Ian Ritchie, the director of the City of London Festival, gave a talk on my subject it seems last year. Ritchie read Law and Music at Cambridge, which certainly gave him a solid basis for the topic of music conflict resolution. I have copied here the transcript of the talk held at Barnard's Inn Hall in April 2013:
I am talking
today about music and conflict resolution.
Although there is considerable evidence available concerning the power
of music and its effective application to the damaging human consequences of
conflict, much less has been spoken or written about its potential role in
resolving conflict or addressing its causes.
Without redressing the balance completely, I hope to provide one or two
pointers in the wider context of music and its longstanding relationship with
conflict.
There are a
number of ideas that are worth exploring – separate subjects as well as
variations upon the same – and I propose to say something about the power of
music and to define some of the different facets of its relationship with
conflict. I hope that this will provide
an overture of ideas: the full symphony has yet to be written. In fact, we have only begun to scratch the
surface of what is to be learned about the effects of music upon human
emotions, behaviour and well-being, both mental and physical.
I have
chosen the following themes and variations: conflict resolution at the heart of
musical expression itself; the use of music to avert conflict, to resolve
conflict, to heal the trauma caused by conflict and to rebuild broken
communities, not just damaged minds; and finally music’s response to the
experience of conflict, for example inspired by war, which incidentally can be
part of the healing process or ‘resolution’ achieved through the creative process. With the importance of ‘resolution’ uppermost
in my mind, I have avoided the subject of music’s use throughout history as
propaganda in support of conflict and as a weapon on the battlefield itself.
By way of
introduction, I should explain how I came to be involved in this whole area of
discussion. In the first place my whole
professional life has involved making and working with music, and over time I
have gained a deepening awareness of the nature and power of music itself. But then, around 20 years ago, I was drawn
into the events and consequences of the war in the Balkans, especially in
Bosnia-Herzegovina. Some of you will
remember the extraordinary courage of the cellist in Sarajevo, Vedran
Smailović, who night after night donned his tails and played in the city’s main
marketplace, at the site of the murderous mortar attack by the Serbian forces;
it was freezing as well as dangerous but he survived, albeit with frostbite
which damaged his cello playing. I knew some of the composers who wrote music
specially for him and one in particular, Nigel Osborne, who was renting my flat
in Edinburgh at the time: he visited Sarajevo in the midst of the siege and
arranged to get the cellist out; he finally succeeded in bringing Vedran to
Scotland where my flat became his home for a while! At the end of the war I spent time in Mostar
with Nigel Osborne setting up the Pavarotti Music Centre and its unique Music
Therapy clinic for children suffering trauma as a result of the conflict: it
was also a music school, recording studio, performance space and a centre for
musical outreach into the schools and communities throughout the region; I also
set up a cross-community orchestra, the Mostar Sinfonietta, which comprised not
only Muslims and Catholics from the two parts of the divided city but also
musicians of all standards and from all the confessions of this one-time mixed
and integrated society.
Conflict
resolution has lived at the heart of musical expression. It is generally true to say that every artist
is on a quest for beauty, though the 20th century threw up some
exceptions to this rule. In music,
beauty stems from the creation of dissonance and its resolution into harmony,
the struggle being required to create the conditions necessary for the greater expressive
impact. This seems to offer a parallel with human nature itself which appears
to require contradiction and disagreement en route to achieving the clarity of
consensus and agreement – or, worse still, needs conflict to be waged in order
properly to comprehend the peace that might ensue. It is therefore unsurprising that music, a
basic human impulse which predates even any form of speech in an individual’s
development, is a potentially powerful medium in the area of conflict and a
tool for its resolution. The nature of
music can be described as an interdependent triangular relationship between
inventing, performing and listening – three cornerstones of a creative
triangle. There are illustrations which
I can give of conflict being averted, resolved and its traumatic consequences
repaired through all three modes of musical engagement: simply listening,
performing with a voice or an instrument, or creating either in pure musical
terms or harnessed to other forms of expression, such as words in the making of
song.
There is one
very public and increasingly widespread example of music being used to avert
conflict: I am sure that many of you, like me, will have emerged from a London
underground station or entered a shopping centre to the sound of classical music
being played through loudspeakers. The
purpose of these installations is to discourage
the build-up of restless individuals, to break-up the congregation of rowdy
gangs and to prevent anti-social behaviour.
As a music lover, one is bound to feel slightly queasy at the thought of
this instrumental function of a much-loved art form as a kind of subliminal
wallpaper as opposed to food for the soul; and it is ironic that something
beautiful should be deliberately off-putting rather than encouraging for people. But it has the desired effect. The potential of music to wind people up and
foment conflict is well known and has been the bread and butter of military
musicians for thousands of years – raising morale on the part of both attacker
and defender, inspiring teamwork but also individual and collective
aggression. It follows that the exact
opposite can also be achieved, with music that can inspire peace and dissolve
aggression. There is considerable
potential for the Armed Forces to engage in this approach as part of the role
of the very many military musicians deployed in the theatres of war and not
merely on the parade grounds. The role
of army bandsmen in relation to medical care has existed for centuries and now
goes well beyond the stretcher-bearing duties of the musicians, as was the case
in both the World Wars for example, to embrace working in field hospitals
alongside the doctors. And now there are
even graduates with formal music therapy qualifications who have started to
enter the Army as serving musicians.
This is an optimistic sign of music being applied potentially more
systematically as a cure to the trauma of military engagement, even though it
does not yet foretell the possibility of music as prevention – and we must
remember that prevention is better than cure, as the saying goes.
Although
music and the resolution of conflict is the declared subject of my short talk,
this is perhaps the most elusive aspect of music’s role in this context. There is no doubt that it can have a calming
influence. Neuroscientists – and I am
not equipped or prepared to speak with any pretence of expertise in this area –
have demonstrated the actual patterns of brain activity in response to
different kinds of music that can induce different emotional responses. Indeed the physics and the chemistry induced
by music within the human brain are becoming increasingly the subject of expert
treatise and actual treatment in the fields of neuroscience, psychiatry and the
growing profession of music therapy. But
these applications of music have tended to prove their cases in the aftermath
of conflict rather than in the midst, addressing the traumatic effects or
social damage within communities that have been divided through conflict. One illustration that I shall give, one of a
number of examples that I experienced during my many visits to Bosnia in the
aftermath of the Balkan conflict, when I was engaged with the composer Nigel
Osborne to set up and build a Music Therapy clinic in Mostar specifically to
treat war-damaged children, is a social and political one. After we had built and opened the Pavarotti
Music Centre, complete with its Music Therapy clinic, a number of us continued
to volunteer in delivering music projects for the children of Mostar as well as
for the adults and for the specific goal of healing the society as well as the
individual: this meant bringing people together from across the very strong
divide between East Mostar and West Mostar – essentially the Moslem Bosniaks
and the Catholic Croats who made up (and still comprise) the most substantial
proportions of the city’s population; at the conclusion of a major songwriting
and choral singing project involving children from both halves of the city, we
presented a concert in the courtyard of the Music Centre to which the two
Mayors of Mostar were invited to attend (officially there was only one Mayor
and a deputy Mayor for the municipality, but the community division required
the artifice of recognising two mayors to support the separate education systems
and civic governance of the place); the Mayors sat at the opposite ends of the
front row, surrounded by their respective weighty officials, but during the
course of the evening they increasingly recognised their people, their families
and their heritage in the faces, songs and behaviour of the children performing
in front of them – by the end of the evening the two Mayors were sitting
together and speaking animatedly for the first time since hostilities had
ended. Although the Serbo-Croat language
is shared and spoken by the divided parties, it provided no medium for real
understanding: it was the music that achieved that.
I can offer
countless examples of music as a means of healing trauma caused by conflict,
and the work in Bosnia is just one of these.
Colleagues of mine in various NGOs or working as individuals have found
themselves working effectively as artists applying their gifts in ways that are
therapeutic – in ex-Yugoslavia, the Caucasus, the Middle East and parts of
Africa, for example, that have been torn apart by war – but the medically
accredited clinical discipline of Music Therapy, now functioning all over the
world, has been applied systematically to trauma in rather more isolated
conflict situations. Apart from the
Bosnian example, another centre for this work has been Northern Ireland both
during and in the aftermath of the troubles there. From these and other sources have emerged
conferences, publications and studies which have already been shared
internationally and continue to show the way in which music can actually heal
post-traumatic stress disorders. This
approach has massive untapped potential in relation to the Armed Forces,
particularly as they return from the Afghanistan and Iraq theatres of war with
many suffering from diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorders which, in earlier
generations, were described as shell shock and consigned traumatised soldiers
to forbidding asylums around the country.
In recent years there has been substantial work undertaken – in Northern
Ireland once again – among civilians and the widespread incidence of trauma
that people have experienced. This has
shown not only the individual benefits from this being treated, using Music
Therapy as a powerful means, but also the collective consequences upon the
wider community. In short, the
proposition now is that sustainable peace can be achieved far more readily
through addressing and healing trauma within individuals, families, and their
wider circles.
I have
already alluded to how music can rebuild broken or divided communities and not
just repair individually damaged minds.
During my time spent in Bosnia over the years, one particular model
which I helped to develop and support was that of the Mostar Sinfonietta, which
drew together once more the small number of musicians who remained in the city
by the time the conflict was over. This
was not as straightforward as it sounds, because of the divided nature of the
city: once upon a time this held a happily united and intermarried mixture of
people of all confessions and national backgrounds, but 15 years ago it was
(and to some extent still is today) a place of ghettos and political divisions,
principally between the Moslem and Catholic communities. The small mixed-ability ensemble of musicians
symbolised a unity that could be achieved through a shared purpose and a common
language – a harmonious resolution to the dissonant conflict which went
before. Daniel Barenboim, through his
West Eastern Divan Orchestra made up mainly of young Israeli and Palestinian
musicians, achieved a worldwide profile for this way of working together. Less visibly, another organisation I am
involved in, Musicians without Borders, has for several years been running a
Rock School in Mitrovića, a town in Kosovo which has remained resolutely
divided between its Albanian and Serbian citizens on opposite sides of the
river running through. The only way to
bring the young people together was to take them on summer courses to Skopje in
neighbouring Macedonia where they happily made music together, whilst back in
Kosovo their School existed in two separate buildings on either bank of the
river. Soon they started to walk across
the bridge and begin the process of their families and communities getting to
know each other once again. Closer to home, Musicians without Borders, through
its UK office in Manchester, has brought together refugees and asylum seekers,
not only from different areas of conflict around the world but also those
remaining separated in spite of coming from the same country: the effective
medium for this has been music, leading to the creation of an inspiring
multinational ensemble, Beating Wing
Orchestra, and project involving victims of torture called Stone Flowers.
As I
approach the conclusion of my words, it would be remiss of me not to refer to
the huge amount of music and, indeed, of poetry which through song has become
music that has been inspired by or created in response to conflict. Perhaps more than in any other time of war,
some remarkable soldier-composers emerged during the First World War, such as
Butterworth, Gurney, Ravel and Vaughan Williams, alongside poets, painters and
other famous artists. Even music created
by those who avoided taking part in wars, such as Second World War pacifists
like Benjamin Britten or Samuel Barber, or composers who were too old to fight
like Richard Strauss, responded to the pity of war in a way which could offer
resolution, or a musical pathway to peace, at least in their own minds and
routinely affecting those of the performers and the audiences of such
music. This summer I shall be presenting
an experiment, hopefully a first which will be much imitated in the future, by
commissioning special arrangements of some of this music, created by those
involved in and influenced by conflict, so that it can be performed by military
band. In this instance, it will be the
Band of the Royal Artillery who are of course trained and deployed in making
music for ceremonial occasions and raising public morale: indeed, on the morning
of their concert which happens to be on Armed Forces Day, 29th June,
they will have changed the guard at Buckingham Palace; that evening, however,
they will be performing a new and totally different repertory that includes the
reflective and profoundly moving songs which Ivor Gurney wrote while in the
trenches on the Somme. This concert concludes the Worlds in Collision conference which the City of London Festival is
presenting in partnership with The Musical Brain.
In
conclusion, I should tell you a little bit about this conference that looks at Music and the Trauma of War. We are
putting it on in the Mansion House, symbolising the very heart of our capital
City and bringing together musicians, music therapists, arts practitioners,
psychologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, historians and soldiers to share
their knowledge and experience. The
first day looks at the application of music to the trauma of war and the second
at the response of music to the experience of conflict, ending with the unusual
concert. This event will hopefully offer
some continuity – at least one of the potential directions forward – from this
important seminar in which it has been a privilege to have the chance to
participate and say a few words. As I
said at the start and have done little to disprove in my words which followed,
we are only now scratching the surface of a huge subject and just beginning to
understand the extent of music’s usefulness and its power to make a difference
to individual lives and to humanity as a whole.
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