For some Arab American classical artists, music can speak louder than politics
Kareem Roustom, a Syrian-born composer who is based in the Boston area, wrote “Ramal,” which the Grant Park Orchestra will perform July 12 at Millennium Park’s Pritzker Pavilion. (John Robson photo)
By: John von Rhein
Source: The Chicago Tribune
All performing and creative artists who hold complex identities also face complex journeys. Certainly, classical musicians of Middle Eastern heritage and/or Muslim faith often find themselves navigating very complex spaces in the United States of the 21st century.
With talent and persistence — also a little bit of luck — those artists can overcome some of the challenges and prejudices they face. In the process, they can bring deeply personal perspectives to their work and to modern social and political issues that may inform that work. Which is to say their music can give them a powerful voice with which to speak out against war — indeed, to shine a beacon of compassion and hope in the face of violence and tragedy in the Middle East.
Two such classical musicians — a conductor of Jordanian-Lebanese heritage and a Syrian-American composer, both based in the U.S. — will share an upcoming orchestral program at the Grant Park Music Festival. Each, in his own way, believes he has something distinctive to contribute to the global conversation.
The Chicago-born conductor Fawzi Haimor, whose father is Jordanian-Lebanese and whose mother is from the Philippines, sees it as his duty to promote the work of Muslim and Arabic composers. One of the very few Muslim conductors pursuing an international career, he also has made it part of his mission to encourage younger musicians of similar ethnic and religious background to take up the baton.
For his Chicago conducting debut with the Grant Park Orchestra on July 12 at the Pritzker Pavilion, Haimor will lead “Ramal,” a recent symphonic work by the Damascus-born Kareem Roustom, a classically trained composer who is based in the Boston area and lectures at Tufts University in Medford, Mass.
Along with works for the concert hall, Roustom’s credits include movie and jazz scores, along with pop arrangements that include Shakira’s duet with Beyonce, “Beautiful Liar.” “Ramal” was premiered by the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, an Arab-Israeli youth ensemble, in 2014 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, under co-founder Daniel Barenboim’s direction, and is based on one of the meters used in classical Arabic poetry.
Haimor calls it “a marvelous piece” and says he’s “thrilled” to be bringing it to Chicago as part of his local podium debut. Throwing his weight behind new works that have something to say to today’s world has been important to him since the day he decided music would be his destiny, says the 34-year-old conductor.
He was born in the former Augustana Hospital in the Near North area once known as “President’s Corner,” but was raised for most of his first 11 years in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where his father, an economist, worked for the United Nations. Music and science fascinated him from an early age (his mother started him on violin lessons when he was 4) and continued to do so following the family’s move in 1994 to the San Francisco Bay Area, which remains his home base.
Haimor holds bachelor’s degrees in music and neurobiology, eventually switching his major to music to pursue master’s degrees in conducting at the University of California, Davis, and Indiana University in Bloomington. Given his early determination to attend medical school and become a doctor, it took him six months of deliberation to make up his mind. Fortunately his parents supported his decision.
So what made him choose conducting as his life’s path?
“This may sound like a cliche, but it was Beethoven,” exclaims Haimor. “I would listen to a recording of the Ninth Symphony over and over so I could transcribe it and play along with the recording on my violin. I was fascinated to see how orchestral musicians playing together are able to make this piece sound.”
With graduate-level training at Indiana U. under David Effron and other conducting mentors under his belt, he eventually got his chance to apply his youthful score study to various situations as an adult professional. His first full-time podium appointments were as assistant conductor of the Alabama Symphony, later assistant conductor and resident conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony.
“Working with some of the best musicians on the planet was a daily classroom,” Haimor says of his three seasons in Pittsburgh. It wasn’t just the podium experience and symphonic repertory he amassed: Presiding over the orchestra’s educational concerts allowed him to develop a facility in talking to audiences from the podium, a skill that’s becoming “more and more of a necessity” in the post-Leonard Bernstein era of U.S. classical music, he observes.
An increasing number of guest conducting invitations led to his decision to leave Pittsburgh in 2012. His star has been on the rise ever since. In September, he will take up duties as music director of the Wurttemberg Philharmonic, in Reutlingen, Germany.
As a boy, Haimor never thought it particularly unusual for a Muslim to play classical music, but once he settled into his professional routine as an itinerant guest conductor in the U.S. the question for him was: Where are all the other Muslim classical musicians? The conspicuous dearth disturbed him. He vowed to try and do something about it, casting himself as a role model.
“I can only hope I can be an inspiration to younger Muslim American classical musicians,” he says. “It’s an uphill struggle, particularly these days, trying to encourage them not to be afraid of entering this field.”
Part of the stumbling block, he points out, is self-imposed, since there are within the Muslim community deeply rooted religious and cultural taboos against Muslims practicing Western classical music.
“Some members of the older Muslim generation consider that playing or listening to music — even going to movies — is wrong, because it takes time away from prayer,” he explains. “Fortunately the younger generation does not feel that way. They know that music can actually heal people, even bring them out of comas.”
The process of helping to increase Muslim representation in classical music performance will continue well past his lifetime, he adds
A devout Muslim, Haimor has made Islam the focal point of his life, along with his devotion to music and family. He and his wife, Houda, have three daughters, the oldest of whom is 7, the youngest 4 months. He takes no food or water when he is conducting during the holy month of Ramadan. His religious faith and his profession intersect in other, more subtle ways. “When I recite verses from the Quran during my five daily prayers, it is like making music — you can actually notate the pitches and rhythms on score paper,” he observes.
Both Haimor and Roustom travel on U.S. passports, but U.S. citizenship alone has not freed them from encountering difficulties during international air travel.
Each has found himself detained for extra questioning by airport security officers. Because Roustom was born in Syria, he often is asked whether he has any relatives associated with the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. “The questions have become more invasive lately, which I find really unnerving,” he says.
For his part, Haimor tells of the time two years ago when he was about to board a U.S.-bound flight in Madrid. His name was announced over the PA system and he was escorted to an adjacent room for secondary screening. “They opened my travel bag and found my baton. They asked me what it was. I told them I use it to conduct, and that it’s made of wood!” He was allowed onto the flight.
The conductor insists he is apolitical but has strong opinions as to what’s happening in the world. Alleged ethnic/religious profiling, he says, is “just something my Middle Eastern colleagues and I have to deal with.” Does he feel demeaned by being singled out in such manner? “Certainly,” he replies, “but I have no interest in lowering myself to that level. The best way I can represent myself and my faith is to try to give the best musical (performance) I can.”
With Germany opening its borders to Syrian refugees, Haimor says he’s looking forward to promoting Muslim composers and performers once he takes up his new new post in Wurttemberg this fall.
Outspokenly political, Roustom (whose father is Syrian and his mother American) has composed several works in response to the ongoing conflict that has produced hundreds of thousands of casualties, millions of refugees and wholesale destruction of parts of the rich cultural history of his Syrian homeland.
“Since the start of this catastrophe in 2011, I realized I have a mission, in a way, to try to make a positive change,” says Roustom, whose family settled in Wareham, Mass., just west of Cape Cod, when he was 13. “Some of my pieces have been very personal, some angry and strident. I don’t want to say ‘Ramal’ is political; rather, I would say that (composing it) was part of my humanistic and cultural mission.”
Political or not, “Ramal” can exert a powerful effect on the listener. Audience members were in tears, the composer recalls, following the work’s American premiere in August at the Grand Teton Music Festival in Wyoming. Only days before the performance, news reports around the world exploded with images of a dazed toddler, his body bloodied and covered with dust, who had just been pulled from the wreckage of his family’s home in Aleppo, Syria.
“People came up to me at the end of the concert, thanking me for writing the piece,” Roustom says. “Maybe the anger in the music gave them some sort of emotional release. Or perhaps the music gave them (their own) opportunity to ask the question, ‘Why is this happening?'”
Most of his relatives were able to flee from Syria and settle in Lebanon, Dubai and Canada, he reports. “They are the lucky ones. It’s difficult for them to be in this limbo, not knowing when, or even if, they will ever go back to their homeland. We stay in touch, we try to update each other. But there comes a point when you run out of things to say.
“So I try to focus on helping the people I’m able to help. My music has actually been getting a lot of play in Germany and other parts of Europe where a large resettlement effort is going on. That makes me feel really good, because when the music is performed it is part of the solution, if only a small part. This is what I am able to do, and I’m happy to be useful.”
Fawzi Haimor will make his Grant Park Music Festival debut leading the Grant Park Orchestra in Kareem Roustom’s “Ramal,” along with works by Haydn and Hindemith, at 6:30 p.m. July 12 at Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, Randolph Street and Michigan Avenue; ticket prices vary in reserved seating areas, other seating free; 312-742-7647, www.gpmf.org.
