Concert for Nuclear Disarmament



This year, 2015, is the 70th anniversary of the dropping of A-bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My friend Jin Hirata has been involved in the movement for a "nuclear-free world" for more than 20 years. He thinks that "this year is particularly important because this could be the last year when we can directly hear the stories of Hibakusha, a-bombs survivors, whose average age is now almost 80." This year, 40 hibakushas will visit 50 high schools in NY area and share their experience as survivors of nuclear weapon attack with hundreds of students. GH and I, together with DW and D, joined Jin at last night's concert for nuclear disarmament, "With Love to Hiroshima and Nagasaki," at the New York Society for Ethical Culture.

The concert began with a slideshow by Robert Croonquist chronicling the last seven years of the school visits program. Anne Klaeysen and Clifton Truman Daniel, the grandson of Harry Truman, the President who ordered the bombing, gave the welcome. Animation shorts by Amber Cooper-Davis punctuated the six movements of the concert.

1. Gratitude - Joanna Macy and Jean Rohr spoke.

2. The Manhattan Project - A slideshow displayed the various places around Manhattan in which the Project took shape. The Oppenheimers' apartment on Riverside Drive hosted secret meetings, etc. Most interesting to me is a "hibakusha" statue of a Buddhist priest now standing on Riverside Drive. Anne Waldman read a collage of poems (including Ginsberg), accompanied by Yasuaki Yamashita's saxophone.

3. The Moment - Shigeko Sasamori, a hibakusha, spoke. Paul D Miller aka DJ Spooky performed an excerpt from Miller's Peace Symphony, together with Sugar Vendil (piano) and Kivie Cahn (cello) of the Nouveau Classical Project. The symphonic excerpt was very interesting.

4. The Bomb Today - Setsuko Thurlow, a hibakusha, spoke. Masaaki Tanokura played on the Jogaquin Hibaku Violin, which survived the Russian Revolution, was damaged by the Bomb, and then restored. He was accompanied very ably by Tomoko Sawada. The musical work was very sentimental, however.

5. The Power and the Waste - Clifton T. Daniel (woodwind) and Sam Sadigursky (violin) displayed superb musicianship in playing together.

6. The Journey Towards Nuclear Guardianship - Joanna Macy spoke about going beyond banning nuclear weapons to stopping the mining of uranium and taking care of the waste products already created. and Tomihisa Taue, a hibakusha, showed a long piece of yellow cloth on which are written all the names of her dead schoolmates who were in the city center of Nagasaki when the bomb dropped. Then the Hibakusha Himawari (Sunflower) Choir, which flew from Nagasaki, sang two songs in Japanese. They were then joined by the vocal students from LaGuardia Arts High School to sing the Anthem for Nuclear Disarmament, composed by Jean Rohe. I thought the Anthem met creatively the challenge of composing for singers singing in two dffeerent languages.

Epilogue - PIKADON Project: live art projections on the Central Park Wall of the New York Society for Ethical Culture, created with the participation of New York City high school students.

Comments

Ms. said…
I've been reading Joanna Macy for years and wish I'd been able to attend but glad you did!
7:52 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Examples from ar
Read more

Wallace Stevens' "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Just read three essays from the "Poetics" section at the back of Volume One of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry : "The Poetry and the Present" by D.H. Lawrence (1919); "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes (1926); and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" by Wallace Stevens (1942). The first is an artful polemic for free verse in contact with the "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The second is a spirited rejoinder to a young Negro poet who wanted to "write like a poet--not a Negro poet." The third, my favorite, is a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet. So many grand things said but I will only quote a few passages: I am interested in the nature of poetry and I have stated its nature, from one of many points of view from which it is possible to state it. It is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic
Read more