Iraqi Orchestra Plays Up Unity

Three years ago, members of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra were reduced to subsistence wages, forced by Saddam Hussein’s regime to supplement their love of music with jobs as taxi drivers and teachers.

Three months ago, they were driven out of their headquarters by the ravages of war, with no electricity. Tonight, they are scheduled to perform for President Bush, with the National Symphony Orchestra, at the red-carpeted Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts here, with cellist Yo-Yo Ma as featured soloist and the works of Beethoven and Bizet at their fingertips.

“Music is an international language,” Hisham Sharaf, director of the Iraqi orchestra, said by phone between rehearsals at the Kennedy Center on Monday. “We are Kurdish, Shi’a, Sunni, Christian, Armenian. We want the world to know we have culture in Iraq. Some people who come to Baghdad are surprised we have an orchestra; they think we have only camels and a desert.”

Sharaf almost didn’t make it to tonight’s performance. After the announcement that the orchestra would travel to Washington, amid some biting commentary on Al Jazeera and other Arab media, someone took a shot at Sharaf’s car, penetrating the windshield but missing him.

“Maybe it was an accident,” he said. “Some people think we’re playing for the American Army. They don’t understand it’s a cultural exchange.”

The journey from Baghdad to Washington for this troupe of about 60 Iraqi musicians owes something to Air Force Col. Scott Norwood, a senior military assistant to L. Paul Bremer III, the chief U.S. administrator in Baghdad. Norwood, who plays the trumpet, was invited to perform with the orchestra this summer, and he discovered the plight of the musicians.

When the regime fell in April, looters burned the al-Rashid Theater, where the orchestra performed monthly, destroying much of its library of sheet music. Instruments were stolen or damaged in a trail of broken lutes, harpsichords and pianos. Undeterred, 45 members of the orchestra gave their first postwar concert in June. They played “My Nation,” which had been the national anthem before Hussein took power in 1979. Associated Press said the performance “brought tears to the eyes of the audience.”

The musicians had moved to another site in Baghdad, but an erratic electrical grid left them playing in the dark in a hall with poor acoustics and no air conditioning. In November, Bremer welcomed the musicians to their new headquarters at the Baghdad Convention Center, inside the city’s so-called Green Zone, which is guarded by U.S. troops. “All across Iraq, people are working hard to return the country the normal,” Bremer told them. “You play a very important role in that message.”

But before they could play, they would need music and instruments. Norwood contacted Susan Feder of G. Schirmer Inc., one of the largest publishers of music scores, and she in turn contacted the Major Orchestra Librarians’ Assn., an international network of symphony librarians. Within three months, collecting materials in Washington, London and Sydney, organizers had gathered complete sets of 350 pieces of music -- with scores for the conductor and the various instruments.

“We gathered 90% of their wish list and many, many more,” said Paul Gunther, chief librarian for the Minnesota Orchestra and president of the librarians’ association. Under copyright law, some music cannot be purchased but only rented. In those cases, publishers donated it.

“We felt it was important to aid in this nation-building effort,” Feder said. “The Iraqi symphony was not in position to rent it.” They also reached out to some musicians’ estates, which donated works still under copyright, like George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris,” Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” and Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.”

Meanwhile, the National Endowment for the Arts had launched Operation Harmony, a parallel request to music companies to donate instruments. Steinway & Sons, the 150-year-old piano company based in New York and Germany, earmarked a nine-foot concert grand, model D -- the kind most often used by symphony orchestras, which normally sells for $96,000. “We’re very glad to do it,” said Steinway spokesman Leo Spellman, who did not issue a press release on the contribution. “We’re waiting for a signal for how and when to ship it.”

Monetary donations came in too. And two officials from Washington came to visit.

Michael Kaiser, president of the Kennedy Center, and Patricia Harrison, assistant secretary of State for education and cultural affairs, visited Baghdad in September and invited the orchestra to Washington. They agreed to share the $200,000 cost of the trip. The Iraqi orchestra brought some traditional Kurdish instruments and scores, which make their debut at the Kennedy Center tonight and are set to be demonstrated Wednesday to children from Washington-area elementary schools.

Founded in 1959, the Iraqi orchestra is among the oldest in the Arab world. It was disbanded in 1966 by a government official reportedly hostile to Western classical music. Eventually, the orchestra went public again, although its schedule was erratic during the 10 years of the Iran-Iraq War. In 1990, after Iraq invaded Kuwait and the conductor, a foreigner, fled the country, composer Mohammed Amin Ezzat was named its conductor. He served until 2002, when Hussein, who had written a novel called “The Gate of the City,” wanted Ezzat to compose a score for the stage adaptation.

“I didn’t say no, of course,” Ezzat told the Chicago Tribune. “I accepted. Then I went to Germany. I was a refugee.”

From there, Ezzat made his way to Sweden, where he sought political asylum. He returned to Iraq and the orchestra this fall. And tonight one of his compositions, called “Two Fragments,” is scheduled to have its U.S. debut at the Kennedy Center.

“When you actually put musicians side by side with a piece of music, it’s irrelevant where they come from,” Kaiser said. “There’s a great symbolic reason for doing this.”