyard, dancing to Eugene Skeef’s drummers. Quite a few of the notables looked as if they wished they weren’t Minister of this or that for a day so they could join in.
The plan was for Pavarotti to visit the Special School on the road into town, but with the delays, the children there were told they would have to walk up a muddy path to the main road since he only had time for a brief stop. As the entourage approached, they started to sing. His car came to a halt and so did the singing as they watched him open his door and embrace them with a laugh and a huge smile.3
Two hours late, Pavarotti entered the building, one arm around Nicoletta, the other over Bono’s shoulder. I greeted him at the door and he kissed me. There were tears in his eyes. His only words were a whispered, ‘Thank you, thank you.’ As he entered the hall, even the politicians’ faces lit up as the cheering started.
The children danced and sang. Adin Omerović , aged nine, remembers this:
‘I, together with my classmates, practised a song to perform for the opening of the Pavarotti Music Centre. I had heard of plans for the Centre, but I could not dream that I would be there or near to Pavarotti. At the end of the song, “Big Bam Boo”, I gave Luciano Pavarotti a fower. I still remember that day when we waited for him so long and I cannot forget how strong my heart was beating after his speech. He said, ‘Grazie, grazie,’ I still remember that. I got a toy from him which I still have. I would like to have more memories like this one. Thank you very much, Pavarotti.’
Weeks earlier, children had decorated the art room with their hand prints. This gave us the idea to have Pavarotti and the other guests place theirs under the tablet we had had made to commemorate the opening. We arranged for trays of paint to be prepared for this. When Pavarotti’s head of security saw two children standing at the side with the paint, he told me that the last time this had happened was at an Italian school and paint had ended up on Pavarotti’s clothes. I was about to order the graffti exercise cancelled when, to my horror, the children stepped through the crowd just as Pavarotti, Bono and Brian Eno were unveiling the memorial. Pavarotti gleefully covered his hands with poster paint, followed by the others. Luckily, no one’s clothes were splashed.
I then had to get Pavarotti upstairs for the press conference. I pushed my way through the crowd to arrange for the lift to take him up. It was full. Its occupants included the Swiss Ambassador and a German army general. Unceremoniously, I ordered them out to let the Maestro enter.
Before the conference, I’d made sure that there were spaces on the dais reserved for Pavarotti, Bono and a child. As I entered the hall, I saw there were not enough chairs. Tom Stoppard saw my face and vacated his. Bono picked up the child and sat him on his knee.
I was now being told that the party had to leave for the Chinooks in five minutes. There was only time for Pavarotti to say, ‘My message is peace. You saw the horror of war – you see today the peace. The future now is in the hands of the children who will soon be grown up. Try to live in peace. That is the reason why we are here today.’
It was then a dash back to the lift and just enough time to give Pavarotti and Bono a quick visit to the studio in the basement. ‘Ciao,’ Luciano called out as he was pushed into the street by an increasingly nervous military escort. He was gone.
Some months later, I asked Pavarotti if he would send his memories of the day to us and he wrote this:
‘It is no exaggeration to say that visiting Mostar that day was truly one of the most beautiful moments of my life. For two years, we had been raising funds through concerts and albums to build the Music Centre and to eventually see its completion, and to witness some of the beautiful and talented children of Mostar performing for us on their inaugural day was simply a joy. The children that day were so very patient. We were delayed on our journey by something beyond our control, the weather! But, when we eventually arrived in the beautiful city that was overwhelming, and the people of Mostar certainly proved that they have something very special that is their future. Those children are an example to us all and a tribute to Mostar. If music is central to a person’s life, it can be something very special and life-affrming. The Music Centre was built for the children – I can only hope that making music helps in the healing process and that it will bring joy to the children of Mostar for many, many years to come.’
The next morning I spent time with Tom Stoppard before taking him to Sarajevo where he was to spend the night before his return fight to London. We walked through the town. He was silent and didn’t seem happy. After he returned home, he wrote to say that he’d felt uncomfortable to be a feeting visitor to a place of such suffering.4
I sat with him in the lobby of the Hotel Bosna in Sarajevo while Anne went to our room to pack. She is a militant non- smoker and I had to hide my bad habit from her. As the lift’s glass doors shut on her, I asked Tom for a cigarette. I said that if I was still smoking when the lift came down with Anne, I’d pass it to him. He happily agreed and spent the time staring at the 1960s light fittings, commenting that this lobby would make an excellent stage set for a play.
As he was talking, I saw the light from the descending lift. It was Anne. I passed my half- smoked cigarette to Tom, but he’d just lit up himself. The doors opened, Tom sitting there smiling broadly, a cigarette in each hand. He stubbed one out as Anne approached. She told me later that she’d watched it all.
Murray McCullough, Chief Administrator at the Office of the High Representative in Mostar, had been responsible for the logistics of bringing Pavarotti into town. He wrote about the opening and started with a quote from Shakespeare.
‘“There is a tide in the affairs of man which, if taken at the food, leads on to victory.” On the most surreal of days, out of the mists of an extraordinary wet and cold December afternoon descended a war helicopter into the war zone that is Mostar, with cargo, to open a music centre for a charity called War Child. It was not surprising then that its famous passenger, the Maestro, should be a little nervous. Surrounded by diplomats, photographers and soldiers, he left, tense and confused, in a convoy for a tour of the city, all the time fghting with his mobile phone to reassure his mother of his safety but, like the weather, communications were bad. Still he tried, nervous, his eyes staring, his face contorted with anguish. After a while, the convoy stopped before a crowd of noisy, freezing and impatient children at the school for children with special needs. They had been there for hours, but they knew this was a special day and they had come to embrace the heart of a great man, but still the mobile took centre stage. From the steaming happy mess stepped the smallest child, blessed but free of the deferential fears that surround normal children. He climbed, as if by right, into the vehicle. Slowly, but with consummate gentleness, he ran his little toy down the cheek of the anguished face to say hello in the only way he knew. ‘Mr Pavarotti,’ said Bono, ‘these are the children of Mostar with special needs. They have been waiting for you for a long time.’ As if by a miracle, a ray of light descended, the staring and frozen eyes melted as though touched by a sunbeam. The lips parted to an immense smile, the contorted face opened the windows of the real world that is Mostar and its children. Pavarotti had at last arrived and was in full food.’
NOTES
1 Article in Oslobodjenje: ‘I understand that there have been criticisms from some politicians concerning the Pavarotti Music Centre – that it is too full of “Muslims”. Let us start with the use of the word “Muslim”. I am a Celt of Scottish and Welsh ancestry, with an English cultural background. I have a Jewish first name and a Christian family name, but am neither Jewish nor Christian, nor even, strictly speaking, English. I am still amazed that, at the far end of the twentieth century, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, where all people seem to be very much alike and where many are of mixed parentage, two groups are defined in terms of nationality (Croats and Serbs) while a third group is defined in terms of religion. This leaves aside the number of families of mixed parentage.
It would be amusing, if not so tragic, that ethnic definitions are based on the father’s name and not
the mother’s. Why is a person defined as Muslim, Croat or Serb based on the male lineage when
the mother might well be from one or the other of the newly selected ethnic groups? There is a
missing logic here. That missing logic continues with criticisms of this Centre which has been set
up for everyone, regardless of cultural, ethnic or religious background. As Director, I wish to involve
all children and young people in our work since my own family is partly Croatian and I have a long
and strong connection with Croatia. It is, of course, true to say that there are a lot of people with
Muslim names in the Centre; hardly surprising considering what has happened in Mostar. This
criticism is like saying that the Warsaw Ghetto was full of Jews. Yes, it was, and why were they
there? Despite the continuing and shameful existence of the Mostar Ghetto, we at the Pavarotti
Music Centre are determined to open the doors of this place to everyone. Those who criticise us
will be disappointed to hear that many Croatian young people come here every day. Two weeks
ago, we organised a percussion and performance evening led by our Director of Music
Development (Eugene Skeef – mixed Zulu/Xhosa). Over 200 people were present, one third of
them from the west side of town. From the west, we also have groups who regularly attend our
rock school and we have been actively recruiting young Croats to join our team of guardians who
look after the building during the day. In addition, the Centre carries out a considerable amount of
work on the west side, with percussion workshops in two youth centres and we act as a meeting
place for youth organisations from across the city and from as far away as apljina and Grude. This
is a role we have recently taken on from the OSCE. We would do more. We would like to extend
our music school work into western Herzegovina, working alongside the music schools in the west.
It is politicians who make this impossible at the moment. I would also remind the public that the
PMC is a War Child initiative, that our very first programme was a mobile bakery which started its
work feeding refugees in Medjugorje. We have also been a major supplier of diabetic medicines in
West Mostar and western Herzegovina. We have, in collaboration with the Croatian Government,
recently constructed an extension to the kindergarten in Pakrac (Croatia). Has all this been
forgotten? We work in other parts of Bosnia Herzegovina: in Sarajevo, Gorazde, in hospitals in
Fojnica and Pazari where, happily, we do not have to watch our backs quite so much as here in
Mostar with criticisms of those we are working with. We have recently started work with young
people in Republika Srpska. We do all possible to encourage attendance from all sides at the
Centre and offer transportation to those who feel uncertain about coming here. Their uncertainty
has nothing to do with fear of this place, but has more to do with what might and, on occasions,
has happened to them when they return home. I would suggest that those who care to criticise us,
take a good look at their actions and the behaviour of those in responsible positions, the police
force for example, before telling anyone that the Pavarotti Music Centre is full of “Muslims”. Those
politicians and others who claim to be so proud of their ethnicity have history against them. Take a
good look around the world – that is if you are prepared to raise your eyes from the puddle of your
and other people’s tears – and you will see that the greatest cultures of the world, the greatest
literature, the greatest philosophies, art and music have been the result of a meeting of times,
places, minds and peoples. To our critics I say, come to the Pavarotti Music Centre and you will be
welcome guests. To those already coming here, I say that you have no reason to stop coming and,
to those who have not yet come to the Centre, you are missing something that has been absent in
all your lives for far too long – music and joy.’
2 de Volkskrant, Pay-Uun Hiu, (December 1997): ‘Music Centre? Yes, yes. Of course, the taxi driver knows where to find it. Everybody in East Mostar knows it. Pavarotti, says the taxi driver and laughs. He points out at the bombed-out buildings. Boom, boom, he says. While driving over the newly-erected bridge, his hands move in a big circle around the steering wheel and form a big V; he seems to want to explain how the bridge was destroyed. Boom, boom. Then he stops the car in
2 de Volkskrant, Pay-Uun Hiu, (December 1997): ‘Music Centre? Yes, yes. Of course, the taxi driver knows where to find it. Everybody in East Mostar knows it. Pavarotti, says the taxi driver and laughs. He points out at the bombed-out buildings. Boom, boom, he says. While driving over the newly-erected bridge, his hands move in a big circle around the steering wheel and form a big V; he seems to want to explain how the bridge was destroyed. Boom, boom. Then he stops the car in
front of a brand-new yellow facade with terracotta ornaments, an unlikely fairy tale palace amidst
the ruins; the Muzicki Centar Pavarotti which came to life at the initiative of the international aid
organisation, War Child. The funds for the building, seven million Deutschmarks, were mainly
raised by Luciano Pavarotti. Together with Brian Eno, and U2’s Bono, he organised big charity
concerts. Their song “Miss Sarajevo” alone raised £300,000. Director David Wilson does not waste
time on greetings and formal chit-chat. Six days before the official festive opening on December
21, which will include Pavarotti, many other famous musicians and three hundred children, time is
running out. The building was designed by British architects and arose from the ruins of an old
primary school. The interior decoration, however, is far from finished. “Just follow me,” says
Wilson, while running on the shiny tiled floor through the courtyard to one of the performing areas,
“we’re just unpacking a grand piano”. At the same time he explains about the building: the central
courtyard where a fountain still has to be placed, a section for music education, a special section
for music therapy, rehearsal areas, concert areas and a professional recording studio in the
basement. Finally, there are two apartments in the semi-circled towers on the top-floor. These are
meant mainly for guests, but Wilson also wants to use one of them as a healing and meditation
area. This is Oha, says Wilson. Oha, very tall, crew cut, nineteen-years-old. He has impressively
big hands with the nails painfully bitten off. He is the best djembe player in the whole of Bosnia,
says Wilson. But Oha has more to offer. When he was 14, he was one of the youngest soldiers in
the Bosnian army yet now he is one of the local helpers at the Centre. Oha and a group of other
teenagers formed a club during the war for cultural activities, called Apeiron (from Greek
philosophy: the Unending). Oha and his friends are both target groups and future cornerstones of
the Music Centre. Of course the PMC also works with much younger children, but youngsters like
Oha cannot be missed as interpreters, future workshop leaders and with the fieldwork in schools in
and around Mostar. For these youths, the workshops and their other work for the Centre are an
escape from the depressing void the war has left. War Child’s philosophy is to finance and run the
centre for another two years, and at the same time educate enough local helpers to take over and
continue the work afterwards. This Sunday, Oha is very stressed, notes Eugene Skeef during the
drum workshop. Skeef, born in South Africa and former co-worker of Steve Biko in the seventies, is
a phenomenal drummer and has an equally phenomenal gift for music communication. In the small
room, with a view of the strip of land where an aromatic herb garden is planned to bloom, it is
impossible not to hear the forceful call of Skeef’s djembe. With Skeef there is no place for quasi-
serious or quasi-creative playing. “Focus,” he demands, while rolling his dreadlocks into a ponytail.
“Do not play before I ask you to! Concentrate! Watch each other. We want to get into the spirit of
the music.” Gradually the workshop takes on the air of an almost magical ritual. Every single player
gets into the rhythm of his own rhythmic pattern which corresponds with the rhythmical pattern of
the djembe trio formed by Skeef, Oha and Peter Vilk, a young English drummer and music
psychologist. Through repetition of the pattern not a single part of the body is left unaffected by the
sound. The lower djembe tones go right through your diaphragm and with their long waves provide
a feeling of stability and calmness. The higher tones in the faster patterns work directly on the
muscles and absorb all the concentration until everybody’s attention is solely focused on the
music. When this level of concentration has been reached, Skeef increases the intensity and
complexity. He not only increases the tempo, but also the difficult rhythmic combinations and the
tempo in which the patterns change. With extreme precision he moves every participant just a tiny
bit over their limits, while stimulating them with his djembe. His voice has become like a hurricane:
power, power, man! Keep going! Keep watching! Hands no longer feel pain, legs and feet are
moving by themselves. Then Skeef lets his drummers go. The rhythms slow down and the
drummers become Bosnian kids again. “Relax, relax. That was real power energy, man,” he says.
Oha’s day has been made. He feels great after the workshop. Although Skeef wasn’t easy on him.
“I know you’re under great pressure,” he had said, “and that everybody demands a great deal from
you. Oha, please help us with the piano, Oha, could you take those things there and there. But you
are a musician and we still have to practise a lot before the opening. Practise, practise, practise,”
Skeef had stressed. “You know,” Oha later tells us while sitting on the battered old couch in
Wilson’s house, “it is like there is more and more growing noise inside my head which can be
exorcised by the drumming.” Afterwards it is quiet again and he has a moment of peace.
Meanwhile the small living room is getting crowded and becoming more like a youth hostel.
Everybody helps themselves to beer, coffee and tea. “I more or less adopted them,” Wilson
acknowledges. It is a bit unpractical to keep up the beer stock all the time, but guys like Oha, Teo
or Crnji just don’t have any other place where they feel at home. Wilson sees himself a “teacher,
failed entrepreneur, manager and incidental playwright”. At the end of 1992 he and film-maker Bill
Leeson went to Zagreb to make a film about the war in Croatia, where his wife was born. Back in
London he and Leeson founded War Child, named after a play Wilson once wrote. They organised
a three-day benefit festival at the Royal Festival Hall, with artists like Julian Lloyd Webber. Their
ideas about giving aid shaped the War Child philosophy, which contrasts sharply with the old
colonial “we-relief- workers-know-what-is-good-for-you” mentality. Wilson, “if you are serious about
doing something, for starters you have to become part of the community and then really listen to
what is being requested instead of telling them what they need.” Already during the war a bakery
was set up in Mostar providing 15,000 people a day with bread. An insulin transport was set up for
diabetic children and what became evident with all the visits was the repeated demand for music.
As soon as the electricity was working again after a failure, children would immediately turn on
their radios and play their CDs. War Child always left with a huge list of requests and came back
with dozens of CDs and cassettes for the local radio. “Music forms an essential part in giving aid,”
Wilson determined. “Of course you need food and medicine, but you have to strive and keep
people ‘human’ in an inhumane situation.” The idea to deal with this request for music more
systematically and to use music as a “healing force” came after War Child met up with Nigel
Osborne in Sarajevo in 1994. Nigel, as intimates know is “larger than life”. It is true that the
composer and professor in music science at the University of Edinburgh and the University of
Hanover is a very tall figure with glasses, a beard and an impressive amount of untameable hair in
the nostrils. Yet his reputation is mostly derived from the music workshops he organised in the
basements of Sarajevo during the war. With his backpack filled with maracas, triangles,
woodblocks, crotales and other instruments, he “sneaked” his way through the only good route to
the city under siege; across Mount Igman, slipping by the snipers in the dark, through the tunnel at
the airport. In the city Osborne set up different instrument depots, like soldiers do for their
weapons. Through the “bush-telegraph” the time and place where workshops were taught was
announced. At the workshops, for instance, he used a poem by Goran Simi¬, with whom he made
a rock-opera which premiered in Sarajevo in 1995. “The end of the war is half an hour too late,” the
children sang, after three hours of democratic composing and orchestrating, for a public of 40 or
50. At present, Osborne (Head of the Music Department) and Skeef (Head of Music Development)
are mainly responsible for the artistic content of the Music Centre. Osborne provides the typical
Western European, academic approach and he wants to set up a clinical music therapy
department with the help of medical specialists, focusing mainly on the treatment of trauma. At this
moment his postgraduate students are already working at schools in the Mostar region with a
programme combining music education and healing, where Skeef’s African background is
indispensable. Tuesday morning, one day later than planned, the first class of school children
arrives at the new building to practise for the grand opening. Oha is there. “You know,” Oha had
stated before, “I was an impossible child.” His parents’ marriage was not great and he had “fire in
his body”. The war seemed exciting. “You are only a child, what do you know about it.” His father
was forced to flee to Germany and Oha became a soldier and fought on the Mostar front line. “It’s
because of all the films on TV,” he thinks, looking back. “There you have heroes like the
Terminator and children want to be like their heroes.” He says he was lucky. That doesn’t apply to
all his friends. Some of them are gone for good, others he lost sight of because they were Croat.
Just recently he ran into an old friend at the west side of the city. They talked and laughed as they
had done in the old days, but it was not the same any more. “Everything seems the same, but it is
not the same. Everything has changed,” he notices daily. But music also changed his life. Eugene
Skeef changed his life. After the war Oha went to Italy with other members of Apeiron. He just
observed, observed a lot. The sea, the forests, the land. Kilometres of wide, safe areas. It brought
calmness and in this calmness he decided he wanted to be a musician and work with children. And
that he wanted children of his own and a close family life. Yet mostly, he wanted to live. For the
first time, children’s voices are heard in the high, light atmosphere of the Centre. The cleaning
crew, the carpenters, the bricklayers and staff of the music centre are standing around the
balustrades and glass doors looking around and enjoying the site. The children sing and Crnji, with
his long black hair and known for his silent cigarette smoking, depicts, while flapping his arms, a
bird spreading his wings across the ocean. Teo, who was interrogated about the whereabouts of
his father during a surprise attack, and who then witnessed his father’s murder and now has a hard
time falling asleep, plays the snare drum while Oha plays his djembe. Just for a while they are no
longer tough guys. They are no longer soldiers. They are back in what is left of their childhood. “It
sounds romantic,” Wilson knows, “but Mostar lost its bridge and the Music Centre could well be a
new bridge, figuratively speaking: a bridge to the future, a bridge between music cultures, a bridge
to the peace.”’
3 Tiffany Hughes, PMC music therapist: ‘It was cold, wet and almost dark, but we had to bear it. Pavarotti and his entourage would stop here first to hear the children of the Special School. The children were excited, clutching the toys they had been given by the Maestro and Nicoletta Mantovani. We waited, receiving conflicting information about the time of arrival, not knowing whether to take the children up the road or keep them by the school. They were growing restless and the atmosphere lay at the fine line between elation and frustration. Adrenaline ran high, mine and theirs, for different reasons. Through the rain in the distance, with a powerful serenity, descended two helicopters. This was a sign for me of how long we had to make our decision. None of the children noticed. By now they were singing their way through every song that we had ever taught them. The decision was made to take them to the road so that they would be nearer Pavarotti. We ran in the rain and discovered there was only a muddy strip of wasteland for us to occupy, but it was better than being fenced in. More waiting. I thought the moment would never come, but at long last a slow procession of vehicles approached us. The children sang for all they could, only until the cars stopped. A door opened and in the damp, cold night, a great beaming warmth drew in the children with his smile. The voices drifted off into an amazed gasp and shrieks of excitement. The song was lost, but it no longer seemed appropriate anyway. Whatever the Maestro actually felt at this point, all he showed these children was his heart. They hadn’t noticed the helicopters, but no one could miss how the smile dispelled the cold and the waiting. Pavarotti had arrived in Mostar and these children, if any, deserved his attention first.’
4 Letter from Tom Stoppard: ‘The thing I will remember longest is the long straight road which was the walk from the Music Centre back to the hotel; walking the gauntlet between ruins shelled and shot to pieces, trying to imagine what it must have been like. Knowing it was impossible to imagine. Someone pointed out a place where a dance class continued to practise underground during the fighting. I didn’t feel comfortable in Mostar: to have suffered nothing and to be made a fuss of by people who suffered much, and lost so much, and now had regained so much between the ruins, is not comfortable. I only felt normal with children too young to remember anything; and how young those had to be. But – somehow – the experience was uplifting too.’
3 Tiffany Hughes, PMC music therapist: ‘It was cold, wet and almost dark, but we had to bear it. Pavarotti and his entourage would stop here first to hear the children of the Special School. The children were excited, clutching the toys they had been given by the Maestro and Nicoletta Mantovani. We waited, receiving conflicting information about the time of arrival, not knowing whether to take the children up the road or keep them by the school. They were growing restless and the atmosphere lay at the fine line between elation and frustration. Adrenaline ran high, mine and theirs, for different reasons. Through the rain in the distance, with a powerful serenity, descended two helicopters. This was a sign for me of how long we had to make our decision. None of the children noticed. By now they were singing their way through every song that we had ever taught them. The decision was made to take them to the road so that they would be nearer Pavarotti. We ran in the rain and discovered there was only a muddy strip of wasteland for us to occupy, but it was better than being fenced in. More waiting. I thought the moment would never come, but at long last a slow procession of vehicles approached us. The children sang for all they could, only until the cars stopped. A door opened and in the damp, cold night, a great beaming warmth drew in the children with his smile. The voices drifted off into an amazed gasp and shrieks of excitement. The song was lost, but it no longer seemed appropriate anyway. Whatever the Maestro actually felt at this point, all he showed these children was his heart. They hadn’t noticed the helicopters, but no one could miss how the smile dispelled the cold and the waiting. Pavarotti had arrived in Mostar and these children, if any, deserved his attention first.’
4 Letter from Tom Stoppard: ‘The thing I will remember longest is the long straight road which was the walk from the Music Centre back to the hotel; walking the gauntlet between ruins shelled and shot to pieces, trying to imagine what it must have been like. Knowing it was impossible to imagine. Someone pointed out a place where a dance class continued to practise underground during the fighting. I didn’t feel comfortable in Mostar: to have suffered nothing and to be made a fuss of by people who suffered much, and lost so much, and now had regained so much between the ruins, is not comfortable. I only felt normal with children too young to remember anything; and how young those had to be. But – somehow – the experience was uplifting too.’
Sunday, 10 December 2017
Melanie Friesen wanted to eat my book
When
Melanie Friesen, Martin Scorsese's former head of development, was in
London last year we met at Housmans Bookshop where her old friend,
the late Heathcote Williams, was talking about his book about Boris
Johnson. On her flight home to Vancouver she started reading 'Left
Field' and this is what she later wrote to me.
"A note to say how
much I enjoyed LEFT FIELD. My comments below are a bit trivial, but
they connected me with your writing, so I could be on board
throughout the book. I enjoyed the read and suffered the total
despair of your myriad attempts to get the show on the road with War
Child in spite of so many battles, including egos. What a triumph all
the same.
The childhood in an
autobiography/biography interests me the most because it’s watching
how the seedling grew and seeing what might have influenced it. I
also like to connect to childhood events that the writer mentions, as
it brings me closer to the book.
Also how many books
have notes at the back that are just as interesting as the text?
Some examples with
your book:
Your description and
recipe of your mom’s roast potatoes: My mom wasn’t interested in
cooking, nor in any household activity, so she got several jobs which
interested her very much in order to pay for a housekeeper. I adore
food and the description of these potatoes had me gnawing on the
spine of the book. Luckily I was on the Air Canada flight back to
Vancouver while reading it and the meal on board was so disgusting
that no one found it unusual that I was trying to eat my reading
material (JUST KIDDING!)
The horror and
fascination of you staring at your dad’s concentration camp photos:
Cripes I remember that so well. I think I mentioned that mom’s
whole family except her parents and brother – i.e., her
grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts – were all gassed at
Auschwitz and Theresienstadt. Just the words ARBEIT MACHT FREI give
me the worst chills. So I was with you on that page.
Thomas Dormandy: My
mom was born in Slovakia of Hungarian parents and immigrated to Chile
in 1939. Her mother tongue was Hungarian. In 1956, she worked in
Vancouver at the docks and the airports translating for Hungarian
immigrants and got many of them homes and jobs. As a result, I love
Thomas as much as your dad did. If he is still alive, send him this song, the only Hungarian song I can sing. Nothing brings my
childhood back like this tune (well, that’s not completely true; a
million things bring it back):
“I also got a good grade in history. I couldn’t stand the present so I concentrated on the past.” Utterly, David, utterly, hence me enlisting in Whitechapel guided tours at night about Jack the Ripper. Fuck the shard, bring on St. Paul’s through the mist.
Your Argentinean experiences are exactly that, but I found many of them very Chilean, since I have been there to see family 4 or 5 times. Love that you arrived in Rosario where Che was born. Ever since my Nov. 2015 trip to Cuba, I hold him in even higher esteem than ever.
The para. about the
Muslim and Jewish prohibition on pork – so spot on. The only focus
of all religions is to love one another and do what we can for one
another. What to eat and what not to eat, the coffers of The Vatican
totalling trillions of euros and whipping oneself during Lent are
hardly part of doing unto others and we would like done unto us.
Re: Yoruba having the
highest rate of twin in the world – Wilmette, Illinois has the
highest rate of multiple births in the US – that's where my
identical twin nephews were born. Love it – Yoruba and Wilmette.
The Museum of Broken
Relationships in Zagreb – Never having heard of it, but thinking it
a great idea, I read about it on the internet. I think it must be
very comforting for those who are sad about a break-up to go there
and be comforted by many others who have done same.
Best line in the book
(re: Ivo): “When he played his accordion, he looked as though he
was telling himself a joke.”
You mention Bob
Hoskins – I was an extra in PENNIES FROM HEAVEN since I knew the
producer, Ken Trodd, and I was broke at the time.
You mention Rebecca
West: In 1976 I did some secretarial work for her in her Kensington
flat. She showed me a tea set that Queen Mary had admired and said,
“When royalty said they liked something, one was supposed to gift
them with it. But I didn’t.” She left me my pay on the
mantelpiece but I didn’t take it because I felt sorry for her,
thinking she was old and lonely. What a drip I was, I’m sure she
could afford to pay me and I was so broke.
I love the quotations
that open some of the chapters, my favourite being the one by Milan
Kundera: “… for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not
even one’s own pain weighs as heavy as the pain one feels with
someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and
prolonged by a hundred echoes.” (Although I think it should read,
“weighs as heavy as the pain,” but maybe that was the way it was
translated.)
The quotation from
ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT is also as powerful as it gets. That
was the book/film that turned my mom into a pacifist.
After the enormous
ups and downs of War Child, the simplicity of your, “an injury to
one is an injury to all,” harkens right back to my comment above
re: being religious or spiritual is not about passing on the bacon.
It is this and only this.
“Enid was a wrestling fan and had a friend with whom she went to matches at Wembley …” It’s quite a leap and not at all relevant to your book, but when I worked for Scorsese, he was going to produce a film directed by Dennis Hopper and starring Sean Penn based on the book by Joyce Carol Oates called YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS. It’s about a girl, Enid, who falls into immature love with her Uncle Felix, a boxer: To see you refer to an Enid and wrestling brought the book straight to my mind and the meeting I had with the 3 men mentioned above. The film never happened, too bad – it was the right teams for the story.
Well, the next
Margarita is on me, thank you so very much for giving me your book
and for giving Anne the last say in it!
Love to you both, Melanie XO
You can read my review of Heathcote Williams' book here
You can now buy Left Field for £13 (includes p&p) here
Saturday, 25 November 2017
On Assignment in Mostar
"I remember the Centre was the only bright side in town at that time. The place where we could feel Mostar as it used to be, no divisions in any form.”
DJ Amir Groove
ITV's Julie Etchingham returned to the Pavarotti Music Centre after 20 years, She wrote an
account of her experiences which you
can read here
The Sushi problem is here
You
can read the chapter on the Pavarotti Music Centre in Left Field below
You can now buy Left Field for £13 (includes P&P)
You can now buy Left Field for £13 (includes P&P)
Music and War
The Bible says, ‘In the beginning was the word.’Wrong. First there was the rhythm. From the time of the Big Bang, it is the beat that gives the cosmos its pulse. All else may be
chaos, but it is there in mathematical time, something primordial.1 In one sense, however,
the Bible is right. Man’s first attempt to communicate involved rhythm, movement and
dance which represented the first language, the first word.
At the time of what Engels called ‘primitive communism’, when Homo sapiens were hunter- gatherers, humans signalled to each other by beating stick on stick, stone on stone. The first vocal syllables were whistles and calls based on rhythmic patterns which allowed human communication to take place. Rhythm was there at the start of everything. It was there at the start of our species and is there at the start of our individual lives.2
Whether or not we evolved from the sea, we all emerged from the waters of our mothers, and water is a perfect transmitter of sound. Place a waterproof watch under the surface at one end of a swimming pool. Get there early in the morning when no one else is around. Have a friend swim underwater at the far end of the pool and ask them what they can hear.Both the heart of the foetus and that of the mother beat to a cycle of dash dash, dum dum, dum dum, dum dum. Mother and baby are in syncopated rhythm. Sounds exterior to the womb may also be heard and absorbed by the foetus. Many pregnant women will tell you that they are aware that their babies react to external sounds. So music and rhythm, or rhythm and music to be chronologically correct, are central to our lives. It is a physical and emotional link, both to something in us and beyond us, linking us to the music of the spheres.
Music can move us to extremes of joy or sadness, elation or depression. Perhaps it is a piece we associate with some event in our life: when we first kissed, when we went to our first teenage party, when we first made love. This musical association is strong in all of us. Perhaps it is with Mahler’s ‘Adagietto’, Ali Farka Toure, blues, a song sung by Ella Fitzgerald, an Indian raga, hip-hop or drum and bass. In all types of music we can be emotionally, and even physically, moved.
If you project sound waves at piles of sand, iron filings, water or mercury, you can create varied patterns, from spirals to grids. Given the sound conductivity of water and its high level in the human body, it is hardly surprising that our cells react to sound vibrations, even those at the far end of the spectrum which we are unable to hear. With this knowledge, holistic healers place vibrating forks close to the energy field of the human body and hospitals use high-pitched sound to shatter kidney and gallstones. Conversely, the negative side of the use of sound are experiments undertaken by the US military and other governments, utilising sound waves as instruments of war. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have shown us that music can be a weapon.
Music therapist Olivea Dewhurst-Maddock has argued that the vibrational energies of different notes affect different areas of the body. For instance, C major affects the bones, lower back, legs and feet. D major transmits energy waves to the kidneys and bladder,lymphatic and reproductive systems and skin. A major is related to pain and pain control.3
A few years ago, a friend of mine had major heart surgery. This is what he told me about his recuperation:
‘My post-operative experience was quite disturbing. I’d brought some of my favourite music to listen to in the hospital. I have always been passionate about classical music. My mother and stepfather were professional musicians and I was brought up, from the embryo onwards, listening to Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Haydn and Schubert. Once I was a bit more than an embryo, I learned to play the piano, cello and guitar. During the week following the operation, I lost touch with a lot of things – my sense of taste, smell, my enjoyment of books, but the worst was being cut off from the meaning of music. Something central to my life seemed to have died inside me. I would listen to a Mozart piano concerto; I could understand the harmony and counterpoint, but found no beauty in it, nor could I appreciate its extraordinary passion and inventiveness. Listening to Mozart was like listening to Salieri. That loss and the frequent moments when I burst into tears, for no apparent reason, convinced me that lengthy and violent operations have a much deeper effect on our inner selves than medical science acknowledges. Only part of me was put to sleep. Many levels of my subconscious and my body were awake when the knife cut me open. They went into a state of shock. They switched off. They needed time to mourn. My enjoyment of music now, three years later, is even more intense than before. I don’t know if that comes with age, or whether it is the result of the operation, but it is now a passion only second to my closest relationships.’
Perhaps it is for this reason that in ancient Egypt, the hieroglyph for music was also that for well-being and joy. But what about music in non-joyful situations, in war? When the lights go out and all that is left is hunger and the threat of death, you will still find music.
In 1993 and 1994 I was in cellars in Sarajevo and Mostar. Shells were exploding, the snipers were at work, but people – particularly young people – gathered together and, if they could not listen to music as there was often no power, they played it. The louder the shelling, the louder their music. It was an expression of defiance, a testament to the survival of the one thing that kept them human in an inhuman situation – the primordial language of rhythm and music which connected them to their essence.
A young soldier in Mostar visited me after his time on the front line, a Kalashnikov on one shoulder and a guitar on the other. He tapped the guitar and told me, ‘A much better weapon.’
This young man faced his former classmates across a narrow street, playing music to them when it was too dark to fight. Cigarettes were thrown into the building where he was crouching as he performed for his enemies.
Just before the war ended in 1995, I helped smuggle a Bob Marley photo exhibition into East Mostar. Sponsored by Island Records, we took in tapes and CDs with the photos. The local war radio station broadcast these non-stop for two days from their cellar studio. The exhibition opened underground on the front line. I will never forget how the town pulsed to Marley’s rhythms in the middle of the thuds from incoming shells.
These are examples of overt and easily recognisable influences of music in extreme situations: music as defiance with an external enemy in mind. But what of the influence of music in relationship to the enemy within? What is its effect on the disturbed and traumatised minds of those who have been too close to the barbarism of war, who have shot and killed, have been shot at and wounded, physically and emotionally? Who have seen friends die, who have lost mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters?
The PMC was constructed in East Mostar, a part of the city that had been devastated by two consecutive wars: first in the war of the whole town against Serb forces, then in the much worse war between the Croats on the west bank of the Neretva River and the Bosniaks on the east: former allies that had once formed an alliance to defeat the Serbs. When the Croats brokered a secret deal with the Serbs, the Croats turned on the Bosniaks. Thousands of families were driven into what became a ghetto on the east side of the Neretva River.
The term is ‘ethnic cleansing’, but a more accurate phrase would be ‘ethnic purging’.4 The Bosniaks were forced to live in cellars for ten months, eating grass soup and emerging into the streets only to collect water and, in the case of the young men, to fight. When the Anne Frank exhibition arrived at the Centre in 1998, I was asked to say something at its opening. There was not much to say, only that the Mostar Ghetto had contained thousands of Anne Franks.5
The Centre allowed the healing power of music to enter this community. The young were particularly affected by the war and, from the day the PMC opened its doors, they flooded in. Some of them used music to escape their darkest memories. They would tell me that only when they played, or heard music, could they escape their nightmares.
Children and young people were brought together to make and listen to music: to sing, to beat drums, to strum guitars, to act and react together through music. These workshops took on a structured form, thanks to the work of Nigel Osborne. This was to quickly develop into our successful schools’ outreach programme.
The first schools’ project was called ‘The Oceans’. First, our teachers started with the Neretva which flows through the centre of Mostar. They went to the schools and took with them music from the banks of that river – Croat, Serb and Bosniak songs. On the next visit, the theme became the Mediterranean because the Neretva flows into that sea: Tunisian love songs, flamenco, French, Italian and Greek music. Next, the Atlantic because that is the ocean into which the Mediterranean flows: everything from Brazilian, to blues, to Celtic and West African music. Then the Indian Ocean and, finally, the Pacific. The children became aware that they did not just live in Mostar, or more specifically in the small ghetto of East Mostar, but that their town and river had links to the world.
At the opening of the Centre, some of these children performed a Hawaiian boat dance for Pavarotti. After his long and hazardous helicopter journey across the Balkan winter skies, the Maestro looked puzzled, not knowing why these children had chosen a dance so foreign to their experience.
The Centre employed more than 30 young musicians who travelled to schools and kindergartens in Mostar and the surrounding villages to bring music into the lives of the children. Centre staff also worked in special needs’ schools, the Sarajevo Blind School and in the Srpska Republika.
The Music Therapy department, staffed by the first resident music therapists in Bosnia- Herzegovina, worked with the most disturbed and distressed children. The results were amazing and a credit to a small, dedicated department who achieved so much in a damaged town with its equally damaged population. This small team were responsible for groundbreaking work. Traumatised children were treated and, on occasion, responded so well that some of them ended up joining the Centre’s more mainstream activities.
For some in Bosnia-Herzegovina, much that happened at the Centre was dangerously political because music was being used to counter cultural exclusiveness – what I call cultural incest when expressed in its most extreme form. Negative and threatening music comes from this tradition: national anthems and military marching songs. To the contrary, the best music, as with the best art, architecture and whatever else expresses human creativity, comes from cultural mixing.6 Goring once said, ‘When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.’ I would counter that with, ‘When I hear the word gun, I reach for my culture.’
This attempt to universalise music and culture at the Centre was deliberate and methodical. For the first two years of our work, Eugene Skeef was responsible for setting up what became African percussion workshops. On Sunday afternoons, you could find up to 60 children and young people taking part with djembes, maracas, handbells, marimbas and wood blocks.
These workshops were developed, both at the Centre and, as part of the outreach work, at orphanages and hospitals. After the first half hour of drum tuition, I saw very young children express rhythmic talent as if it were latent in their essence and being.
On a recent visit to the USA, I came across an article by Feeny Lipscomb, drummer and writer, who wrote, ‘Recently, medical research has testified that drumming produces an altered state similar to meditation, thereby reducing stress. Drumming is also a right-brain activity which increases intuition, shuts down the ‘rational’ mind, and centers us in our hearts... I have often heard drumming compared to the high produced by endorphins. In fact, many people have taken up drumming because they’ve heard it’s a way to get the same endorphin-produced high without running and/or doing aerobics.’7
For millennia, shamans have argued that drumming is ‘the horse that takes you to the gods’. The state induced is a type of meditation and, in fact, the Centre offered meditation classes after an acupuncturist at the Centre was asked to teach it by her patients. Through Chinese medicine and meditation, the practitioner achieved some extraordinary results: helping the traumatised sleep for the first time in years, curing migraines, helping stroke victims and the wounded.
From the start, the ethos of the PMC had been to make a difference, not just in terms of the type of aid work that was carried out, but also the reasons why it existed. It is time that we question those aid programmes which lead to dependency and ensure the continuation of the outstretched hand. This form of aid becomes an appendage to war and does not address the larger questions of physical, spiritual and psychological reconstruction needed to minimise the possibility of future wars.
Europeans travel to Africa to teach the people how to grow their crops. One of the places they go to is in the Rift Valley, where agriculture was practised before Europe was populated. Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying they should not be there doing what they do, but they should be aware of the history, economics, culture and politics of the people they have come to help. If to this is added a passion for justice and, dare I say it, an understanding of the need for political change, then their work can be more than a ‘flash in the pan’.8
In the words of Eugene Skeef, ‘The destruction visited upon the planet in the name of advancement is more than sufficient proof that those of us whose basic education and development was fired in the Western mould need to exercise a rare humility before proceeding to administer aid to others. We all know that the so-called First World (strange notion this, if we are to accept Africa as the birthplace of human civilisation) has a great deal to learn from the so-called Third World, if they can just step back, join the circle and let someone else lead the song with a different rhythmic melody.’
It was my hope that the Pavarotti Music Centre could be a resource centre for a worldwide music-based project whose purpose would be to sustain the lives of those traumatised by war and conflict. To join and widen the circle.
Here is what I wrote on the first birthday of the PMC:
‘One year old, the Pavarotti Music Centre has surpassed all expectations. A schools’ music programme working in more than 20 schools, kindergartens and special schools, the first music therapy department in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a hospital outreach programme, a music school, a busy recording studio, a rock school, percussion workshops, guitar classes, a youth choir, drama workshops, dance and ballet, concerts and exhibitions, even acupuncture and meditation. Above all else, a place where children and young people can find themselves and their friends. In the middle of this damaged country, this wounded town, and working from within that town’s ghetto, we have done what no politician would dream of doing – produced solutions to political problems by ignoring politics altogether. We have let the music play. Of course, none of this was possible without the generosity of the many musicians who performed at the Modena concerts, none of this was possible without Brian Eno and his wife, Anthea. And none of this was possible without Luciano Pavarotti. But with them alone, we would have a building. We needed a ticking heart. That we found in the young people of Mostar who have dedicated themselves to making this place a success. And we have found it in the international workers here who seem, like me, to have fallen in love with the earth upon which the Centre stands.’
[An abridged version of this chapter was published in the European Journal of Intercultural Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3, 1999 and in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, The University of Kansas, Fall 2000, Vol. XV, No. 8]
NOTES
1 Western orchestral music would not have been possible without Pythagoras’ visit to a blacksmith. Hearing a hammer strike an anvil he asked if he could weigh the hammers. He found that one was two- thirds the size of the first. He showed that by continually dividing by two-thirds, an infinite spiral of notes emerges. He had hit upon ‘natural harmonics’. He concluded that the cosmos was a
At the time of what Engels called ‘primitive communism’, when Homo sapiens were hunter- gatherers, humans signalled to each other by beating stick on stick, stone on stone. The first vocal syllables were whistles and calls based on rhythmic patterns which allowed human communication to take place. Rhythm was there at the start of everything. It was there at the start of our species and is there at the start of our individual lives.2
Whether or not we evolved from the sea, we all emerged from the waters of our mothers, and water is a perfect transmitter of sound. Place a waterproof watch under the surface at one end of a swimming pool. Get there early in the morning when no one else is around. Have a friend swim underwater at the far end of the pool and ask them what they can hear.Both the heart of the foetus and that of the mother beat to a cycle of dash dash, dum dum, dum dum, dum dum. Mother and baby are in syncopated rhythm. Sounds exterior to the womb may also be heard and absorbed by the foetus. Many pregnant women will tell you that they are aware that their babies react to external sounds. So music and rhythm, or rhythm and music to be chronologically correct, are central to our lives. It is a physical and emotional link, both to something in us and beyond us, linking us to the music of the spheres.
Music can move us to extremes of joy or sadness, elation or depression. Perhaps it is a piece we associate with some event in our life: when we first kissed, when we went to our first teenage party, when we first made love. This musical association is strong in all of us. Perhaps it is with Mahler’s ‘Adagietto’, Ali Farka Toure, blues, a song sung by Ella Fitzgerald, an Indian raga, hip-hop or drum and bass. In all types of music we can be emotionally, and even physically, moved.
If you project sound waves at piles of sand, iron filings, water or mercury, you can create varied patterns, from spirals to grids. Given the sound conductivity of water and its high level in the human body, it is hardly surprising that our cells react to sound vibrations, even those at the far end of the spectrum which we are unable to hear. With this knowledge, holistic healers place vibrating forks close to the energy field of the human body and hospitals use high-pitched sound to shatter kidney and gallstones. Conversely, the negative side of the use of sound are experiments undertaken by the US military and other governments, utilising sound waves as instruments of war. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have shown us that music can be a weapon.
Music therapist Olivea Dewhurst-Maddock has argued that the vibrational energies of different notes affect different areas of the body. For instance, C major affects the bones, lower back, legs and feet. D major transmits energy waves to the kidneys and bladder,lymphatic and reproductive systems and skin. A major is related to pain and pain control.3
A few years ago, a friend of mine had major heart surgery. This is what he told me about his recuperation:
‘My post-operative experience was quite disturbing. I’d brought some of my favourite music to listen to in the hospital. I have always been passionate about classical music. My mother and stepfather were professional musicians and I was brought up, from the embryo onwards, listening to Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Haydn and Schubert. Once I was a bit more than an embryo, I learned to play the piano, cello and guitar. During the week following the operation, I lost touch with a lot of things – my sense of taste, smell, my enjoyment of books, but the worst was being cut off from the meaning of music. Something central to my life seemed to have died inside me. I would listen to a Mozart piano concerto; I could understand the harmony and counterpoint, but found no beauty in it, nor could I appreciate its extraordinary passion and inventiveness. Listening to Mozart was like listening to Salieri. That loss and the frequent moments when I burst into tears, for no apparent reason, convinced me that lengthy and violent operations have a much deeper effect on our inner selves than medical science acknowledges. Only part of me was put to sleep. Many levels of my subconscious and my body were awake when the knife cut me open. They went into a state of shock. They switched off. They needed time to mourn. My enjoyment of music now, three years later, is even more intense than before. I don’t know if that comes with age, or whether it is the result of the operation, but it is now a passion only second to my closest relationships.’
Perhaps it is for this reason that in ancient Egypt, the hieroglyph for music was also that for well-being and joy. But what about music in non-joyful situations, in war? When the lights go out and all that is left is hunger and the threat of death, you will still find music.
In 1993 and 1994 I was in cellars in Sarajevo and Mostar. Shells were exploding, the snipers were at work, but people – particularly young people – gathered together and, if they could not listen to music as there was often no power, they played it. The louder the shelling, the louder their music. It was an expression of defiance, a testament to the survival of the one thing that kept them human in an inhuman situation – the primordial language of rhythm and music which connected them to their essence.
A young soldier in Mostar visited me after his time on the front line, a Kalashnikov on one shoulder and a guitar on the other. He tapped the guitar and told me, ‘A much better weapon.’
This young man faced his former classmates across a narrow street, playing music to them when it was too dark to fight. Cigarettes were thrown into the building where he was crouching as he performed for his enemies.
Just before the war ended in 1995, I helped smuggle a Bob Marley photo exhibition into East Mostar. Sponsored by Island Records, we took in tapes and CDs with the photos. The local war radio station broadcast these non-stop for two days from their cellar studio. The exhibition opened underground on the front line. I will never forget how the town pulsed to Marley’s rhythms in the middle of the thuds from incoming shells.
These are examples of overt and easily recognisable influences of music in extreme situations: music as defiance with an external enemy in mind. But what of the influence of music in relationship to the enemy within? What is its effect on the disturbed and traumatised minds of those who have been too close to the barbarism of war, who have shot and killed, have been shot at and wounded, physically and emotionally? Who have seen friends die, who have lost mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters?
The PMC was constructed in East Mostar, a part of the city that had been devastated by two consecutive wars: first in the war of the whole town against Serb forces, then in the much worse war between the Croats on the west bank of the Neretva River and the Bosniaks on the east: former allies that had once formed an alliance to defeat the Serbs. When the Croats brokered a secret deal with the Serbs, the Croats turned on the Bosniaks. Thousands of families were driven into what became a ghetto on the east side of the Neretva River.
The term is ‘ethnic cleansing’, but a more accurate phrase would be ‘ethnic purging’.4 The Bosniaks were forced to live in cellars for ten months, eating grass soup and emerging into the streets only to collect water and, in the case of the young men, to fight. When the Anne Frank exhibition arrived at the Centre in 1998, I was asked to say something at its opening. There was not much to say, only that the Mostar Ghetto had contained thousands of Anne Franks.5
The Centre allowed the healing power of music to enter this community. The young were particularly affected by the war and, from the day the PMC opened its doors, they flooded in. Some of them used music to escape their darkest memories. They would tell me that only when they played, or heard music, could they escape their nightmares.
Children and young people were brought together to make and listen to music: to sing, to beat drums, to strum guitars, to act and react together through music. These workshops took on a structured form, thanks to the work of Nigel Osborne. This was to quickly develop into our successful schools’ outreach programme.
The first schools’ project was called ‘The Oceans’. First, our teachers started with the Neretva which flows through the centre of Mostar. They went to the schools and took with them music from the banks of that river – Croat, Serb and Bosniak songs. On the next visit, the theme became the Mediterranean because the Neretva flows into that sea: Tunisian love songs, flamenco, French, Italian and Greek music. Next, the Atlantic because that is the ocean into which the Mediterranean flows: everything from Brazilian, to blues, to Celtic and West African music. Then the Indian Ocean and, finally, the Pacific. The children became aware that they did not just live in Mostar, or more specifically in the small ghetto of East Mostar, but that their town and river had links to the world.
At the opening of the Centre, some of these children performed a Hawaiian boat dance for Pavarotti. After his long and hazardous helicopter journey across the Balkan winter skies, the Maestro looked puzzled, not knowing why these children had chosen a dance so foreign to their experience.
The Centre employed more than 30 young musicians who travelled to schools and kindergartens in Mostar and the surrounding villages to bring music into the lives of the children. Centre staff also worked in special needs’ schools, the Sarajevo Blind School and in the Srpska Republika.
The Music Therapy department, staffed by the first resident music therapists in Bosnia- Herzegovina, worked with the most disturbed and distressed children. The results were amazing and a credit to a small, dedicated department who achieved so much in a damaged town with its equally damaged population. This small team were responsible for groundbreaking work. Traumatised children were treated and, on occasion, responded so well that some of them ended up joining the Centre’s more mainstream activities.
For some in Bosnia-Herzegovina, much that happened at the Centre was dangerously political because music was being used to counter cultural exclusiveness – what I call cultural incest when expressed in its most extreme form. Negative and threatening music comes from this tradition: national anthems and military marching songs. To the contrary, the best music, as with the best art, architecture and whatever else expresses human creativity, comes from cultural mixing.6 Goring once said, ‘When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.’ I would counter that with, ‘When I hear the word gun, I reach for my culture.’
This attempt to universalise music and culture at the Centre was deliberate and methodical. For the first two years of our work, Eugene Skeef was responsible for setting up what became African percussion workshops. On Sunday afternoons, you could find up to 60 children and young people taking part with djembes, maracas, handbells, marimbas and wood blocks.
These workshops were developed, both at the Centre and, as part of the outreach work, at orphanages and hospitals. After the first half hour of drum tuition, I saw very young children express rhythmic talent as if it were latent in their essence and being.
On a recent visit to the USA, I came across an article by Feeny Lipscomb, drummer and writer, who wrote, ‘Recently, medical research has testified that drumming produces an altered state similar to meditation, thereby reducing stress. Drumming is also a right-brain activity which increases intuition, shuts down the ‘rational’ mind, and centers us in our hearts... I have often heard drumming compared to the high produced by endorphins. In fact, many people have taken up drumming because they’ve heard it’s a way to get the same endorphin-produced high without running and/or doing aerobics.’7
For millennia, shamans have argued that drumming is ‘the horse that takes you to the gods’. The state induced is a type of meditation and, in fact, the Centre offered meditation classes after an acupuncturist at the Centre was asked to teach it by her patients. Through Chinese medicine and meditation, the practitioner achieved some extraordinary results: helping the traumatised sleep for the first time in years, curing migraines, helping stroke victims and the wounded.
From the start, the ethos of the PMC had been to make a difference, not just in terms of the type of aid work that was carried out, but also the reasons why it existed. It is time that we question those aid programmes which lead to dependency and ensure the continuation of the outstretched hand. This form of aid becomes an appendage to war and does not address the larger questions of physical, spiritual and psychological reconstruction needed to minimise the possibility of future wars.
Europeans travel to Africa to teach the people how to grow their crops. One of the places they go to is in the Rift Valley, where agriculture was practised before Europe was populated. Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying they should not be there doing what they do, but they should be aware of the history, economics, culture and politics of the people they have come to help. If to this is added a passion for justice and, dare I say it, an understanding of the need for political change, then their work can be more than a ‘flash in the pan’.8
In the words of Eugene Skeef, ‘The destruction visited upon the planet in the name of advancement is more than sufficient proof that those of us whose basic education and development was fired in the Western mould need to exercise a rare humility before proceeding to administer aid to others. We all know that the so-called First World (strange notion this, if we are to accept Africa as the birthplace of human civilisation) has a great deal to learn from the so-called Third World, if they can just step back, join the circle and let someone else lead the song with a different rhythmic melody.’
It was my hope that the Pavarotti Music Centre could be a resource centre for a worldwide music-based project whose purpose would be to sustain the lives of those traumatised by war and conflict. To join and widen the circle.
Here is what I wrote on the first birthday of the PMC:
‘One year old, the Pavarotti Music Centre has surpassed all expectations. A schools’ music programme working in more than 20 schools, kindergartens and special schools, the first music therapy department in Bosnia-Herzegovina, a hospital outreach programme, a music school, a busy recording studio, a rock school, percussion workshops, guitar classes, a youth choir, drama workshops, dance and ballet, concerts and exhibitions, even acupuncture and meditation. Above all else, a place where children and young people can find themselves and their friends. In the middle of this damaged country, this wounded town, and working from within that town’s ghetto, we have done what no politician would dream of doing – produced solutions to political problems by ignoring politics altogether. We have let the music play. Of course, none of this was possible without the generosity of the many musicians who performed at the Modena concerts, none of this was possible without Brian Eno and his wife, Anthea. And none of this was possible without Luciano Pavarotti. But with them alone, we would have a building. We needed a ticking heart. That we found in the young people of Mostar who have dedicated themselves to making this place a success. And we have found it in the international workers here who seem, like me, to have fallen in love with the earth upon which the Centre stands.’
[An abridged version of this chapter was published in the European Journal of Intercultural Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3, 1999 and in The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, The University of Kansas, Fall 2000, Vol. XV, No. 8]
NOTES
1 Western orchestral music would not have been possible without Pythagoras’ visit to a blacksmith. Hearing a hammer strike an anvil he asked if he could weigh the hammers. He found that one was two- thirds the size of the first. He showed that by continually dividing by two-thirds, an infinite spiral of notes emerges. He had hit upon ‘natural harmonics’. He concluded that the cosmos was a
harmonic ratio, that we lived in a musical universe and that music obeys the laws of physics.
2 Look at the honeybee to see how this is true for beings other than mammals. In Following The
Bloom: Across America with the Migratory Bee Keepers, Beacon Press, Boston 1991, Douglas Whynott
says that bees produce ‘sustained wing vibrations and measured sound pulses. Tempo
corresponds to distance. [Bees] remain in the hive dancing through the day and into the night,
altering the straight run to create a gravity symbol that refers to the sun’s position on the other side
of the earth – a position the bee has never seen.’
3 Book of Sound Therapy, Olivea Dewhurst-Maddock, Fireside 1993.
4 The International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights acknowledged in their 1993 report that ‘what is taking place in Bosnia-Herzegovina is attempted genocide – the extermination of a people in whole or in part because of their race, religion or ethnicity’, with the international community (the parties to the Geneva Convention and the United Nations) ‘displaying nearly incomprehensible incapacity; having failed to put an end to a war between one of the best equipped armies in Europe and a civilian population, who were neither psychologically or physically and materially prepared for it.’
5 My opening remarks made at the Anne Frank Exhibition, PMC, September 3rd, 1998: ‘The PMC is honoured to host the opening of the exhibition. On a personal note and, as one born right at the end of the Second World War, my politics, in fact my presence here at the PMC, has been shaped by Anne Frank. My father was one of the first British doctors to enter Bergen-Belsen and I still have his photographs of the emaciated survivors imprinted on my brain. He told me that he had been ashamed at how many died after Liberation because British soldiers fed the people too much, too quickly. Anne Frank would recognise Bosnia and Herzegovina. We should not hide from the facts. Nothing was learnt from her experiences and we sit here today in the Mostar Ghetto, a place where thousands of Anne Franks ate grass soup for ten months at the worst time of the war. We also sit inside a European country where events took place which were the equal of those that happened during the time of the last European Holocaust. It is to our shame that the same speeches were made, the same eyes were averted, Munich went transatlantic. And it goes on. The twentieth century has been the century of Anne Franks. From the Armenians at the beginning of the century on to the Nazi terror, the Stalin Gulags, Cambodia, Rwanda and onwards to Iraq. It has been estimated that in the last decade we have had millions of Anne Franks: two million children killed in wars, four million orphaned and some ten million psychologically traumatised. One survivor of Auschwitz, Bruno Bettelheim, said that there is no meaning at all to life but we must behave as though there is. Anne Frank lived that dictum almost to the end of her short life. If she was here now – perhaps she is here now in all of us present – she would understand and enjoy what we are doing here.’
6 ‘Music is the weapon’ declared the Nigerian musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti (from the 1982 film about Kuti of the same name by S Tchal-Gadjieff and J-J Flori). Aware of that fact, politicians around the world use music and musicians to achieve their goals or try to control musicians who they perceive as a threat to their power; the treatment of Kuti, for example, in Nigeria or Victor Jara in Pinochet’s Chile. Even instruments are sometimes seen as a threat and are banned.
7 ‘Your Child’s Brain’, Newsweek, February 19th, 1996, presented evidence for the brain’s need for rhythm. The article described the stress produced when the brain is deprived of this basic need.
8 For those interested in the aid debate as applied to former Yugoslavia, I would recommend Barbara E. Harrell-Bond’s ‘Refugees and the Challenge of Reconstructing Communities Through
3 Book of Sound Therapy, Olivea Dewhurst-Maddock, Fireside 1993.
4 The International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights acknowledged in their 1993 report that ‘what is taking place in Bosnia-Herzegovina is attempted genocide – the extermination of a people in whole or in part because of their race, religion or ethnicity’, with the international community (the parties to the Geneva Convention and the United Nations) ‘displaying nearly incomprehensible incapacity; having failed to put an end to a war between one of the best equipped armies in Europe and a civilian population, who were neither psychologically or physically and materially prepared for it.’
5 My opening remarks made at the Anne Frank Exhibition, PMC, September 3rd, 1998: ‘The PMC is honoured to host the opening of the exhibition. On a personal note and, as one born right at the end of the Second World War, my politics, in fact my presence here at the PMC, has been shaped by Anne Frank. My father was one of the first British doctors to enter Bergen-Belsen and I still have his photographs of the emaciated survivors imprinted on my brain. He told me that he had been ashamed at how many died after Liberation because British soldiers fed the people too much, too quickly. Anne Frank would recognise Bosnia and Herzegovina. We should not hide from the facts. Nothing was learnt from her experiences and we sit here today in the Mostar Ghetto, a place where thousands of Anne Franks ate grass soup for ten months at the worst time of the war. We also sit inside a European country where events took place which were the equal of those that happened during the time of the last European Holocaust. It is to our shame that the same speeches were made, the same eyes were averted, Munich went transatlantic. And it goes on. The twentieth century has been the century of Anne Franks. From the Armenians at the beginning of the century on to the Nazi terror, the Stalin Gulags, Cambodia, Rwanda and onwards to Iraq. It has been estimated that in the last decade we have had millions of Anne Franks: two million children killed in wars, four million orphaned and some ten million psychologically traumatised. One survivor of Auschwitz, Bruno Bettelheim, said that there is no meaning at all to life but we must behave as though there is. Anne Frank lived that dictum almost to the end of her short life. If she was here now – perhaps she is here now in all of us present – she would understand and enjoy what we are doing here.’
6 ‘Music is the weapon’ declared the Nigerian musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti (from the 1982 film about Kuti of the same name by S Tchal-Gadjieff and J-J Flori). Aware of that fact, politicians around the world use music and musicians to achieve their goals or try to control musicians who they perceive as a threat to their power; the treatment of Kuti, for example, in Nigeria or Victor Jara in Pinochet’s Chile. Even instruments are sometimes seen as a threat and are banned.
7 ‘Your Child’s Brain’, Newsweek, February 19th, 1996, presented evidence for the brain’s need for rhythm. The article described the stress produced when the brain is deprived of this basic need.
8 For those interested in the aid debate as applied to former Yugoslavia, I would recommend Barbara E. Harrell-Bond’s ‘Refugees and the Challenge of Reconstructing Communities Through
Aid’, in War Exile, Everyday Life, published by the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research,
Zagreb. For an overall political perspective, see Noam Chomsky, World Orders and other writings on Cold and post-Cold War International Politics.
Zagreb. For an overall political perspective, see Noam Chomsky, World Orders and other writings on Cold and post-Cold War International Politics.
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