© David Wilson 2003
MUSIC AND WAR
David Wilson (Future Trust & first director of the Pavarotti Music
Centre)
(a shorter version of this article was published in the European
Journal of
Intercultural Studies, Vol.10, No 3, 1999 and in The Journal of Dramatic
Theory & Criticism, The University of Kansas, Fall 2000, Vol. XV,
No 1)
The Bible says, ‘In the beginning was the word’. Wrong.
First there was the rhythm. From the time of the Big Bang, it is the
beat that
goes on because the cosmos has its pulse. All else may be chaos, but
it is there, in mathematical time, something primordial(1). It
is no coincidence that good musicians are often good mathematicians.
In one sense, however,
the Bible was right. Man’s first attempt to communicate involved
rhythm, movement and dance which represented the first language, the
first word.
Look at the honey bee to see how this is true for beings other than
mammals. In Douglas Whynott’s book, Following the Bloom, he says that bees
produce "sustained wing vibrations and measured sound pulses. Tempo
corresponds to distance. [Bees] remain in the hive dancing through the
day and into the night, altering the straight run to create a gravity symbol
that refers to the sun’s position on the other side of the earth
- a position the bee has never seen."(2)
At the time of what Engels called ‘primitive communism’,
when homo sapiens were hunter-gatherers, humans signalled to each other
by beating
stick on stick, stone on stone. The first vocal syllables were whistles
and calls based on rhythmic patterns which allowed human communication
to take place. Rhythm was there, at the start of everything. It was
there at the start of our species and at the start of our individual
lives.
Take the human embryo. Some would argue that we came from the sea.
Whether we
did or not, we all came from the waters of our mothers. Water is a
perfect transmitter of sound. Try placing a waterproof watch at one
end of a
swimming pool. Get there early in the morning, when no one else is
around, and ask
a friend to swim to the far end of the pool under water and ask them
what they can hear.
Both the heart of the foetus and that of the mother beat to a time
cycle of three: dum, dum, break, dum, dum, break. This is called
three time.
Mother and baby are in syncopated rhythm with each other. They have
individual rhythms which meet to form a third. This may be the embryo’s first
experience of the outer world, the beating of ticking hearts, and if you
accept my watch analogy, sounds exterior to the womb may also be heard
and absorbed. Many pregnant women will tell you that they are aware their
babies react to external sounds. So music and rhythm or, rhythm and music
to be chronologically correct, is central to our lives. It is a physical
and emotional link, both to something in us and beyond us, linking us to
the ‘music of the spheres’.
Music can move us to extremes of joy or sadness, elation or depression.
Perhaps it is a piece we associate with some event in our life: when
we first kissed, when we went to our first teenage party, when we
first made
love. This musical association is strong in all of us. Perhaps it
is with Albinoni’s "Adagio", Mozart’s "Clarinet Concerto",
Ali Farka Toure, blues, a song sung by Ella Fitzgerald or John Lee
Hooker, an Indian raga, hip hop or drum and bass. In all of these types
of music,
we can be emotionally, and even physically, moved.
I am arguing here that sound profoundly influences our physical and
emotional states. If you project sound waves at piles of sand, iron
filings, water
or mercury, for example, you can create varied patterns, from spirals
to grids. I have already mentioned the sound conductivity of water
and, given
its high level in the human body, you will not be surprised if I
tell you that our cells react to sound vibrations, even those at
the far
end of
the spectrum which we are unable to hear. With this knowledge, holistic
healers place vibrating forks close to the energy field of the human
body. If tempted to dismiss this as being too far on the fringe,
the reader should
not forget that hospitals use high-pitched sound to shatter kidney
and gall stones. Conversely, the negative side of the use of sound
are experiments
undertaken by the US military and other governments, utilizing sound
waves as a weapon of war. So sound can both massage and destroy the
body’s
molecules.
Music therapist, Olivea Dewhurst-Maddock, has argued that the vibrational
energies of different notes affect different areas of the body. For
instance, C major affects the bones, lower back, legs and feet, D
major transmits
energy waves to the kidneys and bladder, lymphatic and reproductive
systems and skin and A major is related to pain and pain control.
A few years ago, a good friend of mine had major heart surgery. This
is what he told me about it.
'My post-operative experience was quite disturbing. I'd brought some of my favourite music to listen to in the hospital. I have always been passionate about classical music. My mother and stepfather were professional musicians and I was brought up, from the embryo onwards, listening to Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Haydn and Schubert. Once I was a bit more than an embryo, I learnt to play the piano, cello and guitar. During the week following the operation, I lost touch with a lot of things - my sense of taste, smell, my enjoyment of books, but the worst was being cut off from the meaning of music. Something central to my life seemed to have died inside me. I would listen to a Mozart piano concerto; I could follow the harmony and counter-point, but found no beauty in it, nor could I appreciate its extraordinary passion and inventiveness. Listening to Mozart was like listening to Salieri. That loss and the frequent moments when I burst into tears, for no apparent reason, convinced me that lengthy and violent operations have a much deeper effect on our inner selves than medical science acknowledges. Only part of me was put to sleep. Many levels of my subconscious and my body were awake when the knife cut me open. They went into a state of shock. They switched off. They needed time to mourn. My enjoyment of music now, three years later, is even more intense than before. I don't know if that comes with age, or whether it is the result of the operation, but it is now a passion only second to my closest relationships.'
Perhaps it is for this very reason that in ancient Egypt, the hieroglyph
for music was also that for well-being and joy. These remarks
take me on to a discussion of music in extreme human situations.
In
war. It is interesting
to me that when the lights go out, when the food runs out and
when death is ever-present, you will still find music.
In 1994, I was in cellars in Sarajevo and Mostar, right on
the front line.(3) The shells were exploding,
the snipers were at work, but people, particularly young people,
gathered
together
and, if they could not listen to music
as there was often no power, they played it. The louder the
shelling, the louder their music. It was an expression of defiance,
a testament
to the
survival of the one thing that kept them human in an inhuman
situation - the primordial language of rhythm and music which
connected them
back to their essence.
I knew a young soldier in Mostar who came to the flat where
I was staying after his time on the front line, a Kalashnikov
on
one
shoulder and
a guitar on the other. He tapped the guitar and told me, ‘A much better weapon’.
I have met young musicians in Mostar who faced their former
classmates across a narrow street, playing music to them when
it was too dark
to fight. Cigarettes were thrown into the building where the
musicians were crouching
as they performed for their enemies. It was an expression of
their common humanity.
Just before the war ended in 1995, I helped to smuggle into
East Mostar a photo exhibition on Bob Marley sponsored by Island
Records.
To this
day, I cannot say who else was involved because we received
a lot of opposition
from some mainstream NGO’s who claimed that we were endangering aid
programmes in the area, although some of these same NGO’s were handing
up to 30% of their aid to the forces bombarding Sarajevo and Mostar. For
this exhibition, we took in Marley tapes and CD’s which the local
radio station broadcast non-stop for two days from their cellar. The exhibition
opened underground, on the front line. I will never forget how the town
pulsed to Marley’s rhythms in the midst of the thud of
incoming shells. It was an expression of the power of music.
These are examples of overt and easily-recognizable influences
of music in such extreme interface situations: music as defiance
with
an external
enemy in mind. But what of the influence of music in relationship
to the enemy within? Its effect on the disturbed and traumatized
minds
of those
who have been too close to the barbarisms of war, who have
shot and killed, have been shot at and wounded, both physically
and
emotionally,
who have
seen friends die, lost mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters?
The Pavarotti Music Centre was opened to allow the healing
power
of music to enter
this community and was constructed in East Mostar, a part of
the city completely devastated by two wars: first in the war
of the whole
town against Serb forces and then in the much worse war between
the Croats on
the west bank of the Neretva River and the Bosniaks on the East.
Thousands of families were driven into this ghetto on the east
side by "ethnic
cleansing", an inaccurate phrase for attempted genocide.(4) A
truer phrase would be "ethnic purging". They lived in
cellars for ten months, eating grass soup and emerging into the
streets only
to collect
water, and in the case of the young men, to fight. When the Anne
Frank exhibition
arrived at the centre in 1998, I was asked to say something at
its opening. There was not much to say, only that the Mostar ghetto
had contained
thousands
of Anne Franks.(5)
The young were particularly affected by the war. Some of those
who attended the centre used music to escape their darkest memories.
I had friends there
who told me that only when they played or listened to music
could
they escape their nightmares. It became clear to me that music
had a stabilizing
effect on their lives. The best of our African drummers had
been the youngest soldier on the front line, but if you met him,
a gentle
giant of a man,
you would not believe the things that happened to him or the
things that he did which, when remembered, brought him close
to tears. The
experiences
my colleagues and I had in Bosnia during the war, and my experiences
as director of the centre in post-war Bosnia, persuaded me of
the value of
music as healer for emotional pains and trauma.
We started organizing music workshops from the beginning of
our time in Bosnia. Children were brought together in shelters
and
cellars,
in bombed
ruins and, when safe, in open spaces to make and listen to
music: to sing, to beat drums, to strum guitars, to act and
react together
through
music.
These workshops took on a structured form with Professor Nigel
Osborne who had organized a children’s opera in Sarajevo at the height of
the war. Osborne brought graduate students to Mostar from the Faculties
of Music at Edinburgh and Hanover Universities where he was a professor.
Intensive music workshops in and around Mostar were initiated and developed
into what became our successful schools’ outreach programme.
I remember attending one of the first workshops. There was
still intermittent shelling and our music students gathered
children
together, in a shelter
in the centre of town. One woman sat with her six-year-old
daughter who was blind and impassive. I watched while one of
the students
attempted
to get the girl to play a triangle. The girl refused to even
hold it. This went on for some time until, finally, she grabbed
the
triangle with one
hand, the metal stick with the other, struck it over and over
again, her face lighting up. Her mother told us later that
it was the
first time she
had seen her daughter smile in over two years.
The first schools’ project was called "The Oceans".
First, our teachers started with the Neretva which flows through
the centre
of Mostar. They went to the schools and took with them music
from the banks
of that river - Croat, Serb and Bosniak songs. On the next visit,
the theme became the Mediterranean because the Neretva flows
into that
sea: Tunisian
love songs, Flamenco, French, Italian and Greek music. Next,
the Atlantic because that is the ocean into which the Mediterranean
flows: everything
from Brazilian, to Blues, to Celtic and West African music, then
the Indian Ocean and finally the Pacific. The children became
aware that
they did
not just live in Mostar, or specifically in the case of East
Mostar, in a small ghetto, but that their town and river had
links to the far
distant
islands of the Pacific. When Pavarotti came to open the building,
some of these same children performed a Hawaiian boat dance for
him.
The Centre employed more than thirty young musicians who travelled
out to schools and kindergartens in Mostar and the surrounding
villages to
bring music education into the lives of the children. Centre
staff also worked in special schools, the Sarajevo Blind School
and in
the Srpska
Republika.
The Music Therapy department, staffed by the first resident
music therapists in Bosnia Hercegovina, worked with the most
disturbed
and distressed
children. I am not a music therapist and cannot speak for them,
but as the director
who introduced music therapy to the centre, I watched the progress
of their work very carefully. The results were amazing and
a credit to a small,
dedicated department who achieved so much in an extremely distressed
town with its extremely-distressed populace. This small team
were responsible for ground-breaking work. Children with extreme
difficulties
were being
treated and, on occasion, responded so well that some of them
ended up
by joining more mainstream activities that were offered at
the Centre.The PMC had a team of young musicians working in
the mental
hospital
in Pazaric. They cooperated with the music therapy department
and accepted
their
help and advice, but they were not therapists, yet the results
of their work there were extraordinary. The hospital was caught
between
two
front lines
in the war; the patients had been left unstaffed and starving
and were forced to bury their own dead. When I first visited
the
place immediately
after
the war, it was like a scene from Dante’s Inferno. If you went there
later with Oha and his team, the patients could be found lining the driveway
in expectation of the visit and a good time. Every six weeks, a few of them
were invited to the PMC to spend the weekend and join in the Centre’s
activities.
The PMC adopted a holistic approach to music which was probably
quite original. Our Western-oriented clinical music therapy department
worked successfully
alongside those working to a different rhythm: music as healer,
alongside music as treatment. This link was an important part
of
my thinking
since the inception of the Centre, in part as a result of living
with a part-Cherokee
acupuncturist who, although a practising Buddhist, ends her
meditations by beating her Indian drum. She practised acupuncture
at the Centre
for many months and had extraordinary success with patients who
varied from
the physically wounded to the mentally scarred.
It is an interesting subject this: the distinction between
treatment and healing. I have become convinced that there is
a place for
both, with the
time long past for an integrated approach to be developed by
those engaged in music therapies. I understand the word "healing" is
about being made whole again, a striving for balance, repairing
out-of-tuneness with oneself and with the environment. It starts
from the premise that
none of us can, or should be, separated from the web in which
we live. This is in stark contrast to the Western notion of regarding
the environment
as something separate and alien from ourselves. Working from
this principle, music healing is preventative, not reactive,
a practice to be used
to
help maintain harmony and balance. Precisely for this reason,
it does not fit
neatly into the deductive, empirical principles of treatment
which are: there is something wrong and we will see if we can
right that
wrong and
will observe the result.
That is not to say that this more empirical approach is any
less worthy of practise. I saw it in the music therapy department
and
it does work.
A child assessed as needful of therapy is treated and either
does, or does not, get better. The results are observable.
A child who
does not talk
or smile starts to talk and smile. A child who is physically
destructive of him/herself and others changes their behaviour
for the better.
But where the musician stands in relationship to the child
more as a healer, you
cannot necessarily observe a result, good or bad. You can,
for example, run percussion workshops with children who are
not walking
round
Mostar with any overt problem and it is impossible to say that
because they beat
a drum twice a week they have been made better.
My experience is that these approaches are not mutually exclusive
and it is good for those brought up in one or other of these
cultures to cross-fertilise
and engage in self-questioning. I am fascinated by the strengths
and weaknesses on both sides. The Judaeo-Christian belief in
the expulsion from the Garden
of Eden divorces Man from his environment and leaves him attempting
to reshape it, often with disastrous consequences. By contrast,
the peoples
and cultures who believe they are still in their Garden of
Eden and have never been separated from their wider environment,
have
their
problems,
too. They are left disarmed in the face of the re-shapers.
For some in Bosnia Hercegovina, much that happened at the centre
was dangerously political because music was being used to counter
cultural
exclusiveness;
what I call cultural incest. It is interesting that the most
negative and threatening music comes from this tradition: national
anthems
and military
marching songs, to look at it from the extreme. To the contrary,
the best music, as with the best art, architecture and whatever
else expresses
human
creativity, comes from cultural mixing.(6) Goebbels
once said, "When
I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun." I would answer,
When I hear the word gun, I reach for my culture.
This attempt to universalize music and culture at the Centre
was deliberate and methodical. For the first year of our work,
we appointed
as Director
of Music Development the South African drummer, Eugene Skeef,
a cultural activist who was Steve Biko’s driver. He was
responsible for setting up what became an African percussion
tradition at the centre.
On Sunday
afternoons, you could find up to sixty children and young people
taking part in percussion workshops.
A strong percussion tradition developed, both at the centre
and as part of the outreach work at Pazaric Hospital, for example.
After
the first
half hour of drum tuition, I have seen very young children
express
rhythmic talent that appeared as if from nowhere, as though
latent to their essence
and being. On a recent visit to the USA, I came across an article
by Feeny Lipscomb, drummer and writer, who says, "Recently, medical research
has testified that drumming produces an altered state similar to meditation,
thereby reducing stress. Drumming is also a right-brain activity which
increases intuition, shuts down the "rational" mind, and centers
us in our hearts . . . I have often heard drumming compared to the high
produced by endorphins. In fact, many people have taken up drumming because
they’ve heard it’s a way to get the same endorphin-produced
high without running and/or doing aerobics."(7) As
someone who is allergic to exercise, I say yes to that.
From the start, the ethos of the PMC had been to make a difference,
not just in terms of the type of aid work that was carried
out, but also the
reasons why it was. It is time that society questions those
aid programmes which lead to dependency and ensure the continuation
of the outstretched
hand. This form of aid becomes an appendage to war and does
not
address the larger questions of physical, spiritual and psychological
reconstruction
which minimize the possibility of future wars.
I find it strange that Europeans arrive in Africa to teach
the people how to grow their crops. One of the places they
go to
sits in the
Rift Valley,
where agriculture was practised before Europe was populated.
Don’t
get me wrong. I am not saying they should not be there doing what they
do, but they should be aware of the history, economics, culture and politics
of the people they have come to help and if to this is added a passion
for justice and, dare I say it, an understanding of the need for political
change, then their work can be more than a ‘flash in the pan’.(8) I
cannot do better than repeat the words of Eugene Skeef: "The
destruction visited upon the planet in the name of advancement
is more than sufficient
proof that those of us whose basic education and development
was fired in the Western mould, need to exercise a rare humility
before proceeding
to administer aid to others. We all know that the so-called first
world (strange notion this, if we are to accept Africa as the
birthplace
of human civilization) has a great deal to learn from the so-called
third world,
if they can just step back, join the circle and let someone else
lead the song with a different rhythmic melody."
It was my hope that the Music Centre in Mostar, Pavarotti’s
first initiative in the field of music and cultural aid, could
be a resource
centre for a worldwide project whose purpose was to add and sustain
hope to the lives of the generation who may, one day, remember
war and conflict
as a distant memory.
NOTES:
1. The purest connection of music to nature
is to be found in the Eastern pentatonic scale, eg the bamboo
flute played in China. In discovering ‘natural
harmonics’, Pythagoras laid the groundwork for equal temperament through
his understanding of the ladder of notes. His ‘discoveries’ affected
the development of Western music. Orchestral music would not have been possible
without his visit to a blacksmith. Walking past one, he heard a hammer striking
an anvil and asked if he could weigh the hammers. He found that one was two-thirds
the size of the first. His experiments showed that by continually dividing
by two-thirds, an infinite spiral of notes emerges. He had hit upon ‘natural
harmonics’. He concluded that the cosmos was a harmonic ratio,
that we lived in a musical universe and that music obeys the laws
of physics.
2. Following The Bloom: Across America with the
Migratory Bee Keepers by
Douglas Whynott. Beacon Press, Boston,1991.
3. I was in Bosnia as co-founder
of the charity War Child, who initiated music and music
therapy projects in former Yugoslavia but which also had
medical and food programmes. I left War Child to set
up Future Trust so as to concentrate exclusively on support for The
PMC
and similar
music and cultural-based
programmes
4. The International Helsinki Federation
for Human Rights acknowledged in their 1993 report
that ‘what is taking place in Bosnia-Hercegovina
is attempted genocide - the extermination of a people in whole or in part
because of their race, religion or ethnicity’, with the international
community (the parties to the Geneva Convention and the United Nations), ‘displaying
nearly incomprehensible incapacity; having failed
to put an end to a war between one of the best
equipped
armies
in Europe and
a civilian population,
who were neither psychologically or physically
and materially prepared for it.’
5. Opening remarks made at the
Anne Frank Exhibition, PMC, 3 September 1998: "The
PMC is honoured to host the opening of the exhibition. On a personal note
and, as one born right at the end of the Second World War, my politics, in
fact my presence here at the PMC, has been shaped by Anne Frank. My father
was one of the first British doctors to enter Bergen Belsen and I still have
his photographs of the emaciated survivors imprinted on my brain. He told
me that he had been ashamed at how many died after Liberation because British
soldiers fed the people too much too quickly. Anne Frank would recognise
Bosnia and Hercegovina. We should not hide from the facts. Nothing was learnt
from her experiences and we sit here today in the Mostar Ghetto, a place
where thousands of Anne Franks ate grass soup for ten months at the worst
time of the war. We also sit inside a European country where events took
place which were the equal of those that happened during the time of the
last European Holocaust. It is to our shame that the same speeches were made,
the same eyes were averted, Münich went
Transatlantic. And it goes on. This has been
the century of Anne
Franks, the century
of holocausts. From
the Armenians at the beginning of the century
onto the fascist terror, the Stalin Gulags,
Cambodia, Rwanda. It
has been estimated
that in the last decade
we have had millions of Anne Franks; two
million children killed in wars, four million
orphaned
and some ten
million psychologically
traumatised. One
survivor of Auschwitz, Bruno Bettelheim,
once said
that there is no meaning at all to life but
we must behave as
though there is.
Anne Frank lived that
dictum almost to the end of her short life.
If she was here now - perhaps she is here
now in
all of us
present
- she would understand
and enjoy what
we are doing here."
6. ‘Music is the weapon’ declared the Nigerian musician, Fela
Anikulapo Kuti (from the 1982 film about Kuti of the same name by S Tchal-Gadjieff & J-J
Flori for Anthenne 2). Aware of that fact, politicians around the world use
music and musicians to achieve their goals or try to control music and musicians
which they perceive as a threat to their power; the treatment of Kuti, for
example, in Nigeria or Victor Jara in Pinochet’s
Chile. Even instruments are sometimes
seen as a threat and are banned.
7. Newsweek ("Your Child’s Brain",19
February 1996) presented evidence for the brain’s
need for rhythm. The article
described
the stress produced
when the brain
is deprived
of this basic need.
8.
For those
interested in the aid
debate as applied to former Yugoslavia,
I
would recommend
Barbara
E Harrell-Bond’s "Refugees and the Challenge
of Reconstructing Communities Through Aid",
in War Exile, Everyday
Life, published by Institute
of
Ethnology
and Folklore
Research, Zagreb.
For an
overall political perspective,
see Noam Chomsky, World
Orders and other
writings on Cold and
post-Cold War
International politics.
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© David Wilson 2003