Music and Arts in Action

Solveig Riiser has published the article "National Identity and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra" in the latest issue of Music and Arts in Action (MAiA).

Riiser's article examines the role of national identity in the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, an orchestra consisting of young musicians from Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria and Iran. The article is built upon the idea that there are constant negotiations at play in the orchestra, including among the musicians internally, between them and the orchestra’s founder and conductor Daniel Barenboim, and between the orchestra and its larger political and geographical context. This article unveils the inner dynamics of the ongoing identity negotiations in the orchestra, and the politics and power-mechanisms informing and defining these negotiations.

This issue of Music and Arts in Action is the first in an annual series of themed issues published by MAiA, and focuses on the role of the arts and music in conflict transformation and peace building. A variety of issues in conflict transformation and peace building are examined using novel case studies. These range from power, politics and identity issues in an Israeli-Arabic orchestra by Solveig Riiser; the role of sing-alongs in sustaining anti-war movements in the U.S. by Jeneve Brooks; cultural identity theory as unpacked in action research in Craig Robertson's ethnographic study of a Bosnian multi-ethnic choir; the bureaucratic constraints on evaluating community theatre interventions in Northern Ireland by Matthew Jennings and Andrea Baldwin; and the combination of academic and practitioner intervention in conflict transformation work by Svanibor Pettan's look at applied ethnomusicology.