In the summer of 1999, in the German city of Weimar, young musicians from Israel and from across the Arab world came together in one rehearsal room, under one conductor, and tuned to the same note. It was the start of an experiment in music, and in listening.
A workshop in Weimar
The idea was simple to describe and hard to carry out. Daniel Barenboim, the Argentine-born Israeli pianist and conductor, and Edward Said, the Jerusalem-born Palestinian-American literary scholar who taught at Columbia University, invited gifted young players to spend several weeks together. By day they rehearsed symphonies. In the evenings there were lectures and long discussions about music, history and the lives they came from.
Interest was greater than anyone had expected. More than 200 applications came in from Arab music students alone. The two founders named the project after Goethe's West-östlicher Divan, a collection of poems regarded as a central work in the idea of a shared world culture. Goethe's book reached from West to East, and so did the workshop.
Two friends, one conversation
Barenboim and Said had become friends in the early 1990s. On paper they were an unlikely pair: a musician who had grown up in Buenos Aires and Israel, and a critic and essayist who had grown up in Jerusalem and Cairo. What united them was a belief that music, which asks every player to listen closely to every other, could teach something that arguments could not.
Barenboim has always been careful not to oversell what that means. He has described the orchestra as a project against ignorance rather than a peace plan, and he has said plainly that an orchestra cannot end a conflict. Its aim is smaller and perhaps more durable: to create a place where people who see the world very differently still have to hear one another, bar by bar, until the music works. Inside the orchestra, he has stressed, everyone is equal.
From summer school to world stages
What began as a one-off workshop became a permanent orchestra. From 2002 it found a home base in Seville, with support from the regional government of Andalusia, and a Barenboim-Said Foundation was set up there to run its work. Each summer the musicians rehearse together and then go on an international tour. Equal numbers of Israeli and Arab musicians form the core of the ensemble, joined by players from Turkey, Iran and Spain.
The orchestra has played at the Salzburg Festival, the BBC Proms, Carnegie Hall and the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires. In 2006 it gave a farewell concert for United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan in the General Assembly Hall, and at the 2012 Proms Barenboim led it through all nine Beethoven symphonies in a single season. It has also performed in some of its members' home regions, including Rabat, Doha and Abu Dhabi.
One evening stands out. On 21 August 2005 the orchestra played at the Cultural Palace in Ramallah, with a programme of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola and Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Said had died in 2003, and the concert honoured him. An audience of Palestinians and Israelis rose for a standing ovation. His widow, Mariam Said, went on to carry his part of the work forward.
“You don't change a desperate situation into a better one by ignoring the other.”Daniel Barenboim, conductor and co-founder, PBS NewsHour, 2013
A school for listening in Berlin
In time Barenboim wanted something that lasted all year, not just for a summer. On 8 December 2016 the Barenboim-Said Akademie opened in Berlin, in a former stage-set depot of the State Opera on Unter den Linden. It is a state-recognised conservatory offering bachelor's and master's degrees and an Artist Diploma, and it teaches talented young musicians mainly from the Middle East and North Africa. It is funded for up to 90 students; a New York Times report in 2023 counted 78, about 70 percent of them from that region.
What makes the academy unusual is that every programme includes the humanities. Alongside harmony and practice, students study philosophy, history and literature, in courses meant to build intellectual openness and real encounter with people unlike themselves. The school year opens with sessions on respecting differences and looking past stereotypes. Students and alumni also run Music Speaks, which brings classical music workshops to children in Berlin's welcome classes for newly arrived pupils.
Inside the same building is the Pierre Boulez Saal, a concert hall of roughly 680 seats designed by the architect Frank Gehry with the acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota, which opened on 4 March 2017. Pierre Boulez himself was consulted on its design. When tensions in the wider world have run high, Barenboim has given his students the same simple instruction: "We have to listen to each other."
Why the music matters
The orchestra has been recognised many times. In 2002 Barenboim and Said shared Spain's Prince of Asturias Award for Concord, and in 2016 the United Nations named the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra a Global Advocate for Cultural Understanding. A documentary about its work, Knowledge Is the Beginning, won an Emmy Award in 2006. Musicians such as Martha Argerich, Yo-Yo Ma, Anne-Sophie Mutter and Waltraud Meier have become honorary members.
None of that is the real measure. The real measure is in the young people who have shared a music stand with someone they might otherwise never have met, and who came away having heard that person's story. Barenboim's insistence has always been that music cannot erase differences, but it can hold them, and that disagreement is no reason to stop listening.
More than a quarter of a century after Weimar, that work goes on. In November 2026 the orchestra is launching a new West-Eastern Divan Festival at the Philharmonie in Berlin, with Barenboim on the podium. A new generation of players will once again tune to the same note, and begin, as the first ones did, by listening.
Sources & further reading
- Orchestra, West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
- Ramallah, Cultural Palace, 21 August 2005, West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
- West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, Wikipedia
- Ramallah hosts solidarity concert, Al Jazeera
- Arabs, Jews Unite Under One Baton, PBS NewsHour
- Where Israelis, Palestinians and Iranians Must Listen to One Another (The New York Times, 2023, reposted), Opus 3 Artists
- Barenboim-Said Akademie, Barenboim-Said Akademie
- Barenboim-Said Akademie, Wikipedia
Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
Tikkun olam in action. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.
