Violinist Daniel Rowland: 'One spontaneous action can change the world'

The healing power of music, some firmly believe in it - in 2013 it was even the premise of the City of London Festival. Based on the belief that music can connect people and have a healing effect on conflictual societies, festival director Ian Ritchie asked the Brodsky Quartet to commission a composition around this theme.

Thus was born the song cycle created by nine composers and eight poets Trees Walls Cities, inspired by famous cities with walls. Some intended to keep the enemy out, others to keep the people in and still others to separate rival groups. The cycle was first performed in London in 2013, and will have its Dutch premiere at the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ in Amsterdam. Six questions to Daniel Rowland, primarius of the Brodsky Quartet.

When and how did the idea for this song cycle originate?

Our viola player Paul Cassidy grew up in the split Northern Irish city of Derry, called Londonderry by the English. It forms the border between the Protestant north and the Catholic south. As a 17-year-old, Paul had to decide whether he was for or against the Irish Revolutionary Army (IRA), which wanted to detach Northern Ireland from England to rejoin Ireland. Derry/Londonderry has two walls: a historical one, encompassing the Old Town, and a symbolic one: the divide between Catholic independence fighters and Protestant 'unionists'.

When Paul was young, one bomb after another exploded here, so the split-city issue is very familiar to him. He fled to London as a teenager to build a new life. Together with Ian Ritchie, artistic director of the City of London Festival and Cathy Graham of the British Council, he spearheaded this project. The mezzo-soprano Loré Lixenberg is also heavily involved in this theme.

How were the cities chosen?

We wanted iconic places. Derry/Londonderry was fixed from the start, but Utrecht too has city walls, built in the Middle Ages to protect its inhabitants. Older are the walls of London, which were built by the Romans around what they called 'Londinium'; those of Dubrovnik originated in the seventh century and were later expanded more and more. Of particular note are the six Flaktürme in Vienna, which were erected in World War II for the purpose of anti-aircraft defence. Besides such protective walls, you also have grim, political walls, as in Berlin, Nicosia and Jerusalem.

Where did the idea of trees come from?

Again, this is near Derry. The name comes from the original Celtic designation for this area, 'Doire', which means as much as 'oak grove' and was bastardised into 'Derry'. Coincidentally, Dubrovnik is derived from the Old Slavic duba/dubrava, which also means 'oak forest'. In many cities, trees grow around or near the walls and their branches bend over them, while their roots can dislocate the stones, a beautiful symbolism. In the song about London, for example, someone is sitting on a branch. In addition, because we had a large-scale cycle in mind, we thought of Schubert's Winterreise, with the renowned song about the Linden tree. We asked the composers to incorporate this in their piece.

How did you choose the composers?

We looked for a suitable composer for each city and, as it happens, all four of us first looked around in our own circles. For example, I studied with Yannis Kyriakides, who is from Nicosia but has lived in the Netherlands for many years. He wrote one of the most personal works, Walls Have Ears. It is based on a poem by Turkish Cypriot poet Mehmet Yaşin, describing his childhood.

Yaşin and Kyriakides both grew up during the time when the wall was being erected between the Turkish and Greek parts of Cyprus. Turks and Greeks no longer spoke to each other and language suddenly became very important and even dangerous, because it immediately put you in a camp. For the generation growing up, English became the language of choice, as this gave you the least chance of making enemies. It is similar to the situation in Derry: if you spoke English with an Irish accent, you were automatically a nationalist and vice versa.

Yannis has shaped that situation beautifully in his music. The singer sings in Turkish, sometimes just vocalising, with chunks of words. As we play, we say the English translation of her lyrics. Her singing is vague, impressionistic and melismatic, with many sounds on a single syllable; we, meanwhile, recite our English words very dryly and distantly. The music is microtonal, evocative and wry; it is a hugely haunting composition.

For Dubrovnik, we asked Isidora Žebeljan, a great composer I know well. She grew up in this city and also wrote a very personal piece, When God was creating Dubrovnik. She used a poem by Milan Milišić, a Serbian poet who, like her, lived in this city. Milišić was one of the first civilian victims when the Croatian war of independence broke out in December 1991 and the city was shelled by the Yugoslav army.

Isidora's piece is very festive and insanely virtuosic, an intentional kind of twisted Balkan music. She wrote the song as something conciliatory, to indicate that art is above the nasty political reality. It is difficult to play, rhythmically tricky and very fast. Like a whirlwind, so brilliant that you have to shout bravo afterwards, it is always the hit of the evening. At the same time, her song has a wry undertone: the poet has been shot dead and the impacts of the shelling are still gaping wounds in Dubrovnik's city walls.

For Utrecht, we asked Theo Verbey, who was inspired by the poem The garden of Paracelsus by Berlin poet Peter Huchel, in which trees play a major role. It is a profound piece, sounding a bit like a Bach chorale. But Theo weaves sparkling flageolet tones through it, evoking a transcendent atmosphere. His song has a dark touch: something is brewing under the surface. He manages to evoke a whole world in the short span of four minutes, an amazing feat.

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With so many different composers, don't you get a random hodgepodge of styles?

That danger was obviously lurking. That's why we asked British composer Nigel Osborne to connect the eight songs and also write an opening and a closing. He did a fantastic job, his pieces simultaneously forming a look back at the previous and a look forward to the next. For example, he effortlessly connects the nightclub-like Just outside on Berlin by Søren Nils Eichberg with the violently atonal Flak Tower, Esterhazy Park By Gerald Resch on Vienna.

Thanks to Nigel's evocative interludes, one continuous cycle of about 50 minutes was created, interlocking from the first note to the last. He was the ideal person for this, by the way, as he always uses his music as a unifying element to rise above political and religious battle lines. He also worked extensively in the former Yugoslavia, where he actively propagated the ideal of fraternisation through music.

Did this project itself make you think differently about conflict situations and the healing power of music?

'That's a bit much to say, but I expected an emotional response in Jerusalem, for instance. The piece for this city was composed by a Palestinian, Habib Shehadeh Hanna. Who uses a text - sung in Arabic - from the Song of Songs by Solomon about a woman entering the walls of Jerusalem in search of her lover. I did not sense any particular charge among the audience, either of disapproval or fraternisation. Nor do I know if there were any Palestinians in the audience; from the looks of it, the visitors belonged to the upper middle class.

What did affect me enormously was our performance in Dubrovnik. When the mayor heard that the cycle was to be performed in his city and that this involved a Serbian composer, he announced that she was not welcome. Naturally, we protested against this, but only when we promised to keep Isidora in the lee, did she get permission to attend the concert. We were not allowed to mention her name under any circumstances. This was contrary to our ideal that music could bridge this kind of conflict. It felt totally wrong. I was surprised by the rawness of the emotions: that siege was almost a quarter of a century ago now.

That we were not allowed to call Isidora on stage was extra poignant because it was her birthday that night. Coincidentally, there was a famous Croatian opera singer in the audience, with whom we had given an earlier concert. Afterwards, he gave an encore with us, after which he spontaneously exclaimed that today was the birthday of the 'great composer Isidora Žebeljan'. He set the Croatian version of Happy Birthday and after some hesitation, everyone sang along, except the politicians who had so agitated against her coming. Those looked at their toes contemptuously.

For me, that was the crystallisation of the emotions our project can evoke. It made the biggest impression on me: one person's spontaneous action can change the world.

More information about the concert on 7 January 2016 with Trees Walls Cities can be found at here.

From 4 to 6 March, the Brodsky Quartet will again be a guest at the Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ, when they will play all the Shostakovich's string quartets.