A.M. Al-Qattan Foundation & Music Fund in Gaza

Ramallah, Saturday 8th November 2009. Meeting Ziad Khalaf, the head of the Ramallah office of the A.M. Al-Qattan Foundation, we evaluated our failure to enter Gaza this last week, and agreed upon a number of new initiatives which Music Fund will be developing in the near future in partnership with the A.M. Al-Qattan Foundation. Besides storing tools and parts for future workshops in Gaza at our repair-workshop at Nablus the Culture, Music Fund has donated a few valuable music instruments which our equipe took with us in our luggage: 2 flutes and 1 violin. Music Fund will again come to the region in April or May 2009 and then again try to propose initiation-workshops in repairing music instruments to people related to the Gaza Music School. In the meantime, Olivier Marie, the French piano-tuner who is working for Music Fund with trainees at Nablus the Culture, will the coming months try to go several times into Gaza in order to verify and repair pianos which can be found in the Gaza and the Gaza-strip. Pianos are desperately needed for the music school in Gaza. For the moment, they have only one available in the school, but it need to be repaired. They also hope to soon receive another piano from within Gaza. Music Fund and Nablus the Culture therefor decided to donate an upright piano to the Gaza Music School. This piano was bought by Sami Hammad of Nablus the Culture and has been have been restored the last months by the students of Olivier Marie's training programme for pianotuners in Nablus. As soon as this piano is restored, we will try to get it into Gaza, something which is not so easy to do. Nablus the Culture also proposes to transfer 10 beautiful guitars to the music school in Gaza, which were originally donated to them by Music Fund. As the Barenboim-Said Foundation just did exactly the same, the music school in Gaza is not immediately in need to receive them, but could use them later on. We also introduced Ziad Khalaf to the Nablus-based oud-maker Ali Hassanen, who is making ouds which are very highly appreciated by such wonderful oud-players as Habeeb Al Deik or Khaled Sadouq. Ali Hassanen makes 2 kind of ouds in different sizes: some are small for the small ages and women, others he makes are big and are meant to be performed by men. If the music school in Gaza needs to buy more ouds for its students in the future, they might be buying them from Ali, as the A.M. Al-Qattan Foundation tries to spend as much as possibly locally, preferably in Gaza, or else in the Westbank, in order to give support to the local economy. They will soon meet Ali to find out more about his instruments. So, even though we did not succeed to get permits to get into Gaza this time, there are good reasons to hope that this partnership between Music Fund and the A.M. Al-Qattan Foundation will develop into something strong, thereby giving support to those children and youngsters in Gaza who want to learn music. © the Qattan Centre for the Child in Gaza, to whom Music Fund already donated a number of music instruments in the past (a.o. one piano a.o.)

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[Music For Gaza]

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=57761582416

we would welcome additional information for our international Music For Gaza page in Facebook,

regard,
MFG