00:00

[SOUND EFFECT]

Terrance McKnight: This is the Open Ears Project.

[MUSIC PLAYING: Adagio from Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major]

Dexter Filkins: My name is Dexter Filkins and I'm a staff writer for the New Yorker.  For many years, I was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times. And for four years, nearly four years, I lived in Baghdad during the war there.

This is the second movement of Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major. I used to put it on, uh, in the nightmare years of the war in Iraq from 2003 to 2007.

Being a journalist in Iraq was a very strange experience. I ne-I never got used to the coming and going but it was - I mean, I hated going and I but I hated leaving.

Uh, you know, we live in a strange world, where you can get on an airplane and fly to another plane, essentially what amounts to another planet, stay there for a while and come back.

It was a really, really hard time. Incredibly violent. I would go out some days and there would be 10 or 15 car bombings and suicide bombings. I mean, pretty much every day for the space of a couple of years. 

There'd be 50 bodies in the streets every morning in their last kind of terrible poses with their bags over their heads and their hands cuffed behind them, having been taken away by some death squad the night before. 

2:19

And I mean, it was insane, we were just a newspaper trying to figure out what was going on out there. But it was easy to uh, it was easy to go to pieces and it was easy to kind of lose your faith in, in everything. And I used to come back sometimes and I would, I would put on the second movement of Ravel's piano concerto in G just to, just to take it in. 

It's so gentle, but there's an undercurrent of tension there, which I think grows through the movement and where I think it begins to feel, as tender as it is, that you're walking along a nerve.

And I think that's what makes it so powerful, because it's that feeling that kind of of the storm receding and going out to sea. And not quite gone and, and still blustery and blowing and spooky. 

But the storm is gone, the pain is gone, it's all temporary. But of course, so is this, so is this moment.

4:39

And, and - um, it would, uh, it would calm me in those, in those really, really bad moments during those terrible days that-that I had there.

And I remember it was a very particular phenomenon, in the bad years, which was most of the car bombs and most of the suicide bombings would happen before nine o'clock in the morning.

We were living on a crazy schedule because of the time difference: we would stay up until three or four o'clock in the morning and then inevitably eight-thirty, eight o'clock in the morning, you'd start to hear the blasts. And there were days when, uh, our walls would shake pretty much every day and the windows were blown out several times.

But typically, what would happen is I'd hear a big blast and I'd run out the door and I remember one in particular was very close to the house, it was just about a block away. It was a girls school and they had bombed the building next door.

I still remember running towards the scene, and you could see the fire and the smoke, and the girls in their uniforms, their little blue skirts and their white shirts just, you know, eyes wide mouths open, just running away. And, uh, that was a really bad day, but I remember literally wading in the rubble and there were family members looking for, looking for their children or looking for their mother or looking for their, for their brother and, and-and grieving, wailing. They're just impossible scenes. 

And, ugh [sigh], it-that kind of thing stays with you and it doesn't go away, and I remember those, those scenes, uh, the grieving mothers. 

And there's nothing to say about it, um, but I feel like this music speaks to that, it speaks to the suffering, it speaks to the suffering going away, and it speaks to that tenderness that comes after. And - god, I still think of those days. I’m thinking about them right now.

7:18

I would often wonder, and still do, what it was that Ravel himself was trying to convey. Ravel himself had been, I think he was a driver in the first World War, and had a number of friends, I think, who had been kind of shattered by, by the experience, but I feel like this comes right out of that. It must.

I feel like he certainly understood, in his way, exactly what it feels like to go through that.

I think he had to, he had to suffer to get to this…. You can feel it.

8:06

The funny thing about war is you see the whole human condition kind of laid out in front of you every day. And it's the human condition in extremis, I mean, it's under, kind of, really intense circumstances. And so, as much utter barbarity and incredible stupidity and terrible suffering I saw, you also see people, really, at their best, and at their strongest, and their most noble: people running into burning cars and pulling people out and - um - people just enduring what they're enduring. And so in that way, it's not, it's not a hopeless endeavor to witness that.

Part of the power of this piece is that - um - as clear as it is that there had been enormous pain before it, it's not hopeless. In a way it's, it feels redemptive. You feel like you're coming out of something, pain is leaving, storm is leaving and what's left is, you know, the human heart. 

When I listen to this piece today, it feels like the world's gonna be ok.

9:38

[OPEN EARS THEME MUSIC: Philip Glass’s Piano Etude No. 2]

Terrance McKnight: That was Dexter Filkins. He chose the Adagio from Ravel's Piano Concerto in G. Stay with us, the Adagio is coming up.

[MUSIC PLAYING: Adagio from Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major]

19:27

[OPEN EARS THEME MUSIC: Philip Glass’s Piano Etude No. 2]

Terrance McKnight: This is The Open Ears Project. Join us next week, we’ve got Bach and Rowan Williams.

Rowan Williams: Music connects a lot with the unpeeling or unrolling of that tight little ball inside that's my ego, my worried, frantic, guilty, ambitious ego. 

Terrance McKnight: The Open Ears project was conceived and created by Clemency Burton Hill. I’m Terrance McKnight and I'm just pleased to present season two of this podcast to you.

If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating and a review on your favorite podcast platform and, if you’ve got a story about a piece of classical music, we want to know. Email us at openears@wqxr.org. You can also head to our website, wqxr.org, to check out our other podcasts about classical music and playlists for this and past seasons.

Season two of The Open Ears Project was produced by Clemency Burton-Hill and Rosa Gollan. Our technical director is Sapir Rosenblatt, and our project manager is Natalia Ramirez. Elizabeth Nonemaker is the executive producer of podcasts at WQXR, and Ed Yim is our chief content officer. I’m Terrance McKnight. Thanks so much for listening.

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