GAZA CITY: A boy’s lilting song filled the tent in Gaza City, above an instrumental melody and backing singers’ quiet harmonies, soft music that floated into streets these days more attuned to the deadly beat of bombs and bullets.
The young students were taking part in a lesson given on August 4 by teachers from the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, who have continued classes from displacement camps and shattered buildings even after Israel’s bombardments forced them to abandon the school’s main building in the city.
“When I play, I feel like I’m flying away,” said Rifan al Qassas, 15, who started learning the oud, an Arab lute, when she was nine. She hopes to one day play abroad.
“Music gives me hope and eases my fear,” she said.
Al Qassas hopes to one day play abroad, she said during a weekend class at the heavily shelled Gaza College, a school in Gaza City. Israel’s military again pounded parts of the city on August 12, with more than 120 people killed over the past few days, Gazan health authorities say.
The conservatory was founded in the West Bank and had been a cultural lifeline for Gaza ever since it opened a branch there 13 years ago, teaching classical music along with popular genres, until Israel launched its war on the Mediterranean enclave in response to the October 7, 2023, attacks.
Before the fighting, Israel sometimes granted the best students exit permits to travel outside Gaza to play in the Palestine Youth Orchestra, the conservatory’s touring ensemble. Others performed inside Gaza, giving concerts in both Arabic and Western traditions.
After 22 months of bombardment, some of the students are now dead, said Suhail Khoury, the conservatory’s president, including 14-year-old violinist Lubna Alyaan, killed along with her family early in the war.
The school’s old home lies in ruins, according to a video released in January by a teacher. Walls had collapsed and rooms were littered with debris. A grand piano had disappeared.
Reuters asked the Israeli military about the damage. The military declined to comment without more details, which Reuters could not establish.
During last week’s session, over a dozen students gathered under the tent’s rustling plastic sheets to practice on instruments carefully preserved through the war and to join together in song and music.
“No fig leaf will wither inside us,” the boy sang, a line from a popular lament about Palestinian loss through generations of displacement since the 1948 creation of Israel.
Three female students practised the song Greensleeves on guitar outside the tent, while another group of boys were tapping out rhythms on Middle Eastern hand drums. Few instruments have survived the fighting, said Fouad Khader, who coordinates the revived classes for the conservatory. Teachers have bought some from other displaced people for the students to use. But some of these have been smashed during bombardment, he said. — Reuters
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