Music | | Palestine Museum U.S.
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Ensemble Phoenecia performs at the Palestine Museum U.S. From left to right: Insia Malek, Charlotte Loukola, Amer Hasan, Robin Park, and Noémie Chemali. Photos Kapp Singer. A buzz emanated from Noémie Chemalie’s viola. The sound, enticing and unusual, caught the audience’s ears. Most players would have thought something was amiss—and indeed the instrument was not in its typical configuration. A small piece of tinfoil lay between the strings and the bridge. It vibrated as Chemalie played, adding a raspiness to what are normally crystal clear tones.The foil modification was meant to imitate the sound of a mijwiz, a reed instrument made of two parallel pieces of bamboo played throughout the Middle East. In his score for Palestinian Songs and Dances, Syrian-American composer Kareem Roustom instructs the string section to add the kitchen film to their instruments for the piece’s third movement. Alongside Chemalie, cellist Robin Park and violinists Insia Malik and Charlotte Loukola also echoed the rhythmic hums of the mijwiz. Amer Hasan, on clarinet, played a series of high-pitched overtones—what are called spectral glissandos—also characteristic of the instrument. Malek places tinfoil on her instrument.
Ensemble Phoenecia performs "Three Village Wedding Songs," the fourth movement of Palestinian Songs and Dances by Kareem Roustom. The performance held particular weight for Hasan, who is Palestinian-American. Before the group began playing, he recounted to the audience an emotional visit to Bethlehem in 2019.“I remember, from the bottom of the wall, looking up, and for the first time in my life I felt like I had been reduced to nothing, instantly,” he said, referring to the separation barrier that divides the West Bank from Israel, which the Israeli government began building in 2002 during the Second Intifada and rises up to as tall as eight to nine meters in Bethlehem.“But then I took a few steps back, and I was somehow more awestruck in this brief moment because of all of the art that was on this wall—the paintings, the drawings, the poetry,” said Hasan. Since its construction, the concrete barrier has become a canvas for protest art.“It was simultaneously the most beautiful and the most horrifying thing I had experienced in my life at the time,” he said. “Despite all the atrocity and injustice, the grief and the sadness, I think it’s more important than ever to celebrate and preserve the beauty and joy of Palestinian culture.”Ensemble Phoenecia formed last summer on the cusp of a fragile and tragic moment in the Middle East. Their first performance was on Oct. 2, just days before Hamas attacked Israel, killing over 1,000 Israelis and taking about 250 people hostage, and Israel launched its subsequent counteroffensive, killing over 36,000 Gazans to date and displacing at least 1.9 million.“It was so hard to deal with the pain of it all, but we had each other,” Hasan said. “And we knew that our mission was even stronger.” Moving forward, Ensemble Phoenecia plans to record an album and commission compositions from a number of Middle Eastern composers. Amer Hasan. Sami Seif.