Leo Sarbanes is a sophomore music major at Penn. Leo was fascinated by ARTolerance performance earlier in 2017 and the potential to communicate across art mediums for a unique, deeply emotional experience.
He was very interested to learn more about the different styles of music with which Udi Bar-David has engaged over the years (including Israeli and Arab musics, as well as the symphonic literature) and what they mean to him, as well as Udi’s musical origins, the course of his career, and how is playing style and philosophy have changed along the way.
An important assignment in Leo’s ethnomusicology class is to interview someone about a musical genre or an aspect of music history, in order to simulate an ethnomusicologist’s fieldwork.
Leo Sarbanes
Jim Sykes
Intro to Ethnomusicology 7 November 2017
Fieldwork Interview: Udi Bar-David
As we have seen, the field of ethnomusicology is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork, a methodology serving dual purposes: first, to apprehend the fundamental qualities of music in diverse world cultures; and second, to illuminate these musics’ implications for wider themes, such as nationalism and race. Though a survey of this work surely encourages deeper appreciation for foreign musical traditions, it often tempts us to consider each culture and its music in isolation – from each other, and from the Western “classical” tradition associated with musicology. How might the world’s musics acquire deeper meaning if their commonalities and innovations were thrown into relief, and not merely in writing, but in performance? How might this musical dialogue translate to broader discussions across culture and the political spectrum?
A truly impassioned endeavor to answer these questions can be found in the work of Israeli cellist Udi Bar-David. Engaged in the classical tradition from a young age in Tel Aviv, Bar-David went on to study at Juilliard, and built a successful career as a soloist, chamber musician and a member of the Philadelphia Orchestra. However, he has pursued another sphere of music with equal vigor: the smaller, more intimate, and often improvisatory format of traditional world music. In 2003, as an outlet for staging cross-cultural musical dialogue, he founded Intercultural Journeys (a Philadelphia-based organization that has traveled around the globe), and this past year, he created a new organization, ARTolerance, which attempts to promote ideological and cultural tolerance by joining the forces of art forms, performing traditional/improvisatory music, fine art, dance, and theatre in conjunction.
I had a personal stake in interviewing Bar-David for several reasons. Last year, I attended an Intercultural Journeys event entitled “An Artistic Path to Peace,” in which he performed alongside a Palestinian-Israeli violinist and Syrian-Venezuelan percussionist. The breathtaking performance, alternately pyrotechnic and tender, exhibited the connections between Arab and Israeli musics as well as the challenges of immigrant life in America. Last month, I saw an equally inspiring ARTolerance performance, which featured traditional Israeli and Puerto Rican music alongside improvised dance and Iranian painting. As a performer of classical music who grew up hearing traditional Greek and Jewish music, I am fascinated by the ways in which these two spheres combine. Furthermore, as a Jewish-American, my earliest experience with Jewish music came from synagogue, as well as the music of my great-grandfather, who was a klezmer musician from Eastern Europe; as such, I was eager to learn about how Bar-David’s exposure to Jewish music and other cultural fusions may have differed growing up in Israel.
On his way to a meeting on an upcoming interfaith musical panel and performance, Bar- David met with me at a coffee shop to discuss his career and his mission. First, he spoke about his musical origins. He played the cello “from day one,” and though his education was strictly classical, in the smaller society of Israel he was immersed in non-classical music. After gigs as a teenager playing folk music, a crucial experience came when he played in a string quartet for the Israeli Army. Here, his group supplemented the classical repertoire with arrangements of traditional Israeli music, and Bar-David “stretched the limits” of these adaptations more than anyone else in the ensemble. He then turned to discussing the diverse musics with which he has engaged, remarking that Arabic music and African-American music feel most natural for him. He revealed that his introduction to complex improvisation came from a black violinist; through working with her, he furthered his inclination to explore cross-cultural music, as they put on programs in synagogues and churches framing Hasidic music as “Jewish spirituals.” When asked about musical communities he would like to explore further, Bar-David expressed his strong craving to learn Tibetan and Mongolian music and tap into their strong connection with spirituality; in his visits to Buddhist communities, his engagement with throat-singers and other musicians “felt the most like reaching across the globe.” He also acknowledged that he has a large void with African music, and that this will be a vital and exciting discovery for him.
I further inquired about the intersection of Bar-David’s two worlds: the classical and the traditional/improvisational. He recognized that the musicians he meets are usually either strictly in one sphere or the other, and there are times when he himself is completely immersed in one. However, drawing a comparison with connections in the brain, Bar-David told me that in traditional music, he plays techniques and intervals that “stretch his artistic boundaries in classical music,” particularly chamber and solo music; on the flip side, he enhances ensembles of improvisers by adding structure to the music. He put this overlap into effect in organizing Intercultural Journeys collaborations with the Philadelphia Orchestra, one exploring the commonalities of Arab and Jewish music, and another analyzing Native American and African- American influence on Dvorak. According to Bar-David, “it is natural and fascinating how these worlds merge, and sometimes there are more than just two worlds.” He further considers this merging to be critical for the survival of classical forms, as traditional music offers hundreds of different themes that can be introduced on the symphony stage, either through arrangements or commissions. Worrying that symphony orchestras may lose their significance, in part from the difficulty of contemporary music to connect with its audiences, he believes that material from worldwide cultures can breathe life into the symphony and allow musicians and audiences alike to learn from it. In this context, the “great” classical repertoire (which Bar-David considers the greatest music he’s played) can act as a bridge between cultures and their musics.
This represents just one step on the path to Bar-David’s ultimate dream: a whole new world of cross-cultural music. In many ways, the seeds of this have already been planted: he noted that in our modern soundscape, aided by new technologies, we are always hearing the cultures of others played out around us. The travels of Intercultural Journeys began to uncover the power of this exchange. Bar-David identified his most memorable cross-cultural experience as visiting Palestine and Israel, where “you could feel the tensions melting” through performing musical peace; in a particularly powerful moment, a Palestinian man came up to him after a performance and congratulated him in Hebrew. Moving forward, however, Bar-David believes ARTolerance holds the key to creating tolerance across all boundaries. In a time of great cultural and political strife, he sees the organization, in its consolidation of art forms, as “one step ahead of the transition” towards peace and understanding. This manifests itself in several ways: in interfaith initiatives, with overlapping texts from various scriptures presented alongside overlapping religious musics; side-by-side performances and panels with politicians, academics, and decision-makers so that they can learn from the artistic dialogue; and, in a specific example, comparing the curves in Arabic/Hebrew (in the writing and sound of the languages) alongside the curves in their musical modes. For Bar-David, “breaking down barriers between art forms is the first step to breaking down barriers between cultures, which is the first step to breaking down barriers between cultures in conflict.” Thus, Bar-David and ARTolerance represent an aspiration to take the cross-cultural inclinations of ethnomusicology, and put them into practice for peace.