Harmony and Healing
As the classical music editor at The Times, Zachary Woolfe is no casual opera fan. He is intimate with it, both its beauty and its blemishes. “For centuries,” he wrote from France, “opera has been a tool of power, a spectacle developed and organized by influential Western nations and the elites within them. It is long past time for the art form to be more open about this heritage, and to make reparations for it.”
Mr. Woolfe had been watching a performance of Mozart’s “Abduction From the Seraglio” at the Lyon Opera, a work “with an impolite — not to say inflammatory — take on relations between Europeans and Muslim Turks,” as he described it. But there was a different perspective in the Lyon rendering, dialogue that softened the caricatures. “It made an onstage attempt to link corners of the Mediterranean at a moment when the real world is trying, and often failing, to do the same,” Mr. Woolfe wrote.
He likewise was encouraged by “Kalila wa Dimna,” at the Aix- enProvence Festival. He found the chamber opera, in French and Arabic with a blending of Western and Middle Eastern instruments, “inspiring as a symbol of a more open exchange of ideas.”
“Using opera to understand the connections between cultures and to experiment with what can bridge them is no longer merely an aesthetic possibility,” Mr. Woolfe wrote. “It’s a moral necessity.”
The stage is less refined but the spirit is the same among the musicians in the Jungle, the large migrant camp in Calais, France, where refugees working with professional musicians recorded a benefit album, “The Calais Sessions.” Like “Kalila wa Dimna,” the music is a mix of style and culture, The Times reported, “from Middle Eastern-inflected pop to Iraqi rap to tunes from the Balkans and Spain.”
Vanessa Lucas-Smith, a cellist in the Allegri Quartet in London, led the project after visiting the camp with other musicians, bringing instruments and setting up workshops. “When you take the instruments to people, it sounds as if it’s bread or water or coal, something they really, really need,” she told The Times.
That would seem to describe an Afghan named Ismail, who wrote on the “Calais Sessions” website of having his arm held in boiling water by the Taliban for playing the dambora, a stringed instrument. On the album, he plays a cello-like instrument made from scraps found around the camp.
Ms. Lucas-Smith said the aim was to empower the migrants, allowing them to show a different side. One musician, Kasper, who had been a jewelry maker and amateur rapper in Baghdad, told The Times: “I hope it changes something. I can’t do anything for me here in the Jungle.”
Musical collaboration has already brought change for Johnathon Mullen and others in the MusiCorps Wounded Warrior Band, spawned by a hospital training program to help American war veterans. The band has made tour stops in venues like the Kennedy Center in Washington and the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee, alongside artists like Roger Waters and Yo-Yo Ma. What began as therapy has become so much more.
“The band has given me purpose,” said Mr. Mullen, who lost both legs to an explosion in Afghanistan and plays the drums now. “I used to think, ‘What am I doing with my life?’ And now I can tell people what I’m doing with my life.”