50 day countown

50 days suddenly seems very close when there's still so much to do! Just a minor change in personnel has a cascading effect on rooming and colour groups, but the groups look great and I hope everyone will be happy with their 'roomies'.

The performance venues are starting to come together and we have had confirmation that we will be performing at Arlington Cemetery on 3 July. Paul and Julie Bevan have written a beautiful piece to honour Robert F. Kennedy and we will be performing it at Arlington, where RFK is buried. The work will premiere at the Hunter Singers concert on 27 May. See 60 day countdown post for the link to purchase tickets.

The composers Julie Bevan and Paul Bevan wrote the following notes on the piece:

Robert F Kennedy quotes Aeschylus

On the Death of Dr King

 Even in our sleep,

Pain, which cannot forget

Falls drop by drop upon the heart

until, in our own despair, against our will,

comes wisdom, through the awful grace of God.

"In April 1968 Senator Robert F Kennedy was campaigning in Indianapolis. He had just learned that the leader of the Civil Rights Movement, Dr Martin Luther King, had been shot and killed by a white man in Memphis, Tennessee. The crowd of largely African American supporters he was addressing had not heard the news and, as cities across America burned that night, Kennedy stood on a flat bed truck told them of Dr King’s death.

Without looking at the notes in his hand he shared with them his dream of an America without violence and lawlessness, but with love and wisdom and compassion. He made a rare reference to his own murdered brother and then he quoted from a poem written more than two thousand years earlier by the Greek poet, Aeschylus. The words of the poem are inscribed on Kennedy’s own memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, where he himself was buried only two months later, after he was shot and killed in Los Angeles.

Kim Sutherland suggested we write a piece for the Hunter Singers to take on their 2012 tour of the US. In the way Bach would take a familiar chorale and weave it with his own thoughts into a new work for solo voice and chorus, Kim thought we might write something new but familiar to an American audience, perhaps for solo tenor and choir. In the way Kennedy quoted Aeschylus, we’ve “quoted” other, older works here, starting with the American Samuel Barber, and working back through Mozart, Handel and finally, Bach. The works are a little more obscure than Kim imagined, but hopefully you get the idea. The poem, the flat bed truck on an April night in 1968 and the opportunity for Hunter Singers to perform at his memorial were irresistible."

Julie Bevan and Paul Bevan

April 2012