Word: barenboim
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...Barenboim started the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, a youth ensemble that draws together Israeli and Arab musicians, many from disputed territories. Its first concert that year was in Weimar, Germany, in the shadow of the Buchenwald concentration camp. Concerts followed each summer across Europe and North America until 2004, when Barenboim made history by taking the orchestra to Ramallah, in the West Bank, where the musicians played under armed guard...
...Barenboim insists these concerts are not political. If the orchestra has a purpose in the Middle East peace process, it is to act as a metaphor for the possible. The young musicians live surrounded by walls and boundaries. Their political views are profoundly different--but they nonetheless come together in a common theme...
...transformational experience for the musicians," Barenboim says. "Being an orchestral musician means you have to express yourself to the utmost while simultaneously listening and responding. That's an important skill for conflict resolution--and for life...
Balance is essential to the Divan orchestra and to Barenboim himself. Music is at its most satisfying when an expression meets its counterpoint. Barenboim says the 2003 death from cancer of Palestinian intellectual Edward Said--Barenboim's friend and co-leader of the orchestra--was "catastrophic" for an orchestra based on Arab-Israeli parity. In January of this year, Barenboim made a symbolic gesture: he accepted Palestinian citizenship and became a dual national...
...Barenboim still travels the world conducting great orchestras, including that of the Berlin State Opera, where he is general music director. But it is on the podium in front of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra--where he draws harmony from Arabs and Jews alike--that he shows the power...