Education & Creativity on Troubled Soils
Musicians without Borders - Workshop
The fourth conference session was opened by Otto de Jong, associated staff of Musicians without Borders (MwB). He came directly from a workshop carried out in Bethlehem and reported on his recent experience. He demonstraded MwB's teaching methodology by leading a body percussion workshop with all the conference participants.
Live Music Encounters
Dochy Lichtensztajn, Israeli musicologist and music educator, presented the programme "Live Music Encounters" of the Levinsky School of Music Education. She stressed the importance of the ideological implications to co-existence and tolerance of the music for students which are divided on status, ethnic-cultural, national splits. The “live concert” has a significant part in these initiatives for student population of different cultures in Israel.
Downloads:
Lecture script Presentation slides
Homepage of the Lewinsky College: http://www.levinsky.ac.il/about.as
Silwan Ta'azef Music School
"I have a confession to make: I am an Israeli Jew who works with Palestinians" Danny Felsteiner began his presentation about the foundation of a music school in Silwan, a Palestinian neighbourhood in East Jerusalem. This rather sarcastic remark can be explained by the difficulty in finding participants for Israeli-Palestinian projects – a cooperation unfortunately often branded as treason by the respective groups. Nevertheless, Danny Felsteiner keeps up his commitment. He expressed his delight, to see other people dedicating their work to peace and freedom at the conference.
Find more information on the school at www.madaasilwan.org.
The project is funded by Music in Me.
Apart from his work as a teacher, Danny Felsteiner plays in the Israeli-Palestinian ensemble Derech As-Salaam.
La Vie sur Terre
The foundation La Vie sur Terre was initiated by the Dutch composer Merlijn Twaalfhoven to realize projects that include the audience in an overall experience. With the believe that contemporary, innovative art should be placed in the great open world and not only in the laboratory- or museum-like environment of theatres, concert rooms and cultural institutions, the foundation is carrying out a lot of unusual projects which immerge a broad public into a total experience for all senses.
Merlijn Twaalfhoven already run several projetcs abroad to draw the attention on certain political or social issues. For instance on October 24th 2005, in celebration of the 60th year of the UN, musicians from both the Greek and the Turkish parts of Cyprus collaborated in an immense on-location performance in the city of Nicosia.
At the conference the young composer chose to talk about the failures and problems that he had to face during his work, instead of presenting success stories. One major issue is not to talk about peace anymore, but rather about concrete issues such as music and musicians. Calling a concert a 'peace concert' always contains the claim of not having peace.
Find more information on the composer and his foundation at www.twaalfhoven.net
Watch the Documentary of the mentioned Cyprus project “Echoes across the Divide” at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6sGLwcjL2o