Concert for the people of Gaza

Hastings Jews for Justice is to co-host, together with St Leonards Concerts, a concert for the people of Gaza in which Max Baillie and fellow musicians will play Beethoven’s string quartet Opus 132. All proceeds will go to Medical Aid for Palestinians. Felicity Laurence explains the background.

On Tuesday 14 October, at St John the Evangelist Church in St Leonards, Hastings Jews for Justice (HJJ) is privileged to be co-hosting a concert with Max Baillie, the astonishing, magical violinist of international repute whom we are lucky enough to have living locally.

Max’s concerts in St Leonards over the past few years have enchanted and thrilled a growing local audience, as he takes us through a rich array of different musical traditions, each time with brilliant guest fellow musicians from different musical traditions. This concert is particularly special in both its purpose and its content.

Like so many people, including all of us in HJJ, Max is profoundly concerned for the people of Gaza, and it is to those people that this concert is dedicated. He and the other musicians – Bridget O’Donnell-Abbado (violin), Anne Beilby (viola) and Kirsten Jenson (cello) – are offering their music gratis, with all proceeds to be sent to the internationally known and respected NGO Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP), whose doctors remain in Gaza, on the ground, providing medical aid to the beleaguered people there.

Among their innumerable activities are emergency medical care, neonatal intensive care, provision of water, and in the context of the massive destruction of medical facilities, extensive projects of renovation, including of maternity and obstetric departments.

In this recent Guardian article, MAP confirms that “Approximately half of patients requiring dialysis in Gaza City have been forced to leave” and “that its rehabilitation unit in the central town in Deir al-Balah has reported a doubling of patient numbers in recent days.” In all this, MAP’s staff continue to work with unshakeable dedication and we are honoured to support their work.

Many doctors from the UK and other countries also volunteer for periods in Gaza. In recent days, Dr Martin Griffiths, consultant trauma surgeon at Barts Health NHS Trust in London, has travelled to Al Mawasi, whose friendship links with our town of Hastings have been formally recognised by HBC; Al Mawasi, once a small fishing village, is now ‘home’ to hundreds of thousands who have fled other parts of Gaza.

Tsunami of injuries

Dr Griffiths has spoken of the hundreds of injured people pouring out of Gaza city, seeking medical help that is far beyond the capacity of the medical teams and the shattered hospital infrastructure,as described in the Guardian report alluded to above. Among those injured are “a huge number of kids, some very small,” and he warns of the coming “tsunami”  with “more and more injuries and less and less [supplies to treat them].”

The programme comprises just one piece, Beethoven’s heartbreaking and poignant late string quartet Opus 132, which will be played in its entirety, offering a rare and unmissable opportunity to hear this utterly beautiful work. Max describes it as:

“…a truly cosmic piece. Beethoven wrote it not long before the end of his life, long after he had completely lost his hearing, and following a long period of chronic ill health. The spiritual heart of the piece is its third movement, above which he writes (in German): ‘Song of Thanksgiving to the Deity from a convalescent in the Lydian mode’.

“The music grapples with, and confronts mortality, and in doing so seems to face its own humanity. It’s a piece I’ve been listening to for over 30 years and have long wanted to bring to St Leonards. Choosing it for this charity concert seems appropriate because of its existential themes: all proceeds will go to Medical Aid for Palestinians, an organisation that has been bringing medical relief to Palestinians for the last 40 years.”

The piece lasts just under an hour: but its indescribable emotional range gives space for deep contemplation, and to enter that place beyond words that music can provide.

Testimony

A sense of this can also be gleaned from the moving testimony from a young musician, Hazem Alghosain, written in Gaza a few days ago. He speaks of “the ecstatic delight that we feel with music tarab, or enchantment”. Hazem decided to “use my voice and guitar to bring a brighter tomorrow into children’s dreams,” even as he and the children are compelled constantly to move from one area of rubble to the next.

Last year, he set up a music tent, where upwards of 250 children would come to sing and play, write stories, make theatre. “I would sing with the children, watch them smile, despite everything”. But the area was bombed, 20 of the children killed and many more injured.  He felt that he couldn’t continue with new children: and for him, music has become “a memory, a trace, a forever”.

But, he says, this is not a lament but rather, “I write to etch my voice into an eternity in the face of oblivion…The song that is sung cannot be killed”. You can read the entire, profoundly moving account from Hazem here.

Sound of drones turned to music

Another of the many attempts across Gaza over the past two years to harness music to rehumanise the children in the face of annihilation is this extraordinary transformation, into music, of the sound of the drones that hum loudly, lethally and always, over the people of Gaza.

Ahmed Muin Abu Amsha is a member of the teaching staff at the Ramallah-based Edward Said National Conservatory of Music (ESNCM), at their campus in Gaza. He and the children have turned the drone, an instrument of destruction, into a song. Sadly, in the few weeks since this heartrending video was posted, Ahmed has had to move several times, the bombing and destruction forcing him and the children to flee, and flee again, as with Hazem above.

But nevertheless, it seems fitting that we honour these children of Gaza, and everyone there, with the music that Beethoven too ‘etched into an eternity’.

As Max has written: “Never has it been more important than now to try to help, whilst our own government aids and abets the genocidal Israeli regime, whose leaders make no secret of their intention to wipe Gaza off the face of the earth, further displace Palestinian communities in the West Bank, and destroy any possibility of a two-state solution which would bring basic civil and human rights to Palestinians.

“This is what is going on day by day, with over 200,000 casualties (as reported by Israeli military command), including over 65,000 dead in a campaign of collective punishment since Hamas’ brutal attacks on 7 October 2023. The long-suffering Israeli hostages still remaining under Gaza also depend on a ceasefire for their rescue.”

Raising awareness

“This concert aims to raise money but also awareness, as our politicians continue to be deeply complicit and ineffective in bringing about a ceasefire. I am pleased to co-host the concert with Hastings Jews for Justice, as this reflects that our intention is a humanitarian one shared by Jewish people in our community who are equally horrified by what is happening. St Leonards Concerts is also playing in association with Sound over Silence, a London-based concert series in aid of MAP.”

We in Hastings Jews for Justice, some of us descendants of Holocaust survivors, see our Palestinian sisters and brothers as our fellow human beings, part of our human family. We grieve at what is happening to them now. We hope that many will join us in what will be an unforgettable musical experience, a chance to hear one of the most moving works of music ever made, played by superlative musicians; and to remember those other musicians and the children they try to sustain, along with everyone facing erasure in the maelstrom that is Gaza.

 

Concert for the People of Gaza A performance of Beethoven’s string quartet Opus 132 by Max Baillie, Bridget O’Donnell-Abbado, Anne Beilby and Kirsten Jenson. Tuesday 14 October, 7.30pm, St John the Evangelist, Brittany Road, St Leonards-on-Sea TN38 0LF. Tickets at £7 to £17 can be purchased here.

The concert will last approximately one hour.

 

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