Senior lecturer of piano Dr. Bradley Bolen admits he was hesitant when Dr. John Ferguson, founder and executive director of American Voices, called him in 2009 to do some teaching in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. “I didn’t think anyone in Iraq would care about the arts because they’d been through so much tragedy,” he said, “but that wasn’t the case.”
Ferguson, a pianist and teacher, established American Voices in 1993 after the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the time, the idea was to fulfill the need for quality, constructive American cultural programming in the newly independent nations of central and eastern Europe. Since then, the focus has expanded to provide education in music and dance in the Middle East and Asia.
Classes were held for two weeks in Erbil, the most populated city in the Kurdistan Region in northern Iraq. Of the 450 students who signed up, one came by bus from Baghdad, which is almost 200 miles away, while two sisters made the 50-mile commute from Mosul. “We take so much for granted here, but in Iraq we had to find solutions for any number of problems. On the first day when they were setting up the chairs for the cellists, we noticed that they had arms,” said Bolen. “You can’t play the cello in a chair with arms, but we just couldn’t run down to Home Depot to buy more chairs. Fortunately, Dr. Ferguson was used to wrestling with these kinds of problems.”
Before class started on his first day there, he found a student sitting at a piano gluing the hammers back onto the hammer shafts, which were broken. “She had spent a couple of hours literally gluing the piano back together before we were scheduled to play it,” he said, “and when the time came, it worked.”
Unfamiliar with the culture and requiring the services of a translator, Bolen was unsure at first what to do with a classroom of eager students. Ultimately, he decided to do what he did back home and asked each of them to play a little something and tell him about themselves. “I had students who were Arabs, some who were Kurds, others who were Christian or from different Islamic sects,” he said, “and this was my way of showing them that we have more in common than we think we do.”
A dilapidated piano sat at the end of the empty conference room. “One young man sat down and began to play some Bach for us, and a mouse darted out from behind the piano,” said Bolen, who remembers the girls started screaming. “When he stopped playing, the mouse darted behind the piano again, and when he started playing again the mouse darted back out.”
Finally, one of the Iraqi students who knew a little about Western culture got up, went to the piano and started playing Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 by Franz Liszt. “That’s when I knew everything would be all right,” said Bolen, who explained that this particular piece of music was in an episode of Tom and Jerry, an animated feature series that starred a cat named Tom and a mouse named Jerry, who endlessly torments him. Their battle in and around the piano as Tom attempts to finish Liszt’s Rhapsody while Jerry keeps interrupting him is comedy gold.
Two days of gala concerts, which were often televised nationally, took place after every two-week workshop, but that proved problematic since there were only two grand pianos in that part of Iraq. The solution? Drive a pickup truck across town to the School of Fine Arts, take the legs off their grand piano, and drive it back in time for the concert. Bolen laughed when remembering a rumor about a janitor at the School of Fine Arts in Sulaymaniyah on the Iraqi border who had thought he was doing everyone a favor by hosing down the insides of their pianos while he was hosing down the floors.
At breakfast one morning, Bolen met a musicologist from the Netherlands who had just been in Afghanistan. “He told a story about driving around Kabul in a Volkswagen listening to Tracy Chapman with a couple of people when they were stopped at a checkpoint. The Taliban had forbidden anyone to listen to or sing any kind of music that wasn’t sacred text from the Quran. So, they scrambled to eject the cassette in time, but the guard saw them hide something under the seat and asked to listen to it. After a few seconds, he said, ‘That’s not music,’ and let them go.”
What Bolen remembers most about his time in Iraq was the hunger for Western art and music. Since their only access to sheet music was imslp.com – an online public domain data base that didn’t include anything from the last 75 years because it was under copyright – none of his students were familiar with American composers Samuel Barber and George Gershwin or any other composer from the mid- to late-20th century.
When their two-week stint in Iraq was over, Bolen and the rest of his group took a night flight from Erbil to Lebanon where they got taxis under a bridge at 3 a.m. “In reality, it was a bunch of people standing around a bunch of cars in the middle of the night,” he says. “John [Ferguson] had a satchel with $10,000 in U.S. cash inside, and he’s negotiating with these guys so the whole thing looked more like a drug deal.”
They arrived in Damascus, the capital of Syria, at sunrise after a harrowing journey through the mountains, the cellist falling fast asleep in the backseat as the car careened around the hairpin curves. “It had been 125 degrees in Erbil that summer, a record high, so we opened all the windows,” Bolen said, “and the cool mountain air just knocked him out.”
Bolen admits he wasn’t prepared for Damascus. “I was surprised at how beautiful their music conservatory was. My studio alone had two 9-foot concert grand pianos, a harpsichord, and a piano forte.”
From Syria, Bolen was off to the American University of Beirut in Lebanon for two weeks. Then he returned to Waco where Bolen started a blog, bolen88.wordpress.com, to process his experience that summer. “It is funny the odd things that stick out in my mind as I reflect,” he wrote in August, 2010, “and the fact that they aren’t always the big things that we will all remember.” There was a birthday celebration in the back of a car in Iraq in the middle of the night with violin accompaniment. A student’s father playing a Kurdish folk song for him on his guitar. The ice cream on Bliss Street in Beirut. The many unique cats he encountered in all three countries.
“People always ask me if it was difficult to go there, but I told them that it was a lot more difficult coming back,” he said. “You hear clichés about these places, but when you see them for yourself you realize how much we take for granted here in the United States.”
Since then, Bolen has returned to the Middle East with American Voices a number of times. In the summer of 2012, he went to Duhok in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. At the end of the two-week session, they spent a few days in Erbil. “John decided to offer a mini-workshop in Kirkuk for kids who’d lost parents. It was a very rough city so we had to have a military escort. Soldiers with guns were mounted on the back of a pickup, and they drove incredibly fast, which they said was for safety. We had our cars, but they’re driving about 100 miles per hour,” Bolen said, as he remembered how hot it was, upwards of 117 degrees most days. People sat on the side of the road selling drinks. “On our last day, we saw an explosion up ahead, and the soldiers took us off the road right away. It turned out that an oil tanker had gone off the road and exploded, but the next day there was a coordinated attack in Iraq with explosions in different cities. A police station next door to the children’s center where we worked was targeted, and 41 people were killed. I presumed that some of them were the officers who had escorted us to and from Erbil each day.”
Later when people asked if he was afraid of being in Iraq, Bolen reminded them that violence can happen anywhere. There’s no escaping it. On July 20, 2012, he was in Iraq when James Holmes opened fire in a theater in Aurora, Colorado, killing 12 people and injuring 70 more during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises. “I could have been killed just as easily back home as in a war zone,” he said. “It’s that kind of random violence that scares me, not the political violence that you can see coming.”
Looking back on his time with American Voices, Bolen admits that their biggest challenge was getting students from different religious and ethnic backgrounds to work together as a team and not as individuals, but he is convinced that music unites us. Perhaps as the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow suggested, music is indeed the universal language after all. At the very least, it’s capable of evoking emotional responses that transcend cultural and linguistic barriers, and that’s a beautiful thing.
Read more from The Baylor Line’s 2010 series on Dr. Bradley Bolen’s first trip:
- Music for the Masses; A Professor’s Journey | June 11, 2010
- Checking in with Dr. Bradley Bolen | June 20, 2010
- Checking in with Dr. Bolen as He Heads to Iraq | July 2, 2010
- Dr. Bolen Continues His Journey | July 19, 2010
- Friendships Found in the Middle East; A Bolen Update | August 2, 2010
- Dr. Bolen Returns Home | August 17, 2010
- A Piece of the Middle East; Dr. Bolen Reflects | October 11, 2010
