In Gaza, music endures in times of suffering

“The most terrible thing in this war is the sound of the drones. It’s with you night and day… The kids told me, mister, we have headache from this noise. Can we stop the music? I told them no, we are going to sing with it. I told them to concentrate on the tone of the drone. I told them it’s either going to be A or E (scales that provide the framework for a melody),” Ahmed told Al Jazeera, adding that he didn’t want the sound to break him or his students.

Ahmed is a music teacher at Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, which was established in 1993 as The National Conservatory of Music, with its first branch in Ramallah. The one in the West Bank came up 13 years ago. It runs Palestine Youth Orchestra and the Palestine National Orchestra and has been significant in the region. The building of this conservatory was bombed and lost in January 2025 and many students are already dead. But Ahmed, some teachers and the students, who’ve survived through almost 23 months of continuous bombing, amid wreckage and ruins and in their tents with plastic sheets, are attempting to make music not just as a sign of hope and some comfort but also an affirmation of the idea that they existed and thus they sang and recounted their life and times, even in horrific times.

Flipping through the pages of world history, some of the most heartwarming music has risen from pain and catastrophe as a retort to disaster. More than the music, it is the act of making it in punishing situations that has stood out. One of the most remembered is Vedran Smailović, the principal cellist of the Sarajevo Orchestra, who, dressed in his black tux, carried a chair to the market centre that had been turned into rubble and played Baroque era composer Tomaso Giovanni Albinoni’s ‘Adagio in G Minor’. Twenty-two people waiting for food were killed here during a round of shelling. Smailović went there everyday for 22 days and played. In 2015, Karim Wasfi, former director for the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra, sat next to a bombed site in Baghdad and played his cello in protest. Music in Syria’s war-torn streets has been a common sight.

In Baltimore, in the wake of riots, the members of Baltimore Symphony Orchestra sat outside their home, Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, and played pieces by Bach and Beethoven, to give a sense of peace to their city. In fact one of the most iconic photographs from a war is of a Russian soldier playing an abandoned piano in war-torn Chechnya.

Some decades earlier, Jewish music in concentration camps, under the Nazi regime, allowed for people to express themselves in brutal conditions. Then there is the famed story of the valiant Titanic octet that kept playing music to calm the passengers till the last minute, amid all the panic and inevitable death, when the ship finally went down. All eight musicians died.

During the recent pandemic, music helped so many people when nothing else managed to get through to the crevices of our self. Even in a torn space like Gaza it, perhaps, is the only sense of self-awareness, community, hope. Even defiance.