"This is my culture. I live in the Middle East, not Switzerland. One step over is Egypt, and a step in the other direction is Syria. Across the hall, there might be an Arab neighbor. You could say, 'You are playing the music of the enemy,' but who decided this music belongs to a particular religion? It was created in the Middle East, by Jews, among others. In Iraq, for example, the golden age of music was from the years 1920 to 1950. Most of the music was the kind Jews composed and performed. Nearly 100% of musicians were Jews. So what if music in Arabic is the music of the enemy? I don't think there is any such thing as an enemy in music."
This tolerant approach comes from Ariel Cohen, the conductor of the Firqat Alnoor Orchestra. Cohen makes the claim as if it is obvious, but his approach is surprising, or at the very least unusual, especially when you realize he is a haredi man completely enthralled by Arabic music who genuinely sees its dissemination as his mission in life.
Cohen, a baby-faced 32-year old with a burning passion for his music, founded the orchestra nearly five years ago in cooperation with Hana Ftaya, a researcher of piyyut (Jewish liturgical prayer) and the great-granddaughter of the great 20th-century Kabbalist Rabbi Yehuda Ftaya; Sheba Medical Center researcher and musician Dr. Yehuda Kamari; and orientalist Rany Shalom Bialer, a student of Iraqi-born Israeli and Arabic musician Salim Alnurone. Cohen grew up the son of Moroccan immigrants in a religious household in Petach Tikva, where he often heard classic Moroccan music. He become fascinated with Arabic music at the age of eight, when his brother returned from yeshiva studies with a record by the iconic Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum. It was at that moment that he embarked on a personal journey into the depths of Arabic music, perusing record stores in Jaffa to find records by the biggest stars in the field.
Cohen feels at ease with Arabic music. He finds nothing "exotic" about it. He feels it is just as much his own as it is the members of other nations in the region. "We spoke Moroccan Arabic at home, and from a young age, so it wasn't really surprising that I would listen to songs in Arabic."
Q: And why would a yeshiva boy want to listen to Arabic music?
"It is precisely in the haredi sector that there are social circles interested in Arabic music. It's an interesting phenomenon – one of the major consumers of Arabic music in Israel is the Sephardi-haredi Shas sector. Why? Because they come from the synagogue, and that is where all of the melodies of the prayer are layered on top of the songs of Umm Kulthum and Egyptian-Syrian singer and composer Farid al-Atrash. The same kid that hears these baqashot [a collection of supplications, songs, and prayers sung by the Sephardic Syrian, Moroccan and Turkish Jewish communities for centuries on Shabbat mornings] and piyyutim will ask himself, "What is this song?" and get to the source. He doesn't understand a word of Arabic; he doesn't sing it right. But he hears Farid and it piques his interest.
Q: And how did you come to immerse yourself in this vast world?
I wasn't interested in just listening to the songs. I got curious about who wrote them, when they were composed and so on. In the absence of sources like the internet, I went to ask the 'elders,' the Iraqi and Egyptian musicians in the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra of the Israel Broadcasting Authority. My mother would send me in a cab to the piyyutim celebrations in Ramat Gan, and when the party came to an end, I would approach the musicians with a list of questions I had been meaning to ask them.
Cohen still has that same urge to see the works in the greater cultural context. According to him, the term "Arabic music" is too general, because Egyptian and Lebanese music, for example, are very different from one another.
He presents these insights in a new series of events called "Tareb," set to kick off at the Museum of Islamic Art in Jerusalem on Nov. 20. The series will include archival photographs and footage along with live demonstrations of the genre by members of the Firqat Alnoor Orchestra to allow the audience to become familiar with the development of this particular style of music throughout the years and the key figures that helped to shape the genre. A festive concert performance will mark the end of the series.
A press release for the series claims the song the Levites sang in the Temple was the starting point in the journey that is Arabic music. Cohen defends this unusual assertion by noting that "in one of his sermons, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef said, half seriously and half in jest, that those maqams [Arabic melodic systems] came from the Temple.' There is some humor in this, but also some truth. The Temple was built in this region. One can assume the music they heard in the region was much closer to the Arabic maqam than the church music of Italy or Germany. There are no recordings of the song of the Levites, and we do not know what actually happened there, but I have no doubt it contained elements of Arabic music. It is the smell of this earth, it is the music of this place."
This casual attitude, free of labels and politics, can also be seen in the composition of the orchestra.
"There are players who come from a haredi background, and they are yeshiva graduates like me who grew up on Arabic music. There are graduates of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance who came from a western music [background] and only discovered Arabic music at a later stage. There are Arabs and Druze and Christians and Muslims and male and female soloists. I just came from a rehearsal we did in my home, and you see the people sitting on the balcony, smoking a cigarette in such a tense time, and no one talks politics. Everyone laughs and plays music together. Everyone has an opinion but no one brings it up."
Reaction from the Arab world
More and more orchestras that play Arabic music have been popping up in recent years. Cohen welcomes this development, but also takes care to explain that the Firqat Alnoor Orchestra is unique in that it preserves the works in their original form, absent some minor changes. He says it is important "to preserve but also to go forward. Up until 1993, there was the Kol Israel Orchestra [now the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra] funded by the Mapai party, and it had a slot on TV, it had continuous radio play. … They had a shofar to make it heard. True, it was just a 40-minute slot, but those 40 minutes do not exist today. If at one time, the name Zuzu Musa meant something to a lot of people, today he barely means anything to a lot of people. … There should be a place for this music, and there isn't. When people talk to me about reinventing, I see this preservation as reinvention, to take something that has not had its voice heard for over 25 years and revive it, this is also something of a reinvention in my mind - but with the quality of the past.
Q: Does that mean that you are also using it as a tool, as a bridge between peoples and cultures?
That happens even without us trying to get to that place, both on a personal level and through the orchestra. I correspond online with musicians and researchers from Syria, Kuwait and other places. There is a friendship that does not end with conversations about music. A person asks how I am doing, and I ask how they are doing. I had a baby 10 months ago, and I got a card in Arabic in the mail. These are things that are happening, and it's exciting. This is also true for the orchestra. Every video clip of ours that goes up instantly gets comments in the Arab world."
Q: And how does the Arab world see you?
Any way you look at it, we are from Israel and among us there are those who wear kippot, so it is even more conspicuous. We are Israelis, and we are proud. We receive funding from the Israeli Culture Ministry. We are proud to be the Israeli symphony and more importantly a symphony that doesn't just talk the talk of coexistence but walks the walk. The comments from the Arab world that focus on the music itself are positive. As soon as you bring the Jewish part into it, for instance when you sing a piyyut to the music of Umm Kulthum, it drives them crazy. You've taken the music and also changed the text? There are those who see it from a political perspective and will say, 'the Jews stole our land and our music,' and there are those who will say, 'Well done.'"
Q: Have these connections led to any collaborations?
"We performed here with an Iraqi-born Muslim singer by the name of Taher Barakat, and we are looking for these types of collaborations around the world, but it is difficult - not because of the music but because of the politics. There are Arab artists we perform with who have a problem putting on shows at state ceremonies or the International Convention Center in Jerusalem. We are aware of the sensitivities, but for the most part, their abstention from performing comes not from an ideological place but from fear. And music that does not succeed in overcoming the political issue, in my mind, is not real music at all."
