Music breaks barriers

What a weird time this is. It should be full-on fall, but it feels oddly like late summer, and doesn’t quite have the glorious colors of full-on autumn.

Our politics are as unsettled as most of us can remember them being for a very long time — for our lifetimes, probably — and Israel’s, too, are, to use a technical term, a gigantic mess. The world seems bleak. But — thankfully! — there also are good things to report on.

On Monday night, my husband and I went to the JCC MetroWest to see “An Evening with Polyphony.”

Polyphony is an Israeli organization that has two seemingly unrelated but entirely entwined missions. One is to provide students with seriously good classical music education and training; the most talented ones are taught on a high level, and the ones who are not lucky enough to have that talent still are taught to hear classical music as soul-enhancing art.

The other is to provide a way for Jewish and Arab Israelis to overcome the barriers that separate them not by heavy-handed do-gooderism but instead through art. The idea is that when people from different groups work together on creating beauty, the differences become less important than the beauty.

The group we heard at Polyphony included two violinists, a violist, a cellist, and a pianist; they were joined, as an off-program surprise by a singer. All of them are young, some are Arab and some are Jewish, and all are gifted.

It’s always wonderful to watch excellent young musicians, because the visual beauty of their focus, their commitment, their partnership with each other, and their love of their art can be stunning. That means a feast for both eyes and ears.

We in the audience knew that the musicians were all Israelis but some were Arabs and some were Jews, but without looking at the program — and we couldn’t do that with the lights out — we could only guess who was who. And that was another part of the beauty of the evening. It matters that everyone could play together. In the context of music-making, it doesn’t matter who is who, although the fact that some are this and some are that is overwhelmingly important.

Polyphony is a fairly small organization. By itself, it cannot change the world. But it can and does give us hope that change is possible, and that really matters.

—JP