Valentina Returns!

After spending the summer in her native Ukraine, Valentina Mustafa recently returned to Bethlehem and I am thrilled that we have resumed rehearsals. We are currently preparing for fall concerts in Bethlehem and Ramallah. One of the reasons I enjoy working with Valentina, besides the fact that she is the hardest working member of the music program and a fantastic soprano, is her cheerful and dramatic personality. Few people could ever rival her sense of spontaneity combined with dedicated and productive work ethic.

Valentina and I are basing our fall concerts on similar but expanded repertoire as last spring, romances from the great Russian composers, refining our musical collaboration and delving deeper into the works of Tchaikowsky and Rachmaninoff. Make no mistake, these guys rarely wrote an easy piece and we have plenty of work to do in our near future. However, bringing to life the poetry and music of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Russia, a rare event in the West Bank, is more than enough reward.

Why Teach Music?

In founding a fine arts institution in the Middle East, the staff of Dar al-Kalima College are making a concrete statement that music and the arts in general have the ability to improve quality of life. Anthony J. Palmer, Professor of Music at Boston University, presents a defense of including music as a part of education. Here is what he has to say:

"To ask why the human species makes music is a fundamental question. If we can discover even partial answers, we might be better able to understand what the music making process is about, what benefits it bestows on makers and recipients, and what potential it might hold for an increase in life's satisfactions and understandings.

"I have argued previously that there is a genetic disposition to make music (Palmer, 1997). That is, there is a psychological imperative to express through an organized sound system - developed by all cultures - their innermost thoughts, desires, longings, joys, and vicissitudes of life's experiences. Music is a human expression that helps to answer the basic questions of life's existence: Why am I? Why am I here? What is this 'here' of which I am aware?

"The arts, and music in particular, helped to ease the reconciliation between opposites like good and evil, the physical and the metaphysical, the explicable and indefinable, and the phenomenal and numinous. Humankind lives a psychic existence and finds that music is a necessary expression that permeates the mental world in which it exists. Music is both expressive of and expressive for the inexplicable and mysterious experience we call life."

Taken from "Cultural Interpretation and Contemporary Music Education" by Anthony J. Palmer.

Welcoming the first cellist on staff

Our newest personnel addition to the music program is a young American musician, linguist and environmentalist, Nachy Kanfer. A recent Yale graduate and Fulbright Scholar in Damascus, Syria, Nachy will be playing cello in the Bethlehem Star Quintet and working directly with me as his accompanist. The first task we adopted is a bit daunting, the magnificent cello sonata of Sergei Rachmaninoff. I am hoping that the Quintet will act as a nucleus for a larger amateur chamber ensemble with advanced performers from the National Conservatory of Music and Dar al-Kalima College.

Nachy is also co-founder of LifeSource, an environmental organization designed to research and document water rights and access in Israel/Palestine. If you are interested in learning more or want to support this largely unprecedented research and upcoming documentary film, contact Nachy directly at nachy@thelifesourceproject.org.