This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: June 30, 2008 - Music is the transportation that Marc C. Thayer’s taking to get from St. Louis to northern Iraq.
Most of the time, Thayer is the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s vice president for education and community partnerships and his usual circuit is around Powell Hall in Grand Centeror 10 or 20 miles or so from it. But for two years now, Thayer has worked in the Kurdish Autonomous Region of northern Iraq. On July 1, he takes off on his journey, making stops in Chicago and Vienna before arriving in Erbil on Friday.
Although the geography is completely foreign, Thayer’s work in Iraq is not so different from his work here. A significant part of his job in St. Louis involves the care and tending of young musicians, helping them to progress as artists and, for some of them, providing encouragement as they head off to serious careers in music.
The organizing entity for Thayer’s work in Iraq is an organization called American Voices . The group takes responsibility for establishing, for a specific period of time, a music program in countries experiencing conflict of one sort or another.
Although the region in which Thayer is to work is relatively peaceful and enormously prosperous, fighting and destruction are never far away geographically -- or emotionally.
The U.S. Embassies provide major support for the programs around the world, and in Iraq, our embassy in Baghdad is a main source of assistance. Locally, in Kurdistan, the Kurdish Ministry of Culture is the sponsor.
Thayer said most of the highly trained and experienced music teachers able to take a student toward a professional career have fled. The American Voices program, called the Unity Academy, steps into the breach with intensive workshops, coaching and performing.
The students who come to the programs are musicians of considerable talent and experience, and are thoroughly familiar with the music of the Western repertory.
However, by the time they’re in their early 20s, they’ve received all the training and coaching available to them. Progress beyond is generally impossible. These young artists cannot travel abroad to study, not because of Iraqi restrictions, but because countries outside Iraq – those who have music-education resources of a generally high quality anyway – refuse to grant visas to the students.
To its credit, St. Louis University bucked that system and has arranged for two students to come to St. Louis to study for a year, on full scholarships. (More later about violinists Alan Salih and Zana Jalil, who’ll be coming to St. Louis in September.)
Thayer’s first stop in Chicago is to gather up and to pack donations headed for academy participants in Iraq. It is not the usual airlift cargo. Thayer is taking printed music, reeds for woodwind instruments, strings for string instruments, hair for violin bows and musical instruments themselves.
All of this is generally unavailable in Iraq, Thayer said. “Here if we break a string, we get a new one. There, you tie a knot in it and carry on.” Printed music is rare. “Usually, if some is available, it is music owned by a teacher that has been photocopied,” he said.
Thayer, who is an accomplished violinist himself, will be joined by a number of other American musicians, pedagogues and performers. Cellist James Nacy, director of the high school orchestra program in the Rockwoods School District here, is on the faculty in Iraq. Andrew Karr, a French horn player and conductor from Sarasota, Fla., will conduct and coach wind and brass players.
Two “Broadway people,” dance instructors Quae Simpson and Michael Masterson, from New York, are participants, as is children’s theater teacher Carole McCann from Houston, Tex. Leader of the whole project is John Ferguson, who runs American Voices and establishes academies such as this all over the world.
American Voices will spend about two weeks in Erbil (one of the oldest cities in the world) and another two weeks in Suliemanya, also in northeastern Iraq and quite near the Iraq-Iran border. Participants come not only from Erbil and Suliemanya but also from Mosul, Kirkuk, Basra, Baghdad and Duhok to their south.
Beginning soon after his arrival in Erbil on the Fourth of July, Thayer will begin sending a series of articles and photographs of his work to the Beacon as well as to the symphony’s website .
To see a concert by the Unity Baroque Orchestra playing the Vivaldi Concerto for Four Violins last summer, please click here .