Working with Composers in Distressed Countries
This past spring, I was sent a link to a haunting piano composition by Palestinian composer Mahmoud Abuwarda titled Dream of a Quiet Sky. Initially, I was searching for a piano piece for a high school Lebanese student to perform in our end-of-year recital titled “Bridges and Borders: Music Without Limits, Barriers and Divisions.” Mahmoud is an internationally recognized professional composer whose guitar, piano, and symphonic works are widely performed. He is from Gaza and was a professor of music at the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in Gaza City until it was destroyed. He lives in Istanbul, fearing for his parents trapped in Gaza and also fearing for his own deportation. He has photos of the destruction of their middle-class home, his parents’ loss of weight, and their subsistence life in tent shelters. Even though bombing has temporarily ceased, the rainy season has started; food is still scarce and expensive. Living in tattered tents is almost impossible.
To help, Mahmoud and I began working together to produce a collection of seven piano pieces to be performed as a set. Scenes of a Palestinian Childhood is modeled after the tradition of composing music that recreates the moods and scenes of a child’s world. The first elementary pieces demonstrate children’s commonality world over: Squirrel Play, Best Friends, and Finding a Beetle. These are followed by more site-specific pieces, such a Sand Dune Dance, a duet for student and teacher. The next two intermediate melodies, Give Me a Title and Under the Same Moon are heartfelt with sweeping melodic lines. I haven’t yet had a student, school, or adult age, who didn’t fall in love with these movements. In the final work, Melodies of Peace, two folk songs, one Palestinian, the other Israeli, are entwined in a duet of early intermediate level.
The collection can be ordered from Mahmoud Abuwarda’s website https://www.mahmoudabuwarda.com/ and downloaded for a donation of $25. All proceeds go directly to Mahmoud and his family in Gaza for humanitarian relief.
Submitted by Penny Lazarus