Lenny and the Apple Hill String Quartet with King's Academy workshop participants

Hello from Istanbul!

We left Kings Academy yesterday morning, very sad to say goodbye to Reem and our good friend Emer, a long-time Irish participant who came to Jordan to visit and spend the week with us. Our time in Jordan was full of so many amazing experiences, it is hard to know how to begin!

Some of you may remember from last year that King’s Academy is a private school started by King Abdullah in 2006 and modeled after Deerfield Academy, where the king went to high school. It is a beautiful, spacious campus with green lawns (sometimes a little hard to believe you are in Jordan) and uniformed students bustling about. This year the student population was over 400, double the size of last year. Reem, who has been at Apple Hill the past seven summers and was also a Playing for Peace scholarship student at Keene State College, has started a wonderful strings program that includes an orchestra (which she conducts!) as well as chamber music.

King's Academy: Reem conducts a string ensemble at while Lenny coaches

Our first day began with a school-wide assembly concert where we performed our school program. The volunteers that Lenny has chosen to play the violin for the first time have all been excellent, and the volunteer student at the King’s Academy assembly ended up coming to all our events, even though they hadn’t shown much interest in music previously. Later that afternoon we also had the opportunity to hear all the string students in a master class. We were really impressed with the program and how Reem is focusing on chamber music with these students, some of whom are just beginning to play.

Our workshop began later that evening with participants from Kings Academy, Jordan, and Syria. The conductor of the orchestra in Damascus once again escorted a wonderful group of Syrian musicians, including two who participated in last fall’s King’s Academy workshop. The Jordanian musicians were also wonderful and included a few participants from last year as well as one of the Playing for Peace scholarship students from this past summer, Rania. Another former Playing for Peace scholarship student that participated in the workshop and who we were very excited to see again was Dima, a young violinist we first met in Ramallah at Al Kamandjati and who is now a student at King’s Academy. The workshop this year had such an amazing energy, and it really felt like a mini Apple Hill session. The range of groups was wonderful, beginning with a younger mixed wind and string group mostly from Kings Academy to groups of mixed Syrians and Jordanians playing at a professional level.

The Ravel string quartet I worked with

I worked with a group that performed the first movement of the Ravel string quartet, and everything about this group reminded me of why I love Apple Hill. The quartet included two Syrians and two Jordanians, and I had my own Playing for Peace moment: when I first met them I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from these four macho guys, but by the end of the workshop, I just loved them all. The Ravel string quartet is very difficult - it calls for sophisticated musical timing and a whole palette of different colors - and we only had two and a half days to put it together! On top of that, they had never really played music by French composers, and after the first day, I gathered they weren’t too fond of it. So, we had a big task ahead of us to be prepared for the concert, and I also really wanted them to love the piece.

The second day, things went a little better, and I started to see the players get more comfortable with the sound of the music. That day, the whole group of participants had lunch in Madaba, the nearby town, and visited a church with mosaics from the 6th century. In the evening, the Apple Hill String Quartet played our full program for the participants, visitors from Amman, and students and faculty from King’s Academy.

On the morning of the last day of the workshop, my group played through the piece, and I couldn’t believe how much better it was. They listened to one another and made the colors and timing that the music called for. Not only that, I could see the dynamic between the four of them opening up, which for them meant there was a fair amount of teasing going on. The first violinist was a wonderful Syrian player who had gotten up at 5 am that morning to practice, and when he told me that, the others said exasperatedly that they had gotten up because of the noise. The participant concert was again a wonderful sharing of music, and I felt each group really prepared something special. The group I worked with went beyond what they knew they could do. They learned an amazing piece of music, and seemed to become friends while doing it, which encapsulates what Apple Hill is all about.

The Apple Hill String Quartet with young Jordanian students in Aqaba

That evening, the headmaster of King’s Academy invited all of us to a wonderful dinner at his home, and the quartet played three short pieces for the guests and students who had gathered round after dinner. On Sunday morning we traveled to Aqaba, a resort city by the Red Sea, and we began our events hosted by the U.S. Embassy by performing for students from the newly opened University of Jordan Aqaba. The next morning we performed the school program for a group of high school students from Aqaba and Maan, and in the afternoon we traveled to Hussein Bin Talal University in Maan and performed for 200 students there. Most of the students were not used to listening to western classical music, and the program was a perfect introduction to the world of the string quartet as well as a great way to engage the students from a more conservative part of Jordan. They asked excellent questions (”Why do you move when you play?” “Do you play any Jordanian music?”), and it was wonderful to interact with them.

Elise and I with Jordanian Army violinists

Our last day in Jordan began at the National Music Conservatory in Amman with a master class for musicians learning to play instruments in the Jordanian army orchestra. It was definitely a sight to see a group of men in their Jordanian army uniforms playing in an orchestra, with a young conductor from Colombia, no less! In the afternoon, Lenny and Elise started our press events with a live radio interview on MOOD FM, then we met with a newspaper reporter, and at the hall we would be performing at later that evening, we had a short television interview. We performed our public concert in Amman at the Al Hussein Cultural Center, and it was wonderful to see so many old and new friends from the workshops as well as various Embassy officials such as the Public Affairs Officer. We even met a woman from Keene who works for the Embassy in Jordan! Many thanks to the U.S. Embassy for hosting a great few days of events and many thanks to Reem for an amazing time at King’s Academy!

Hope all is very well back home - on behalf of all of us here,

Sarah Kim