The other day I met with Rob Williams the CEO of War Child. He invited me to their office in Kentish Town and I met some of their 30 + staff. With aid projects in six countries (seven soon with Yemen) and an annual budget in excess of £10 million reaching out to over 100,000 children, they are a very different organisation to the one Bill Leeson and I founded. But I am happy to see that music is still central to the charity as a fundraising tool. This year Coldplay, Frank Turner, Florence + The Machine and many others are playing small venues for War Child. As director of the Pavarotti Music Centre I became convinced that music is not only a great fundraiser, but an important part of aid work. Composer Nigel Osborne, who worked with me at the Pavarotti Music Centre said, "We brought bread and music to battered Mostar. We went into a place that craved both something to eat and some kind of expression of life. Politicians always lie but music tells the truth. We were going to feed people, and recover the message of peace and democracy which is inherent in all good music." Simon Glinn, CEO of Buxton Opera House, who worked for us in Mostar and helped organise rock concerts and festivals in Sarajevo has said, "I'm not sure I'd do it like that now, but people of our age then probably would. If one was to paste a philosophy on to that madness, which was brave and lucky, I'd say just that this was about solidarity, multiculturalism and, well, the fundamental principles of good rock'n'roll." Amen to that. Lots more about music and war and music in war in 'Left Field'. Published by Unbound and distributed by Penguin Books - only a few weeks to publication. www.davidwilson.org.uk
I
met yesterday with Prof Nigel Osborne as he passed through London on
his way from running children's workshops in Syria and Lebanon to
Buxton. He was due to give a talk at the Buxton Opera House and
attend the premier of a new work of his, 'Bosnian Voices', to be
performed by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. The Chief Executive at
Buxton is
Simon Glinn, who played a significant role at the Pavarotti Music
Centre in Mostar. 'Significant'
is not strong enough. His technical skills were vital to the setting
up of the centre. Here is an excerpt from 'Left Field' about Nigel's first visit to Mostar. “War
Child today still emphasises the charity's historical connections
with the music world, but the first money-raiser for our work
involved animals. Over the 1993 August Bank Holiday we organised a
three-day event at London Zoo. There were sitar and sarangi players
near the elephants, Peruvian pipers serenaded the llamas and
didgeridoo players the kangaroos. There were African drummers and
giraffes, gamalan players entertaining the Indonesia rhinoceros,
Brazilian berimbau players the squirrel monkeys. The Chinese
percussionists were kept well away from the giant panda, Ming Ming,
because she needed all her concentration to breed. The most amazing
sites for me were a string quartet playing Bach in the Butterfly
Grotto and a lone cellist in the shadowy depths of the Aquarium
entertaining the circling sharks. On the lawns, pathways and
courtyards there were clowns, jugglers, stilt-walkers, magicians,
dancers and acrobats, story-tellers, poets and pavement artists.
Inside the monkey house we held children's workshops, art and photo
exhibitions. The promotional brochure said that, 'during these three
days, London Zoo, with the help of its animals, will come to the
rescue of another endangered species – children threatened by the
thirty wars raging across our planet.' Six months later Nigel
Osborne arrived in Mostar to
help the children. He was carrying
a large bag full of percussion instruments. A big, bearded bear of a
man, Nigel was Professor of Music at Edinburgh University. He’d
heard that we were co-operating with MTV and taking music tapes into
Sarajevo where he’d been trying
to organise music workshops with young people, working with the
Sarajevo String Quartet and collaborating with cellist, Vedran
Smailović and
poet, Goran
Simić on two children's operas. He
said he would like to run children's workshops in Mostar and
it was to be the start of a long association between Nigel and War
Child. It
was no problem gathering interest. I had been amazed how quickly news
travelled across this bombed-out ghetto and, in such a desperate
place, anything out of the ordinary was news. After two years of
shelling, the upper floors of the UNHCR building had been blown away.
The lower floors, housing the UN office, were as secure as it got in
East Mostar. By the time Nigel arrived, there were twenty children
and their parents. They sat very quietly and few of the children
smiled. They looked as though they were about to be told bad news,
not be offered the chance to bang drums and blow whistles. I looked
around the room and realised most of them would have had no memory of
anything but fear. One mother sat with her blind, impassive,
six-year-old daughter. I watched while Nigel tried to get the girl to
play a triangle. She refused to hold it. This went on for some time
until, finally, she grabbed the triangle with one hand, the metal
stick with the other and struck it over and over. Her face lit up.
Her mother told us that it was the first time she had seen her
daughter smile in over two years. Nigel's arrival in Mostar was to result in a schools' music pogramme that reached 3,000 children in Mostar and the surrounding area. More on all this in Left Field
