Building empathy through sound
- World Half Full
- Jul 18
- 5 min read
CULTURE
In February 2025, in the shadow of the Israel-Hamas War, a small audience in a library in Chicago experienced the war’s heartbreak, one note at a time. A classical string quartet played Lao Rahal Soti (“If My Voice Departs”) with the lyrics: “If my voice departs, your voices will not / If the singer dies, the songs will remain / bringing together the broken and suffering hearts”.
“I’d composed this a very long time ago and this seemed like such an appropriate time to share it,” says Shireen Abu Khader, a Palestinian-Jordanian-Canadian musician, composer and educator. “The words are powerful just from a human perspective . . . anybody can connect with it.”
This universality of music, its ability to elicit the same emotions in diverse audiences, is what inspires the work of Chicago-based nonprofit Crossing Borders Music, a group of artists trained mainly in the Western classical tradition, who compile and perform music from Haitian, Palestinian, Rohingya, Native American and many other marginalised communities via free concerts held in libraries, cultural centres and universities across the United States.
“Often, we find that in the West, refugees and immigrants are defined only by the conflict in their home countries,” says Tom Clowes, a classical cellist and the founder of Crossing Borders. “But nobody wants to be defined by the worst things that have happened to them, especially when it’s not even something they’ve done, but something that’s happened to them.” The collaborations and concerts are a bid to not just showcase these diverse and complex musical traditions, but also to inspire empathy and understanding for those who are often overlooked because of race, ethnicity, disability, gender, sexual orientation, identity or past trauma.
Crossing Borders reaches more than 10,000 people in person and online each year; last year they gave 27 free concerts. “And when we hear audience members say our music defied their expectations or broadened their worldview, or they felt their culture was affirmed and uplifted, we know we’re fulfilling our mission,” says Clowes.
The idea of Crossing Borders Music took seed when Clowes started teaching cello and Western-style music in Haiti in 2000. Every year, he fell deeper in love with Haitian culture, history and its centuries-old Western classical music tradition. “Unfortunately, back in the United States, people only had these dehumanised stereotypes and misrepresentations of Haiti,” he says. Few knew the country had a complex and beautiful classical music tradition.
After the devastating 2010 earthquake, while preparing for a radio interview, Clowes asked his Haitian friends what they wanted people in the US to know about Haiti. They said they wanted people to know about the beauty of Haiti and its culture, and how even in the face of a disaster, Haitians came together as one. Clowes created a repertoire of Haitian music, performed it in Chicago, and Crossing Borders Music was born the following year.
While music Crossing Borders creates with diverse communities has distinct ethnic and cultural flavours, the emotions it evokes are universal. For example, the concert Abu Khader curated, Mourning, Refuge, and Unity: String Quartets from the Arab World, featured Lebanese composer Elie Kallab’s Tango al Maboor, which is about his memory of being evacuated from his childhood home in al Maboor. These concerts, Abu Khader says, take audiences and artists “into a space of shared humanity.”
To further enhance the cultural connections fostered by the music, storytelling has also become a hallmark of the concerts. “In 2019, we began collaborating with the National Cambodian Heritage Museum in Chicago and found that the aunties in the community who had survived the Khmer Rouge and resettled here had great stories to tell,” Clowes says.
The depth that storytelling added to the music inspired Clowes to replicate this with the Rohingya community. “When I asked the community what sort of project they’d like, they said their culture and musical tradition was suppressed and [was] disappearing very fast,” he recounts. In October 2024, Clowes stayed for a month outside the world’s largest Rohingya camps in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh where he recorded dozens of songs and stories. He is now sharing them as widely as possible. Crossing Borders plans to begin bringing teachers of Rohingya music in Bangladesh to Chicago to give traditional music lessons to Rohingya children living there.
Refugee music has become a powerful tool to build understanding and empathy in host communities across the world. For example, in 2024, when 700 young artists from conflict zones including Afghanistan, Israel, Ukraine and Venezuela performed at New York’s Carnegie Hall during its festival World Orchestra Week, a review stated that “as a demonstration of courage and determination and love of music, this concert would be hard to top.” Another US nonprofit, the Refugee Orchestra Project, provides a space for refugees and immigrants to share their experiences through music.
“Because music transcends borders, language and culture, listeners react to it emotionally; it helps them realise how artificial the external differences between people are,” Clowes says. Abu Khader tells her students at the Toronto Children’s Choir that all they need to focus on is connecting with one single person in the audience. “Just shift just one person, that’s good enough,” she says.
To an extent, this is happening. After every Crossing Borders concert, Clowes and his team ask the audience for feedback. More than 90 percent of them report finding something unexpected, learning something new, wanting to learn more about the featured culture, or feeling their own culture was affirmed and uplifted.
Research also shows that participating in musical activities can help young refugees cope with everyday challenges by creating a safe and supportive environment for them to express their emotions, build social connections and develop coping skills. Performing music from refugee cultures has also produced some success stories. For example, Afghan musician Milad Yousefi won an Emmy award in 2024 for outstanding musical composition in the film “The Night Doctrine”, the first Afghan to win this honour. In Ireland, Mohammad Syfkhan, a Kurdish Syrian father of five, has been enthralling audiences with his electrified performances of Kurdish, Arabic and Turkish traditional songs, both covers and originals. Since he fled Syria in 2016, he has been playing his bouzouki to get audiences to empathise with the plight of the Kurdish people.
Crossing Borders’ musical collaborations take months, sometimes years, of research and practice. However, both Clowes and Abu Khader say that often the end product — a fusion of Western instruments and refugee voices — sounds as stateless as the refugees themselves. Referring to the group’s Haitian repertoire, Clowes says, “This particular style of music we’ve shared, people in the Western classical world consider it not really part of them, and the people in Haiti say it is certainly not Haitian traditional music either.” Abu Khader’s choral concerts have received similar feedback. This music may not be traditional, but she says it is the sound of “a world in motion; it is music that changed with us when we left our homes and crossed borders”.
Like the journeys of many refugees themselves, the journey of their music is sometimes difficult. “In Haitian music, there are certain rhythms I believe come from West Africa, which don’t really fit in European notation,” Clowes says. “And similarly, in Levantine music, there are notes the piano doesn’t have. For us to hear and play those notes was very challenging.”
For Abu Khader the challenge is reaching new audiences. “Ultimately, the goal is not just to perform, but to connect. Every note carries a story, every lyric becomes a thread between worlds,” Abu Khader says. “And when those threads are woven together, something powerful begins to emerge: understanding, healing and the reclamation of dignity — one song at a time.”
ABOVE Rohingya refugee musicians and Crossing Borders co-director Tom Clowes during a cultural exchange
PHOTO Crossing Borders Music
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