Music works to soothe the savage beast in Syria

Monday night, I went to Carnegie Hall for one of the most amazing concerts I’ve ever heard in my entire life. The concert was titled “Shostakovich for the Children of Syria” and all the proceeds will go to Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Fronteres (MSF) to aid the ongoing debacle of violence going on there, which is encapsulated by Ramsy Baroud’s article, Assessing the conflict in Syria and Egypt, particularly in the first two pages, which will give you a feel for the chaos going on there.

Appropriately the music being performed was Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 in C major, Op. 60 This extraordinary piece ranks among the longest in the composer’s canon, coming in at nearly an hour and a half. Yet the extraordinary orchestra that pulled off this major musical miracle was made up of 150 musicians from around the world, who were donating their services for the cause of a lasting peace and financially supporting the ongoing humanitarian work in Syria. I have rarely seen an orchestra this large or talented. It filled the entire stage to its edges and played brilliantly under George Mathew, artistic director and conductor.

Before the performance, Sophie Delaunay, executive director of Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontiers, explained that clusters of the 150 musicians (of all ages) would be picked to perform to go abroad and perform the Shostakovich Symphony for the Children of Syria in different countries.

Musically a new shorter piece had been composed for the concert by brilliant clarinetist Kinan Azmeh, called “Sahah Hazen, Kul Sabah” (“A Sad Morning, Every Morning”). Azmeh walked onstage without his tux jacket, his white sleeves rolled up and played the touching piece, whose themes were incorporated in the larger piece. It was a beginning for the joint venture of musical talent, even genius, under Mathew’s steady hand.

What an amazing idea I thought to myself to enlist all this talent on behalf of supporting Doctors Without Borders, who are supporting the lives and health of Syria’s ravaged country. Two paragraphs from Baroud’s piece sum up the human damage, “Syria has been hit the hardest. For months, the United Nations has maintained that over 100,000 people have been killed in the 33 months of conflict.”

More recently, the pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights concluded that at least 125,835, of which more than a third of them are civilians, have been killed. The UN’s humanitarian agency (OCHA) says that millions of Syrians living in perpetual suffering are in need of aid, and this number will reach 9.3 million by the end of 2014.

But as Shostakovich’s music went from quiet drum beats to resounding clashes of horns and kettle drums, recreating the sounds of war, mixing with each other, fading away, returning, always with a dissonance lurking in the sections of the orchestra, it broke one’s heart. The music was delivering a nonverbal message to your soul asking, ‘Why must this dissonance of war’ always be present even in the sections that triumphed over it for a time then, the brass returning with hope? This was perhaps the best of Shostakovich’s I’d ever heard (and I’m a fan of 20^th and 21^st century music). The dissonances reflected the pain of our times mixed with sections of pure musical light that shone like the spotlights off the polished brass.

As to Shostakovich himself, his Symphony No. 7 in C major, Op. 60, (titled Leningrad) was written c. 1939–40. Initially dedicated to the life and deeds of Vladimir Lenin, Shostakovich decided instead to dedicate the symphony to the city of Leningrad on its completion in December 1941 The work remains one of Shostakovich’s best known compositions.

The piece soon became very popular in both the Soviet Union and the West as a symbol of resistance to Nazi totalitarianism and militarism. It is still regarded as the major musical testament of the estimated 25 million Soviet citizens who lost their lives in World War II. The symphony is played frequently at the Leningrad Cemetery, where half a million victims of the 900-day Siege of Leningrad are buried. As a condemnation of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the work is particularly representative of the political responsibilities that Shostakovich felt he had for the state, regardless of the conflicts and criticisms he faced throughout his career with Soviet censors and love/hate relationship with Joseph Stalin.

Nevertheless, for this listener Shostakovich remains with Stravinsky two of the premier of Russia’s pantheon of composers. His music is restless, moving from loud to soft, fast to slow, and, without your knowing, piercing, your heart and soul with emotions, even tears (I had trouble holding mine back). And the nearly two hours the piece ran with the introductions and short speeches seem to fly by, lifting my wife and several of her friends and me a level. My reaction was caused in part by the who’s who of players on stage, from music colleges, music departments of universities (the best) from around the world. So we had two armies here: the other the bestial terrorists; the second the angels of the muses that soothed our hearts with love and hope.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.