In 1999, Columbia University professor Edward W. Said and symphony conductor Daniel Barenboim had an audacious idea. Said was a Palestinian and Barenboim was an Israeli Jew, but they had a long-term, close friendship. And they decided to found a similarly boundary-crossing symphony orchestra, composed of equal numbers of Palestinian and Israeli Jewish players. Further, the players would all be ones whose homes were in the Middle East, the site of the most turbulent conflicts between the two ethnicities.

It was a revolutionary idea.

But as Barenboim had commented, one of the things he knew to be profoundly true of symphony musicians was that they loved music more than anything else. And that great love could perhaps provide the base for building an........

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