Originally from Kuwait, the composer Amer Jaafar began his training in the USA at the Portland State University and at Oregon University and then completed his composition studies at the Chopin Academy in Warsaw. At the moment, the 58-year-old composer is a professor in Kuwait. In 2008 Jaafar won the first prize at a composition competition in Sanaa (Yemen) for his work Secrets. He has come to particular renown for his work Impatience of a Captive (2000), which was originally written as a piano sextet and then arranged for orchestra. In addition, Jaafar has composed piano works such as Dance of Peace and the Devil and Dance of the Gazelle. In his works, Jaafar aims to interweave western and Arabic music: “The main reason I’ve always sought to study international music was that I wanted to merge international music with Kuwaiti folk music and Arabic music in order to develop it, present it to the whole world and eventually reach internationalism.”