I am back in Detmold now, practicing for some upcoming auditions and also for my own good :) It is nice to see my friends here, and my landlords as well. On the first night I was back, my landlords came downstairs and gave me the warmest greeting. They invited me upstairs to their place where we proceeded to drink champagne and discuss current events, the holidays, the German school system, and anything else on our minds - in mostly German, too! I am quite happy to say that I think my German somehow improved while I was in the U.S. - I have absolutely no idea how, as I didn't pick up a single piece of German reading or any exercises. I'm certainly not going to complain, though! Please enjoy the following article, I found it very moving. And the Orchestra Plays on, Echoing Iraq’s Struggles Johan Spanner/Polaris, for The New York Times A rehearsal of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra; because of frequent blackouts the orchestra often rehearses without electricity. By EDWARD WONG Published: September 28, 2006 BAGHDAD, Sept. 21 — It was music fit for a troubled war. Orchestra Echoes Iraq's Struggles Johan Spanner/Polaris, for The New York Times Karim Wasfi, a cellist and the orchestra’s director, said, “We exist, we perform, we give hope.” Johan Spanner/Polaris, for The New York Times Members of the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra in Baghdad. The evening began with the orchestra plunging into the ending of Tchaikovsky’s overture “1812,” the notes of the martial anthem swelling through the auditorium as trumpets and trombones melded with strings in a bombastic climax. But the mood soon darkened for a piece called Requiem, written this year by the orchestra’s conductor. A cello solo, it was slow and mournful and haunting, composed as an elegy for his country. The hundreds of Iraqis and the handful of Western diplomats in the audience seemed hypnotized, as did the burly guards toting Kalashnikovs. “It’s just like a person who’s dying,” the conductor, Muhammad Amin Ezzat, 45, said after the concert, held on a recent evening at a fading social club in western Baghdad. “For quite some time he was smiling. The heart is still beating, but it’s hard to breathe, hard to speak, and he’s close to death.” The sudden shift from the triumphalism of Tchaikovsky to the funereal tone of Mr. Ezzat’s piece reflects the changing fortunes of Iraq and of one of its enduring symbols of national unity: the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra. Throughout more than three years of war the orchestra has striven to lift the country’s spirits and give succor through art. But orchestra members are finding that while art can sometimes provide a brief respite from grim reality, it cannot stand forever as a bulwark against the maelstrom of conflict. This summer four members fled to Syria and Dubai, stripping the orchestra of two cellists, an oboist and a violist, and leaving it with 59 musicians. The orchestra is often forced to rehearse without electricity because of frequent blackouts. The rehearsals take place three times a week in the former royal concert hall near the crumbling historic heart of Baghdad, with armed guards surrounding the compound. The musicians are running out of things like reeds and strings, and few music stores remain open in Iraq, partly because militant Islamists have bombed several. Players must worry about offending fundamentalist militiamen and Islamist neighbors. “The circumstances affect us on a daily basis,” said Karim Wasfi, 34, the American-educated orchestra director and a cellist given to wearing buttoned-up black shirts beneath black suits. “But I want to convey that despite the difficulties and problems and instability, we exist, we perform, we give hope.” The orchestra is one of the oldest in the region, Mr. Wasfi said. Its roots stretch back to a string quartet founded in 1939. The earliest incarnation, known as the Baghdad Philharmonic, became a full orchestra in the late 1950’s. Its repertory usually consists of classical European compositions, but it also plays original pieces by its members, including those grounded in Arab musical traditions. Since the American invasion in 2003 the orchestra has performed in the United States, Jordan and Dubai, and it often travels to Iraqi Kurdistan. It played seven concerts last season, some with sponsorship from a Kuwaiti cellphone company. It has scheduled this season’s premiere for Oct. 1, in a theater in downtown Baghdad. The government pays members $140 to $620 a month. Even now, with sectarian strife splitting the country, the orchestra remains a mirror of Iraq’s multiethnic, multireligious society. Playing side by side are Sunni and Shiite Arabs, Kurds, Christians, secularists and at least one follower of the Mandean religion, a Gnostic faith that regards Adam and John the Baptist as prophets. But the shining hopes that these musicians embraced after the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003 have vanished. That year the orchestra gave a stirring performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington, playing for, among others, President Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. Some members were invited to the White House. Now Ali Khasaf, a clarinetist, has to practice quietly in a sealed room in his eastern Baghdad home lest he risk offending conservative militiamen. Mr. Khasaf, 48, lives in Sadr City, the stronghold of the militia that answers to radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr. Some Shariah courts run by Sadr followers have deemed music to be un-Islamic, as the Taliban did in Afghanistan. “If the neighbors hear the sound, they might not like it,” said Mr. Khasaf, a 25-year veteran of the orchestra. “The popular audience is not like you or me.” Mr. Khasaf is not the only member of his family in the orchestra. An older brother plays French horn; a younger brother, the oboe; and a nephew, the trumpet. Mr. Khasaf’s love affair with the clarinet began in 1973, when he joined the Iraqi Army band. He was following in the footsteps of his older brother, Mehdi, who joined the band 10 years earlier. “I saw it was very beautiful, so I joined it,” Mr. Khasaf said. “We learned from Russian players, German players while I was in the army.” Mr. Khasaf and the other members of his family have to sneak their instruments in and out of their neighborhood. But they at least manage to practice at home. Not so with Izzat Ghafouri Baban, a Kurdish trumpeter who lives in what he calls a “filthy place”: the strife-prone northeast neighborhood of Shaab, also under the sway of Mr. Sadr’s Mahdi Army. “I can’t practice in my house because I’m surrounded by husseiniyas,” Mr. Baban, 41, said, referring to Shiite mosques that are named after the martyred grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. “Imagine if somebody hears there’s a musician in my home. They’d think I’m against religion.” He squeezes in practice by arriving at the rehearsal hall two hours before his colleagues. “The only thing that keeps us happy is when we see each other,” said Mr. Baban, a stumpy man with gray hair and a grin as wide as a tuba’s bell. “It’s the happiest moment in our lives.” He said he often took a bottle of whiskey home after carousing during practice with his fellow musicians. Once he was driving into his neighborhood when he saw a Mahdi Army checkpoint ahead. He said he knew they would slit his throat if they searched his car and found the bottle. He was saved at the last minute when the militiamen fled from a patrol of American Humvees rolling through the area. Mr. Baban told this story to a foreign visitor just before the start of the concert at the social club. A gangly trombonist named Ali Nasser walked up in a tuxedo and slipped an arm around Mr. Baban. “This orchestra represents the real map of Iraq,” Mr. Nasser, 48, said as Mr. Baban lighted a cigarette. “This man is Kurdish, there’s another man there who’s Christian. This is a real national symphony. The ties among us are unbreakable.” Mr. Nasser, perhaps even more than others, has proved his dedication to music. A baker in the southern city of Nasiriya, he drives or takes a taxi to rehearsals. That is a four- to six-hour drive each way, and soaring gasoline prices mean the trip sucks up half of his income. Even worse, the road runs through the “Triangle of Death,” an area infested with insurgents, militiamen and criminal gangs. Gunmen once shot dead passengers in a taxi just a few cars ahead of him. “My wife says: ‘Please don’t go. Life is very bad in Baghdad. There’s a lot of death in Baghdad,’ ” he said. “She tries to prevent me from coming, but I have to come. We can’t survive without music. It’s like oxygen.” Survival — not disintegration — still provides the artistic inspiration, at least for now. That became evident as the final notes of Requiem, the elegy for Iraq played by Mr. Wasfi on his cello, drifted through the social club that recent evening. The piece was mostly in a minor key, striking a mood of loss, but the last notes were in a vigorous major. The message was clear: Iraq was still alive.