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Chapter 13 - Working in the Trenches: Surviving Conflicts through Folk Music and Tales

In this chapter I talk about the power of music for peace through my own experiences traveling the back roads of America and through the eyes of other performers who have tried to use their music to bring about social change through nonviolent means. I also use information that I have gathered over the years from my TV show and through personal interviews from other artists such as Pete Seeger, Utah Phillips, Cunningham and others with whom I have been involved in the struggle to promote peace through music.

Chapter 14 - Art for Harmony in the Middle-East: the Music of Yair Dalal

This chapter is based on several online interviews of Israeli composer, singer, oud player and violinist Yair Dalal, as well as on numerous phone calls and live discussions, taking place from 2004 to 2006. Yair Dalal believes that Jews and Arabs have so much in common that there is no reason to argue or fight along cultural identity lines. He thinks it is better to rebuild one’s identity on a larger basis, and widely declares that he is an “Arab Israeli Jew.”

This chapter will highlight episodes in Yair Dalal’s experiences and biography that explain why he affirms his identity as an “Arab Israeli Jew,” how his philosophy of peace is translated into his musical work, and some facts of history that confirm, and others that negate, his theory of the “common roots” between both peoples. The last section will show where two seemingly contradictory projects, that of Yair Dalal and of another brilliant Israeli musician, Gilad Atzmon, converge under the lens of social constructionism.

Chapter 15 - Music and Peace Making in Educational Contexts

This chapter will examine particularly the role of music and empathy in educational contexts – both schools and Higher Education. It will use the five fold model of the Musical experience - Materials, Expression, Construction, Values and Spirituality in the chapter described above to show how the area of value is communicated in a musical event and how this affects participants’ empathetic experience. It will examine examples of projects with deliberate intention to address the issue of peace keeping/making between diverse cultures including The Call of the Ancestors, The Healing of the Earth, The Greening Branch, Re-membering Christ and Peacesong.

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