Transcribed by Isis Nusair 



Malihe Razazan (MR): Welcome, I am Malihe Razazan and you are listening to Status Hour. What is the power of music and  how does it inspire and transform the daily lives of the Palestinian children living under occupation. USC Communication Professor and journalist Sandy Tolan’s new book, Children of the Stone: The Power of Music in a Hard Land tells the story of Ramzi Hussein Aburedwan, a child of the first Intifada, whose al-Kamandjati music center teaches hundreds of Palestinian children in the Occupied West Bank and refugee camps in Lebanon, as well as the intersection of music and resistance.  I spoke with Sandy Tolan about his new book and asked him where he first met Ramzi.

Sandy Tolan (ST): Well, it was actually around the time that I was doing research for what first was a radio documentary and then the book, The Lemon Tree. It was 1998. I saw these posters all over Ramallah of this little boy. Two pictures on the poster; one was a photograph of the little boy, eight years old, throwing a stone in the first Palestinian Intifada in late 1987 early 1988, and  then juxtaposed with that was the same boy except for he was now eighteen and he was playing the viola., and beneath that it said: the Palestine National Conservatory of Music. It was an advertisement for the Conservatory but also in a sense for the notion of Palestinian freedom and independence. Although a lot of people were skeptical, most of the hopes around that time centered around the notion of a two state solution; that it was possible, people thought, it was going to happen. There was a lot of hope in the air and I kept seeing these posters everywhere then met Ramzi. I went with my wife at the time, a Palestinian journalist. We went into al-‘Amiri refugee camp, and I just spent a lot of time with him.  What I remember most of all is him saying when I asked him what his dream was (he was a kid from the camp raised by his impoverished grandparents) and he said: my dream is to play in the first national symphony of Palestine and to open up music schools all over Palestine so that children know there is something beside the stones.

MR: How old was he back then?

ST: He was eighteen. I thought this was a beautiful dream for a kid raised at a refugee camp. But sure enough, he gets a scholarship to study in France to study the viola. I kept in touch with him for a couple of years then I lost track until one night in a restaurant in Ramallah where I was with a couple of my  former Berkeley students, and by chance, I hear my name being called across the restaurant. I looked and here is Ramzi. I said: what are you up to? He said: I am back from France and I am opening a music school for the children of Palestine. That began the journey for me. 

MR: He opened the music school, Al-Kamandjati, in 2002. 

ST: In 2005. 

MR: He started thinking about it back in 2002.

ST: He started thinking and thinking and started experimenting and implementing and bringing some of his friends from France, fellow musicians, down to see what it would be.

MR: Much of your book, The Children of the Stone, focuses on Ramzi Aburedwan. When the first intifada broke out in 1987 he was eight years old. He was raised by his grandparents who lived in al-‘Amiri refugee camp on the outskirts of Ramallah. What was it about his story beside the poster that you saw that compelled you to write 400 plus pages, not just about him but also about the impact of the occupation on ordinary people and also the possibilities, as you said, that Palestinians do imagine even living  under such hard conditions.?

ST: First of all, it is an amazing story. The story of Ramzi; a story of a kid from a refugee camp who grows up with this dream and then actually learns to play music and keeps his dream. He becomes like a pipe piper and all these people start  following his dream. He is a very inspiring person. The fact that all these musicians from all over the world came to help him and all over Palestine was part of the appeal and the drama of doing something truly beautiful under such exceptionally harsh circumstances; that being the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinians in the West Bank since 1967. It is also the story of these children  and how Ramzi used to like to say and still does: my reason for doing this is to protect these children from these soldiers which sounds like a sound bite at first. How can music do that? Then you start seeing the kids talk about it, the teachers talk about it, and of course Ramzi talking about it. Then I did some research and a lot of studies show that music could be truly transformative not just in the moment that you play it. It gives you a different sense of who you are. It kind of unlock something and helps you sort of reorient your circuitry in a way and that is what was happening with a lot of these kids. That was being reported to me and I could see it for myself at times. All of that attracted me. Also, there is so much denial in the general culture in America or just not any discussion of the impact of the occupation on the Palestinians and basically the daily reality of half of the people in this conflict is essentially off the American radar screen.  I thought this great story of Ramzi and the music school gave us an opportunity to do that and tell that story and in the process talk about the incredible hardships that these children have just going by in their daily life.  So it would  be a way of explaining and exploring  and documenting the occupation  without it being a polemic, without it being sort of a speech making or study. You can see these kids at checkpoints and so on. 

MR: I think that you capture what you are trying to do in the prelude over the wall to play Beethoven at the Qalandyya military checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem in the summer of 2003.  This is about musicians who are trying to go to Jerusalem for a concert. Because of the checkpoint and because of the wall their movement is so restricted and they have to risk their lives to be able to go there. 

ST: I wanted people to get a sense immediately of the visceral feeling of what it is like to live in an occupied land. This sort of extraordinary mission of this group of musicians and in fact the book is to talk about the efforts of making music under occupation and the extreme measures that people will go to, just in this case, to play Beethoven’s 4th symphony at a French church built during the Crusader’s time in the old city of Jerusalem. The idea that you could have a story like this! You are kind of left literally dangling at the end of this section and what happens in the prelude is that the story is elaborated in five parts so it is kind of a parallel drama to the rest of the book. 

MR: At the time of the first Intifada in 1987, Ramzi was only eight years old but his life in the refugee camp under occupation defined him. When did music enter his life?

ST: Well, there were several places early on. One of the things he told me is that his grandfather was a street sweeper; a municipal garbage worker. Ramzi’s insistence to sneak around and follow his grandfather to work one morning which is kind of how I open the book. He really loved working with his grandfather. His grandfather was a refugee from the village of Na’ameh in old Palestine and he would just follow him around and sweep the streets with him. He was so impressed with his grandfather that his work was holy, and that he was so devoted to his work even though his work was in garbage. They would find things in the streets that they would salvage and bring home or patch and sell them or whatever. One day they found a teddy bear on the street. Ramzi pulled it and it played the notes of the Ode to Joy from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. He used to play it at night while his grandfather was sleeping and they shared the same bed often. That was one moment. Then there was another moment when there was a fellow called teacher Khalidi; maybe a second grade teacher. One day he brought out a box of instruments and gave him Marokas and tambours and a bunch of instruments. Then he brought out his kamandja or violin and Ramzi said his whole face and his whole being was transformed by that. Ramzi looked and that gave him the idea of being a musician but it wasn’t really something he had in his mind until he had a concrete opportunity at age sixteen or so.

MR: You have a passage in the book that sort of parallels his own experience when he was a little kid with what he saw when he was talking to a group of kids in a school for the disabled in the West Bank. That is when the idea for a music school suddenly sparked in his mind. He said: what if I do that.  I thought that was one of the most beautiful passages in the book because of the relationship that he really developed instantaneously with these kids and as he could observe how transformative music can be. I would like you to read it if possible. 

ST: “A few days after his arrival from France, Ramzi sat in a chair at the front of a classroom at the center for rehabilitation; a small school were handicapped and able-bodied children learn together. He smiled at the children with his buzuq in his lap in the same refugee camp where seventeen years earlier he had watched teacher Khalidi open the magic cabinet full of musical instruments. Ramzi looked around the room at the artwork taped on the walls. In front of him was a large scroll of butcher paper partly unrolled across a ten-foot patch of floor revealing the children’s artwork. Between the images of birds and trees, orange fire exploded from tank barrels, soldiers confronted mothers and children at checkpoints, and houses burned. Ramzi had visited classrooms in France too and there, the children just drew houses, sun, and trees. Children are children, the same everywhere, he believed. They draw what they see. Ramzi began to strum his buzuq playing a soft instrumental version of al-helwa di, the beautiful girl. He played folk and revolutionary songs for thirty minutes then went home looking up at the red roofs of Psagot, the Israeli settlement, at the old hill of Jabal at Tawil. Recently, at the height of the second Intifada, the settlement had begun marketing Kava-bi-Psagot to Jews in Israel and beyond. A website boasted of cabernet sauvignon aged in a special cave containing wine making implements that date at least to the time of the second temple. A few days after his visit, Ramzi returned to the school for rehabilitation. This time the children surrounded him, wide-eyed, touching his buzuq. One by one, Ramzi would play a note then reach out for a child’s hand placing his or her finger on the fingerboard. In this way, the children could hear the change in pitch. Hey, this is magic, someone shouted. This was the same feeling Ramzi had experienced as a boy staring open-mouthed as teacher Khalidi transformed himself into a kamandjati, a violinist. Before he left, Ramzi looked out under the scroll of butcher paper where days earlier he had seen images of rockets, tanks and mothers in distress. Now he watched children trying to draw musical instruments, violin, buzuq and oud. In the moment, Ramzi had a simple epiphany tied to his history and music. I though it would be more useful for your country if you are still alive, you know, than if you die, killed by a soldier in the beginning of your life. Now he thought, his idea which he dreamed of calling al-Kamandjati, the violinist, could actually work. Previously the school had existed in the abstract. Now with children in a war zone drawing musical instruments after hearing Ramzi play for only half an hour, he saw that music could help safeguard his people’s children. Next year he said, to himself: I will come back and I will do the work.” 

MR: This was in 2002 and three years later he established the school in Ramallah. This was not the only music school. You write that after the 1993 Oslo Agreements, tens of thousands of Palestinians long exiled by Israel were able to come back and among those was Mohammad Fadel, a violinist trained in musical therapy who established a national conservatory of music in Ramallah. Four years later in 1998, professor Edward Said together with Israeli pianist and conductor, Daniel Barenboim,  also created West/Eastern Divan Orchestra, the title of which is based on a set of poems by Goethe. These Western centric music projects had different missions and you also have al-Kamandjati that came out later in 2005. So for someone like Ramzi who grew up in a refugee camp and had experienced the first intifada, he was a stone thrower himself, and one day as he was going to the Conservatory, and on his way, he sees a car filled with settlers coming down the alley.  He throws several stones at them and he just turns back and goes to school and does not talk about it. Resisting the occupation was an organic part of their being. So where did he fit? Where did someone like Ramzi fit in this new environment before he started the school of course?

ST: It works on several levels. He never stopped playing Arabic music. He never stopped playing the buzuq. It was always the buzuq and the viola. His formal training as a  classical musician was of course with the viola which began in Ramallah at the National Conservatory of music which is now the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music. So he was always in both worlds of music; Arabic or so-called Oriental music and Western classical music. Ramzi would say: Nobody owns Beethoven, he belongs to the world. He does not make such distinctions. I think what was also a practical manner is that these scholarships were giving a chance for him to do something different with his life.   It could have been if he had a propensity for art maybe it could have been something else or writing. He was drawn to music, had the opportunity, and this was a way for him to become something different. He could have had a career as a classical musician in Europe. He had that opportunity and yet he was always grounded in his dream which was to come back and bring that to his own people. In a way, he used his training as a tool to do what he wanted to do all along. 

MR: He was a student at the National Conservatory of Music, of course, and he played with Divan. At some point, Ramzi’s vision about the role played by music in the lives of Palestinian kids diverged and clashed with that of the West/Eastern Divan Orchestra. How did these different music projects see the relationship between music and politics in general and occupation in particular? 

ST: It is a very good question. One, when Edward Said died, Mariam Said, his widow, took on a very large role in organizing, but I think never the less, as a liaison to the Arab musicians and the Orchestra. These are musicians coming from Syria, Lebanon, Egypt as well as Palestine and other places. I think that the dynamic shifted a little bit and I know a number of the Arab musicians felt like it was becoming more of an Israeli dominated Orchestra. I do not know personally if that is true but I certainly heard people talk about that. I think what happened is that Ramzi felt that Daniel Barenboim was personally quite courageous in the stances that he would take. He accepted a major Israeli prize and took the opportunity of the speech to denounce the occupation. Not everybody would do that. But he did not agree with Ramzi that the Orchestra itself should also take a stand and denounce the occupation. Ramzi spent quite a while trying to convince the rest of the Orchestra that we have to take a stand. After the Lebanon War broke out in 2006 and Israel was attacking Lebanon, there were Lebanese musicians in the Orchestra and a lot of people did not show up. This was the first year Ramzi was there and it was like wait a minute, I thought you guys were progressive and  I do not see that you want our freedom. So he started questioning it and he kept trying to reform the organization. Both Daniel and even Mariam Said agreed that the example of the Orchestra before the war, that there can be harmony, is powerful enough. Ramzi disagreed and he said: that is not power enough because I need to know that everyone in this Orchestra believes in our freedom. I think in the end he did leave the Divan although he remains, I think, quite fond of Daniel Barenboim. They had differences; philosophical differences. I interviewed both of them at length, particularly Ramzi, but also Daniel Barenboim several times. You can tell they really like each other but they just had this irreconcilable difference over the role of the Orchestra and whether it should make a more pronounced stand behind the Palestinians. 

MR: This was intensified with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS). Daniel Barenboim did not understand what it was all about, if I am not mistaken. He says something to that effect in the book. 

ST: What is interesting sort of serendipitously is that the narrative of the Divan Orchestra and Ramzi ‘s involvement in it and his disagreement with Daniel Barenboim which we just talked about parallels the deterioration in the situation on the ground in Palestine, and in particular the erosion of this sort of Oslo era dialogue of ‘let us just understand each other’s pain and history. Let us be a witness to each other.’ I personally think that could be extremely powerful but for Palestinians they know that at the beginning of the dialogue era if you want to call the Oslo era which was signed on the White House lawn between Yitzhaq Rabin and Yasser Arafat in 1993, there were 109,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank not including East Jerusalem. Today there are 350,000. There are more bypass roads. The lands of Palestinians are like an apalenco of islands. Palestinians understandably ask what did this dialogue and witness to each get us? The direct confrontation; non-violent action of the BDS movement and of Palestinian state efforts to join the United Nations and the International Criminal Court, are responses to the situation on the ground and the fact that Israel has not been negotiating a two-state solution in good faith. The two state solution is essentially dead now. Daniel Barenboim wants to still think that we should be in that era of dialogue. I think that a lot of people do not realize that that era has been pretty much discredited by Palestinians because it did not work. 

MR: It was Sharon who said that he was going to turn the West Bank and Gaza into a pastrami sandwich. 

ST: Layers of settlement!

MR: Exactly, layers of settlements. You say that Daniel Barenboim took this personally. It was difficult for Daniel not to take it personally as an individual. He had repeatedly put himself on the line in his own country for advocating for the Palestinian cause and declaring solidarity with the plight of occupied Palestine. What was it about the BDS that Mr. Barenboim did not understand?

ST: I cannot speak to that specifically.

MR: Did you talk to him about this?

ST: I spoke to him in general. I have to go back to my notes. I do not recall if I asked him about his opinion about BDS. I think, in general, that he is pretty much for a two state solution. Of course, BDS does not insist that one must be a one state solution person. I think that he has not made the conversion to the sort of post Oslo direct non-violent confrontation of Israel and the strategy of essentially shaming Israel in the international arena. That goes beyond his comfort zone. I can’t say what exactly his position on BDS is, I would say that for that reason it is probably beyond his comfort zone. 

MR: You also feature several kids who go to Al-Kamandjati and some young girls and the difficulties they face. Can you talk about some of these wonderful young men and women that you met along the way as you were writing this book. 

ST: That is part of what inspired me to keep going and try to make this into really a page-turner tale. I feel committed to telling their story accurately and with heart. I am happy to tell you about a few of them. The girl who is on the cover of the book is Ala’ Shalaldah. She was the first student at Ramzi’s school. She wondered in one day. The school was set up, beautiful, with all the instruments but no students. He told me that he was dwindling his thumbs at first and said: what would I do now? And here is this little girl, seven years old, and Ramzi is playing his viola and she is asking: why do you play it like that? He said: why don’t you come over into the room and see what looks good to you? She started touching the piano and she had never seen the piano before it arrived a month or so earlier except on a Tom & Jerry cartoon (laughs).  She picked up the violin. He said: you know, it is a lot of work the violin. She said: I do not care, I will do it, I will do the work too. So that is one girl. Her older sister, Rasha, was quite a talented flute player and their older brother Shehadah has become the instrument maker of al-Kamandjati, the lucier, the instrument repair guy. Rasha had an opportunity to be the first girl from al-Kamandjati to study abroad and the family especially the father and Shehadah, the oldest brother, were not comfortable with her studying unaccompanied. They opposed her scholarship and that became a very tense situation in the family. Then Rasha got married and she still plays the flute. She got a degree in journalism now I believe, and has a boy, maybe five years old. They are living in their ancestral village near Hebron. 

MR: How did music impact their lives? At some point, I think it was Ala’ who said that when she plays the instrument she feels very calm and she sort of transports herself into a completely different world which does not look anything like her real life. 

ST: Rasha talked about that and said: I just feel transported like I am in the forest with this blue lake, beautiful scene, not like the Dead Seam, and I feel the sense of freedom. All those people around her reported, you know, about this very traumatized girl, traumatized during the Israeli incursions in the second Intifada along with Ala’ and the whole family. I mean Shehadah saw one of his best friends shot dead when they went to try to escape the curfew, break the curfew to get bread. His best friend was shot and killed right beside him. This family was very traumatized during the second intifada so Rasha and Ala’ reported that there was a sense of protection they felt from the music. Rasha herself according to many people I talked to went from being a very angry and traumatized child to this self-respecting young woman and musician. 

MR: Also for Ramzi, al-Kamandjati school was also a model of resisting the Israeli occupation so he would take sometimes these kids or he will try to take them to the checkpoint. Was he ever concerned about taking these young kids to the checkpoints and having them face Israeli soldiers? 

ST: Well, there was a discussion about that. A similar incident where they were thinking about crossing the line between Israel and the West Bank in one of the few places where there is not a wall still in this beautiful village of Beteer. There was a big fight about whether or not they should go. Ramzi wanted to provoke and wanted to go. Other people were saying what if few of these teachers are arrested and banned from coming back and then what happens to the school. What if you are arrested Ramzi! He relented and they did not cross that line. I think that there were some other similar discussions. There were some teachers or rather some parents who expressed some concerns. I think that Ramzi sees his work in music, just as much as when he was a child throwing stones, as a form of resistance. So people would say and maybe tell him to his face that he is more political than musical. He is more into politics than he is into music. For Ramzi, I do not think that you can have one without the other. You cannot live in a situation under the occupation and do anything that is not somehow a statement. These kids wanted to do this amazing event at the Qalandiya checkpoint that I end the book at where they are  playing Mozart’s 4th Symphony. Little Ala’ was probably fourteen then when I talked to her about this. After this concert she had the most serene smile I have ever seen on her face. She could be kind of a frowning kid sometimes bruiting. She was only fourteen at the time and she said: This was the best concert of my life.

MR: Sandy Tolan is an award winning journalist, radio producer and Associate Professor at the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at USC. He is the author of The Children of the Stone: The Power of Music in a Hard Land. You can learn more about Sandy Tolan’s work at Sandytolan.com. You have been listening to Status Hour. I am Malihe Razazan. Please tune in next time for another edition of the Status Hour.