Wisam Gibran was born in Nazareth in 1970 and began to play the violin with his father from an early age and later also studied piano and oud at the Haifa Conservatory. He went on to study composition and musicology in Moscow and Berlin.
In 1993/94, he composed his first symphony Gilgamesch, which was premiered by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. He performs as a violinist and oud player around the world and is probably the only composer for oriental oud and experimental music.
Wisam Gibran has been head of the Arab-Jewish Youth Orchestra since its foundation in 2002.
The spirit of his musical language depends on openness and mutual understanding, assuming that individual identity develops and is not inherited, that it comes from the future and not from the past (Martin Heidegger).
As a Palestinian living in Israel, Wisam Gibran sees a great challenge in the development of a musical language and identity through which he can deal with the complexity of the conflict.
And this the beauty, the uniqueness that differentiates this orchestra from its famous cousin, Barenboim‘s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra: one attempts to interweave the various styles and origins of the music to create a type of equality between the music traditions. nmz online
