Joyce DiDonato, James Jolly, Matt Peacock MBE and Anis Barnat | The Power of Music
Acclaimed opera singer Joyce DiDonato, founding director of Streetwise Opera Matt Peacock, and co-founder of El Sistema Greece Anis Barnat reflect on the transformative power of music in integrating, understanding, and transforming society. Joyce discusses the profound impact of music through her involvement in an outreach program at the Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York. Anis, who works with displaced refugee children in Greece, uses music to enhance their integration and adaptation to change. Matt has been supporting homeless people in the UK by helping them combat loneliness through his music and arts program. This reflection is part of the Pure Land Series, an initiative by the Pure Land Foundation.
James Jolly: Shakespeare in the merchant of Venice wrote, the man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils. Well, I’m joined by three people who certainly have music in themselves, Joyce, Annis and Matt. I thought I’d start off by asking them just to take a few minutes to explain the three sort of projects that they’re working on, and then we’ll have a sort of group conversation. And then, as you heard, we’re going to close the evening with some live music from Joyce. You’ve just released an album in war and peace. You’re starting a program about it. Just tell us about the sort of the idea behind this. It’s not just another disc of baroque Ariadne.
Joyce DiDonato: No, just a very quick hello and Bruno, thank you for having us here tonight. It’s such a joy. And what greater thing to come and talk about music, and music that is going into people’s lives in a kind of radical way? This album, it’s called In War and Peace, harmony through music. And it was set to be a very different project, sort of an obscure recording of long forgotten neapolitan arias go straddle the world of baroque and classical. And going into pre bel canto, sort of the birth of bel canto. And I had just finished a world premier opera where I was playing an opera diva who was contemplating the question, does art matter? And really, is there any point to all of this? And that was very much on my mind in a very kind of acute way. And the Paris attacks happened the day after I finished that opera. And I’ve got this stack of 60 really obscure neapolitan areas, and I’m trying to go through it very diligently to choose the repertoire for this album and this 20 city tour. And I’m checking my phone to make sure my friends are okay in Paris, and nothing’s making sense, and everything feels futile. And I’m getting more and more pessimistic, which is not a natural state for me. And I don’t like it. I don’t like feeling that way. And I thought, number one, I want this to be an album that people want to hit replay right away, and I want it to be something that brings comfort. And I started to think of it in a slightly different way. And then, to be very honest, it’s as if the idea just steamrolled into me and said, this is what it needs to be. And I feel like I said, okay.
James Jolly: Was it easy deciding which were war and which were peace areas for the.
Joyce DiDonato: Most part, certainly the very obvious ones. What was difficult was paring it down and cutting away. We have a limited time on one disc. It was hard to cut out brilliant masterpieces to do this. What I consciously went for were the areas where there’s a lot of shades of gray, because in the midst of big war, sometimes you see incredibly valiant acts of peace. And it’s in that beautiful, peaceful period that people get anxious and war starts to spring up. And we have, all of us have both of that light and dark in us and in varying shades of gray at all times. And so this astonishing music of Handel and Purcell, primarily, who seemed to know us so intimately from centuries ago, they have these shades of grey in almost every aria, and I love that.
James Jolly: And then tomorrow we see it, as it were, in action.
Joyce DiDonato: In action.
James Jolly: What’s that going to look like?
Joyce DiDonato: You have to be. Come here and find out. One thing I decided to do with this program is to get away from the typical concert format. You know, two dimensional, flat, yellow lighting where the audience doesn’t quite know where to look, and we come on to applause. You go off to applause and you say, oh, her dress is pretty, or, oh, she’s singing da tempeste in the second act. We can’t wait. And somehow they’re not in the center of the piece. And this was too important for me. And I said, I want to. To have faith with me, but I want to shock the audience a bit, and I want to get us out of our typical, this is the way it goes mentality, which is kind of poisonous for a classical audience. We already know how it goes, and so we stop engaging and listening in the same kind of way. And we’re also in the world of baroque music, which is extravagant and lavish. And it was shocking at the time, and it was amazing. And I thought, let’s do that. Let’s become a little extravagant in a contemporary way, and let’s invite people to really engage in this. My basic premise of this was to show the dark and the light, the war and the peace, and simply say, you have access to both of these all the time. Is there one that you’d rather nurture right now in your life? The music is showing you this, the text is showing it. And we’re at a point in the world that I think it’s good to decide which side we want to nurture and activate in. That was my point for it.
James Jolly: Let’s move on to Anis. And there’s a connection, because you are the patron of El Sistema, Greece, which you founded. Do you want to just tell us a little bit about the El Sistema concept and then specifically how you’ve been applying it in Greece?
Anis Barnat: Yes, of course. Al Sistema exists since 1975 in Venezuela. It is today almost 800,000 children that benefit a free music education in the country. It has developed in more than 55 countries. And the most recent one is the one that we founded only three weeks ago in Greece. The one in Greece is very, very different from any other health system in the world because we are addressing a very, very different type of population. We are present in refugee camps. And this is very important because all these children in refugee camps, they don’t have a structure yet. There are some NGO’s trying to do some education, some activities, cultural activities, too, but there is no long term plan because it’s an every. It’s an ever changing situation. Now. We’re not in the urgency situation. Everyone realizes that these refugees, they will stay whether we want it or not, they will stay in Greece, they will stay in Europe. And one tool that we can do is actually bringing music. Because music is not only about music, it’s about discipline. It’s about giving a frame. It’s also about sharing experience. And with all the children that we have, it’s a challenge with language, because we have Arabic speaker, we have Farsi speaker, we have Urdu speaker. But somehow music is great because you don’t need to talk. You just have to smile. You just have to look. And this is the power that we can see and that we will see on stage tomorrow. It’s not about the music that you deliver. It’s also the intention. And our teachers in Greece are very committed. They are Greeks because it was very important to have local teachers, but we also use the local talents. There are so many, many, many talents in the refugee camps. And it’s a very, very young program, but potentially it’s a lot of children that we can address.
James Jolly: How many children are currently in refugee camps in Greece?
Anis Barnat: It’s very difficult to say because it’s difficult to track numbers. But officially, for the UNHCR, there are today 2700 children in refugee camps in Greece. And since January 2015, there have been more than 1 million migrants coming to Greece. So that’s a lot, big numbers.
James Jolly: Well, we’ll come back and talk about, you know, actually the actual sort of hands on work. But now let’s move on to matt. You’re artistic director of Streetwise Opera. This is an opera company for homeless people. Do you want to explain what it’s all about?
Matt Peacock: Yes. It’s a privilege to be here. Thank you very much indeed. Hello, everyone. So I guess the story starts in the late 1990s, where I had two jobs. I was a music journalist, and I worked in a homeless centre as a support worker just around the corner in Victoria. And one night, one of the residents from the homeless centre read out a quote from the newspaper from a politician who had said that the homeless are the people you step over coming out of the opera house. And that created somewhat of a debate. But in summary, that was about how homelessness is not just about housing, it’s not just about a roof over someone’s head. And when people have experienced homelessness, they experienced all manner of different challenges of trauma. Music’s a great healer, and music can bring people together. And what we found when we decided to give it a go and put on an opera, and we got hold of the opera house, so thumbs up to them was that music gives people a permission to believe. I think the arts in general gives people a permission to believe. And central to that is, I think, about identity, about how all the people I’ve worked with feel like they’re the sum of their problems. And the arts is in all of us. It’s part of the UN Charter of Human Rights. It’s a human right. And when people access their creativity, as once they did, probably when they were children, and that has kind of possibly gone away a bit, they feel that they are not the sum of their problems. They have achievements that they want to share, and they can be defined by those achievements, not by their needs. And one really good example, I think of this is one of our performers a few years ago, who wanted to work backstage on one of our shows, and he had an addiction problem and had been ostracized by his family, had lost touch. And we have this mechanism in all of our productions where we give our performers tickets, and if they have people to give them to, they bring them along. And he got in touch with his two daughters, who he’d lost touch with. He hadn’t seen them for ten years, and they came along, and one of them brought her daughter, his granddaughter he’d never met before. So his first interaction with his granddaughter was a very positive one. And I think this is central to what the arts can achieve. I also feel that as artists, we are all activists, and we choose how far to take that. Whether we are performing, that’s activism, it’s changing the conversation from what we have now. I think quite a lot, which is hate and bigotry into something which is more powerful. And there are more of us having that conversation of love and acceptance.
James Jolly: Now, Joyce, you took on the role of activist when you went to Sing Sing, the maximum security prison in upstate New York, to work with the inmates. I mean, I remember you telling me earlier this year, and it was an amazing story. And I’ve had actually quite a lot of people saying, I read your piece about, with Joyce about Sing Sing, and it was just so moving. Do you want to share it with us now?
Joyce DiDonato: How much time do we have? Yes. Carnegie Hall does this outreach program, and they go into Sing Sing, which is a maximum security prison. So it’s the worst of the worst criminals. And they teach classical composition. You know, they’re turning that whole, how do you get to Carnegie hall upside down on its head and saying, how can Carnegie hall get to you? And when I heard about this program, I knew I just had to do it. And so they said, we have this opera singer. Does anybody want to write for her? And three of the men did, and two of them were duets. And so you go in, they have people that they work with to work on the composition. Then the artists come in. They also bring in professional musicians. And we workshop side by side for a day. And we come back a week or two later, and we do a concert for the general prison population. One man coming back to the children. His name was Joseph Wilson. And the first day that we met, he terrified me. If I was doing Hollywood casting for the criminal, it would be him. Big man, brooding. Looked at the world like this, right? Nobody around him, very isolated. And we had to stand side by side after just meeting each other. And I had to listen to his song for the first time. And it was called cotton needs a pickin. And the first verse was about. They tell me I’m a free man but because of the color of us, my skin why do I still feel like a slave? I thought, oh, okay, we’re in it now. Second verse was two bullets. Two bullets is all it took to take him down. Okay. And I still don’t know when my part comes in. He told me later, he said, I’ll let you know and just make sure it’s soulful, is what he told me. And I went, yes, sir. Third verse. But what about all the times love good old fashioned love was looking me right in the eyes and then he goes, now it’s you. And I went, ah. And it was extraordinary. I went out for the concert that day, and I sang opera. I’ve never had so many spontaneous standing ovations in my life. They’ve spoiled me for all the opera houses in the world. They were shouting out things in the middle of the arias. It must have been like in Shakespeare’s day. Then I came back ten months later, just about a month ago, and Joseph walks into this room. I forgot to say, in the concert a year ago, he held up a picture of his four month old new daughter named Hope, and dedicated the song to her and to the victim of his crime. Okay, that’s a man taking responsibility for what he’s done in front of his fellow prisoners. That doesn’t happen. And it happened because of the music and what this program has done for him. Come back ten months later, walks into the room, and the light is on inside of him. He’s a different man. Shakes my hand. Miss Joyce, I have so much to tell you. I’m like Joseph. I have so much to tell you, too, because his quote is featured in my sequel album and in various other places.
James Jolly: We should just say that you posed this question, didn’t you, to all sorts of people. And they came back with answers. And many of them were printed in the booklet for the CD.
Joyce DiDonato: Yeah. Getting people to ask how they find peace. Not a bad question to be asking right now. He grabs my hand and he says, you have no idea what’s happened to me. He said, I know I now have to write an opera. And he’s serious. He said, I never knew so much emotion could be expressed in music. I didn’t know that existed. He wrote this epic ten minute piece then that I sang, and he was going, hey, guys, come on, let’s go. He’s now a leader in that group. And when I told him about his quote in the CD, he got quiet and tears came to his eyes. He said, I want to give that to my daughter. Music is instilling dignity in these people that didn’t think it belonged to them anymore. And if a human being rediscovers their dignity, then they can start to contribute. They can take responsibility for their life situation. They can start to contribute to the world. Are we solving world peace? I don’t know. But that man’s life is more peaceful. That man’s life has more clarity and dignity. And of course, that radiates into his circle around him and his daughter and his wife. And then the young guy who’s going to come into the prison and Joseph’s going to say, get into this program and compose, and it’s going to. It’s what El Sistema does, it hands it down to the next group and it passes on.
James Jolly: And presumably, I mean, this must ring bells with you, Matt, in streetwise opera.
Matt Peacock: Yes. And I think being there is regularly is one of the most important things we’ve found. Seeing that spark, seeing how someone has the permission to believe in themselves again and has that dignity, and then following it up with other programs. And often we say that the most important day is the day after the show, after everyone has that come down and needs something else to look forward to.
James Jolly: So presumably the whole sort of rehearsal process is almost as important as the end result. I mean, how long do you take when you. You put on a show with the opera?
Matt Peacock: It’s typically about two years. So we had an opera based on Bach, St Matthew Passion, this March, and we worked with the 16 choir and orchestra and Penny Woolcock directed, and we’d been working for two years in the homeless centres and still do. It’s just part of that program. The 16 singers came in a year and a half ahead, embedded themselves into the process and going back still. So it is. The productions are part of that process, but the absolute gold is the regularity.
James Jolly: And presumably it also creates sort of relationships within the cast, as it were. Just working with other people must be enormously energizing, I suppose.
Matt Peacock: Reassuring people come. They tell us they come primarily to have a community, and in this country we’ve got a fantastic social welfare system and social housing system, so people can get rehoused, but they can often get isolated. Many 25% go back onto the streets, mostly because of loneliness. So these programs, these music and arts programs are also fundamental in keeping people engaged and having something to look forward to being told. They’re being told their Christian names once a week, perhaps, and having high expectations made of them. Many of us have quite low expectations of ourselves, and that permeates throughout all society. That’s another wonderful thing about the arts. It can really make you feel like you’re doing something good very quickly, and.
James Jolly: You’re dealing with children much younger, presumably. What sort of age group are you generally sort of starting them, as it were?
Anis Barnat: We can start from up to four years old and then we can address the program to teenagers up until 1819. It doesn’t really matter. The important thing is regularity with their everyday. And we see them coming back, which is very good during the lesson. They are very, very focused sometimes. Most of the time. It’s not very easy all the time, but we try. But before coming to the lesson, they’re very very agitated. And as soon as the lesson is finished, we see some of them fighting. So we hope that with music, it gives them a frame. It gives them some energy to understand each other’s culture, understand each other, basically. And performance is very important. If you do only music lessons, but you don’t show what you can do, it only stays within yourself. If you can show to your parents, if you can show to the people in the camp what you’re doing, it gives you self esteem, and it makes you understand that the group is very powerful. And in these very, very special environment, they have to be together. Otherwise, it’s only a lonely day.
James Jolly: And presumably, again, as with streetwise opera, friendships must be created within the ensembles. And the kids are kind of encouraged not just to play together, but literally to play together.
Anis Barnat: And the very, very important thing, too, is that it’s transnational. It doesn’t matter about your religion or your nationality. We have seen a young afghani friend now with a young syrian. And before, it wasn’t necessarily the case. So music brings down all the borders, and this is much needed today in these locations.
James Jolly: Going back to Sing Sing, I mean, is this now part of your life, do you think?
Joyce DiDonato: Yeah.
James Jolly: The other side, as it were?
Joyce DiDonato: Yeah, it is. I feel like it’s incredibly significant work. It’s very easy, I’ll be honest. It’s very easy as an opera singer to start to feel cut off and say, is this actually mattering to the world? Goes back to that question from the premiere that I did. I know that it does, but it seems that it matters to people that have a lot of resource to find it from a variety of places and to bring it to people that never existed in their world before, and to see such a visceral reaction and then to see them begging for more, not because it’s just distraction from their normal prison life, but they’re feeling something that they had cut off within themselves. And that’s significant. And I told them last year, I said I’d come back. And when I returned in October, a few of them said, you’re one of the first ones that came back. And I said, well, I’ll be back next year. And as they were leaving after the concert, Joseph said, 364 days. And I’m sure he’s going to have something incredible for me when I go back next year. It feels selfish to say, but it’s incredibly enriching. And then I can carry that confidence and that realization onto the opera stage, where people have paid 150 pounds for a ticket or more, and I can say, don’t you take this lightly. And I know that what I’m doing is significant because I know the power of that music to enter people’s hearts, and it takes a lot for that to happen in 2016. And music is one of the most effective things for it. And arts, culture, it’s one of the most effective things. And if we can get those hearts just slightly less rigid, then there’s space for something else to come in. There’s space for empathy, there’s space for looking at the world outside of your little telescopic lens. And I just. I don’t know of any more effective place to put my energy right now than in this work.
James Jolly: And Matthew, Streetwise Opera, I mean, it’s UK based, but you are now kind of filtering out into other places in the world. Is that?
Matt Peacock: Yes. One wonderful thing about this area of arts and homelessness is it’s really growing around the world. But all the projects that we find, from the Dallas street choir, which we’re talking about before, to amazing work in Japan and Brazil, it’s all very fragmented and not connected. So we’ve set up an initiative called, with one Voice, which is an arts and homelessness network, a movement. And we’ve just been setting up choirs in Rio and working with the wonderful sort of south american culture, which I think is for us, has been just such a wonderful lesson in the value of the arts over the last 15 years, where streetwise opera has been operating. I think it feels like for us and for many, that we’re constantly lobbying and saying the arts is important because it really helps homeless people, or it really does an amazing thing in Parkinson’s. But in this country and in many others, I think it’s still seen a little bit like a luxury item, still seen a bit like it’s, you know, we’re not sure if we’re going to fund that first before something else. There’s a choice there. But in South America, and a great inspiration of the Ilsa state stamer system, the arts is fundamental to humanity. People know that it’s been fundamental in helping conflict resolution, and they talk about it as a human right.
James Jolly: And politicians get involved, which in this.
Matt Peacock: Country, they, politicians turn up to arts events and talk about the arts in a way that I really haven’t come across in many other countries.
James Jolly: I mean, for. El Sistema agrees. I mean, do you have political support from the Greek government and other governments?
Anis Barnat: Yes, we do. But we do because we’re not only targeting the children in refugee camps. What is very important is integration, is social integration in the end. And we already have some plan to do some public performances, not only with the children in the. The refugee camps, but also from the greek community. And this is the new face of Europe. So it is very, very important that all the children at a certain age, they understand the other culture, and they know who they are going to live with. Political support is very, very important when you want to start a local initiative. Unfortunately, we will never be able to tour this El cit Magris choir or orchestras, because, of course, it is the administrative situation. But what we can do is bringing greek children from the schools and make them understand the reality of their country. And we can bring artists and composers. Creativity is very, very important in these camps. And you will maybe not believe it, but the kids are very, very inventive, and they can do a lot of tricks, not only musical tricks, but we hope that they can do some musical tricks, too.
Joyce DiDonato: It reminds me of a quote that has come to me during all of this process, which the opposite of war is not peace. It’s creation. And you’ve got kids creating a choir, creating music, homeless people creating a production, creating their voice, creating music. That’s so powerful. Yeah.
James Jolly: So what stands in the way of development? I mean, what would you like? You know, blue Sky. I want, if I could give you something that would help. El Sistema agrees. I mean, what would it be?
Anis Barnat: Music is only an excuse. Ideally, we would like education to be provided to all the children in these refugee camps. We do music because we know how to do it. And El Sistema is a very, very good inspiration. Methodology. It doesn’t focus on the individual. It focuses on the group. So this is very fundamental to the system. If I had a blue sky, I would like all the Al SSD Magri children to meet at some point and to gather all the experience they have. And maybe if it’s not possible physically, at least it’s possible with the new medias. So we are thinking of developing a sort of platform where they can also exchange not only with Venezuela, but also with any other children and any other child in the world. So this is the next step, maybe.
James Jolly: And for you, Matt, I mean, presumably funding is important, of course, for everyone.
Matt Peacock: But I think what I’d love is more conversations like this and more activists like Joyce to. To make this conversation a real one and one that people can’t ignore, that we talk about the arts in a way that is transformational. And we’re not shy or mealy mouthed about the fact that we know that it can make a difference in the world, a real difference, presumably.
James Jolly: I mean, there will come a time when you go back to sing Sing, when you actually bring a song away and people will say, what was that amazing encore that Joyce DiDonata sang? And you could say, well, actually it was written for me in Sing Sing.
Joyce DiDonato: This guy named Mo who’s been in the program from the beginning on this last workshop, at the very end, he said, oh, by the way, kind of, they don’t like to make a lot of eye contact. You know, they’re handed me this music and he goes, this is just something for you to look at. And I said, what is it? He goes, well, I wrote it for you. I said, well, let’s try it. And he said, well, I don’t know. It’s sort of Iron Maiden meets opera. And I went, let’s try it, you know. And he goes, really? Really, all the guys, electric guitar, you know, drums, all this. And I get a microphone which I don’t get to use very often. And it was about bombs falling down and, you know, what are we building when we bomb? It was just because they were writing on the theme of war and peace and it was awesome. And we did it. And I said, we have to do this in the concert. And it was the finale of the concert. It was incredible. So what Carnegie hall is doing is saying, how do we get this project to Carnegie hall and present it? What’s extraordinary about this program, it’s the day after, as you talked about, Matt, is they follow through. When these men are released, and 98% of the men and women in these programs, programs will be released, they become our neighbors again. And so is rehabilitation important or not? Is another conversation, as is the penal system in America. But I digress. The idea is when they get out, Carnegie Hall follows through. They provide weekly lessons for these men on violin or trumpet or drums or whatever they played. And one of the men is a volunteer usher at Carnegie Hall, and he takes your ticket when you walk in, and that’s his new world. And it’s pretty incredible. So what I am sure is going to happen in a few years, I’ll be back doing more projects there, and I’m sure we’ll invite men that have graduated and are out there, and we’ll sing some of the cons I’ve. Yeah, because it’s important that people hear the creations that they’ve done. And they, you start to feel the transformation of these humans, of these men who have faced what they’ve done and are working to quote Joseph before he announced his peace, he said to the population, he said, hey, guys, when we know better, we have to do better. I’d be happy to have him as my neighbor when he gets out. I like that.
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About the Pure Land Foundation: Established in 2015, the Pure Land Foundation is a charitable organisation with a deep legacy of achievements supporting projects and initiatives focused on emotional and spiritual wellness. Today, the Pure Land Foundation is primarily a digital-first advocacy organisation that is focused on advocating for the adoption of philosophies and precepts derived from ancient Buddhist wisdom in response to the mental health crises of modern life.
About Bruno Wang: Bruno Wang is a patron, philanthropist and producer. Bruno Wang is a longstanding supporter of art, music and theatre as a patron of the arts. Bruno Wang is an advocate for spiritual and mental wellness as founder of the Pure Land Foundation. Bruno Wang is a producer of socially important film and theatre productions at Bruno Wang Productions.
