Mostar // Pavarotti and Music as Healing
Big Luce in Montreal // © meuniard // Shutterstock.com
"There are just 12 notes on the chromatic scale, but music is limitless."
It would be disingenuous to say that the whole place has changed. For one, the layout is the same. The bar is immediately to the right once you enter, with a large room of disparate tables and chairs waiting for prospective punters to plonk down and set about their evening. The bar remains the centre of the action, with five men in various states of burly degradation chain-smoking and putting the world to rights, although mostly chain-smoking. They are also drinking, sort of. Nobody ever seems to buy a drink, but nobody seems to be without one either.
When I first came to Mostar’s Pavarotti Music Centre, it was still dominated by the bar, but to say the bar was open to the public wouldn’t be entirely accurate. I mean, it was, theoretically, but people didn’t really go in, save for the five men I’d encounter every time I conjured up the courage to do so myself. I never knew who was working, but someone always brought me a beer.
At no point has it felt peculiar to me that the owner of the most famous Italian pipes of the modern era lends his name to a bar slash music centre in the centre of Mostar. It shouldn’t, because the series of concerts that Luciano Pavarotti (and friends) put on to raise money for the children of Bosnia and Herzegovina were well-documented, eventually leading to a live album titled, somewhat ironically, Pavarotti and Friends for the Children of Bosnia.
A music centre in Herzegovina. The joke writes itself.
The centre was opened in December 1997 in the premises of a former primary school, itself an early 20th-century building constructed during the brief Austro-Hungarian period of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s history. I only really knew it as a bar, but if you’re basing your understanding of initiatives in BiH entirely on my knowledge, you’re going to leave with a tragic misunderstanding of the successes and achievements of many places.
Artists celebrated at the Pavarotti Music Centre // © Klub 27 // Facebook.com
The Pavarotti Music Centre is at the very front of that queue. Largely the work of the War Child charity, the place was funded entirely through private donations and fundraising. Big Luciano was one of the key examples of the former, and his work in the country led to his name being plonked onto the door. Out of the rubble of war, Mostar had itself a new cultural institution that aimed to provide creative and emotional lightness through the universal magic of music.
War does a lot of things to a lot of people, and its disastrous impact on the lives of children is well documented. Years of subsistence and survival can lead to listless vessels filled with anxiety and passivity in equal measure, tormented by nightmares, bouts of bedwetting and the rest. Surviving war is one thing, but the intense misery doesn’t end with the final shot. If anything, it begins anew in peacetime.
Now, it wouldn’t be correct to say that the founding of this music centre solved all the problems, but it absolutely did provide a beacon of light in an otherwise bleak landscape. Put bluntly, the Pavarotti Music Centre gave kids something to do. The sudden flood of music dragged attention and animation out of previously leaden beings. From being in a war that was entirely out of their control, young people in Mostar now found themselves leading explorations of music, in an atmosphere of mutual respect and positivity. In short, it was the total opposite of everything that was going on in a city divided by war and seemingly committed to those divisions.
Klub 27 is a tremendous spot for a Mostar pivo // © Klub 27 // Facebook.com
Almost every aspect of the Pavarotti Music Centre should be lauded, but the initial clinical music therapy program was particularly important. Not that it was laid bare in front of the children, they just thought they were getting to enjoy music and education, the therapeutic elements only making themselves known years later. The program, if that is the right term, was initially aimed at people with disabilities, be they physical, mental or inherited from the war. It was the first music therapy program of its kind in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a revolutionary process, a program that sadly came to an end in 2007 due to financing issues, not to mention the struggle of finding therapists to come and work.
Still, this should not be remembered as anything other than a grand success. In a lot of ways, the Pavarotti Music Centre was a single intervention that set in motion a whole new world of activities, from concerts to dialogues to the very bar I was sitting in. Heck, even Dodgy recorded some songs here, and if it is good enough for them, then it is good enough for me. I'll see myself out.
It might be a grand cliche, but music is a universal language that transcends society, history and the rest. Welcome to the Pavarotti Music Centre. Come for the inexpensive beer, stay for the long-lasting legacy and magnificent approach to education and healing.
