Ibrahim, Hala and dozens of other children sit and listen in silence, captivated by the ensemble playing a piece of Renaissance music in front of them.

When the adults finish their performance, the young listeners slide off their chairs, extract a variety of instruments from their cases and take over the stage. Over the next half hour, the room is filled with the sound of pieces by Bach, Scarlatti and Tielman Susato, a 16th-century Flemish composer.

This scene might be unexceptional in a comfortable conservatory in Europe or North America, but this is a bare, unheated room in Jalazone, a Palestinian refugee camp near the West Bank town of Ramallah. Here, in a neighbourhood that lacks a basic sewage system and where night military incursions are commonplace, the presence of violins, flutes and cellos feels almost revolutionary. They – and the young musicians who play them – are part of the al-Kamandjati camp's orchestra.

"This is fun. I like it when I come here," says Hala, a nine-year-old girl who is difficult to separate from her flute. Like the other children gathered in the Jalazone youth centre, Hala attends music lessons twice a week. She learns musical theory and practises her instrument. Ibrahim, 14, prefers the guitar. He has been playing the instrument for three years, admitting that "at the beginning it was difficult".

"Here the students not only learn music," says Iad Jaradat, a field supervisor with al-Kamandjati. "They also learn to have dreams and to express themselves. They learn to listen, to respect the teacher and to appreciate other cultures and other kinds of music."

Ramzi Aburedwan, 31, is the soul of the project, which he founded. Himself a refugee from the al-Amari camp near Ramallah, Aburedwan says: "As a kid, I was deprived of any access to music and I wanted to change that."

Aburedwan was eight years old when he became a poster boy for the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, after being photographed with his hands full of stones, ready to throw them at the Israeli soldiers.

But his life changed dramatically. When he was 16 some foreigners organised a music workshop in Ramallah. They did not want the project to be too elitist, so they asked around for a refugee child to make the initiative look more diverse. Someone mentioned a motivated young refugee who worked as a newspaper boy on the streets. That boy was Aburedwan. "When I first saw the viola, I fell in love with the instrument," he recalls. His career as a musician soon took off, eventually leading him to France. "There I discovered that it was possible to play music in the churches. I realised that even if we had no concert halls in the Palestinian villages, we had a church in almost all of them."

In 2002, Aburedwan started al-Kamandjati, which is today supported by several international donors. The association organises festivals, sends Palestinian children to study music abroad and teaches music to hundreds of children all over the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon.

However, the path has been full of obstacles. "The Israelis keep on making it difficult for us," complains Aburedwan. He says the instruments of three German musicians have been confiscated at Tel Aviv airport.

Peter Solski, 44, teaches at al-Kamandjati. He also lectures at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston University and started coming to the West Bank 15 years ago. He says: "The talent of the Palestinian children is similar to that of the American pupils. The difference is that the kids here learn faster because they are hungrier and because they have fewer distractions."

Clemency Burton-Hill, a British violinist playing at the annual baroque festival, says teaching in the West Bank "is an incredibly humbling experience". "I've seen kids that had to sit for hours in a checkpoint in order to attend one violin lesson," she says at al-Kamandjati's offices in Ramallah.

A few kilometres away, in Jalazone camp, the children's concert is over. The young artists have celebrated their musical exploits with glasses of raspberry juice and small pastries filled with cheese. It is time to go home, along the dusty, unlit alleys of the refugee camp, with their instruments proudly clasped in their arms.