Conductor's Workshop - Day 2

Reflections…

Today I feel more strongly than ever that this is an event of unique importance. It started with another beautiful morning, a tasty breakfast, and a pleasant drive to Oxfam headquarters. We were set to spend the morning addressing issues about the percussion: what instruments to use, how many players to have, creating new rhythms, using some established rhythmic patterns, balancing with choirs of various sizes – an incredibly long list, created by the conductors. It looked like it would be an excellent and informative morning.

However the discussion suddenly became more potent and emotional when Falou Wade spoke. He began by apologizing to us for not being able to speak in English. Certainly this was unnecessary, but he then continued (through Myguel’s translation) with kindness and nobility in his voice and demeanor, to compliment the composer, the librettist, the soloists, the percussionist, the other conductors in the room. He spoke of the importance of this project and then said to us, “Everyone in my country is poor.” I cannot adequately express how powerfully that hit me. “Everyone in my country is poor.” I live in arguably the richest country in the world, where if we changed the way we spend and/or use money we could completely eliminate poverty throughout the world. (Simplistic? Perhaps, but often the simplest answer is the right answer, though we are loathe to admit it.) And this kind and gentle man lives in a country where everyone is poor. I cannot, as an American who has barely traveled out of the United States, truly comprehend what that feels like. However, I recognize how terrible it is and how it is absolutely avoidable if we work together. Poverty is not cancer, it is not HIV/AIDS…we have the vaccine, we know the cure – we just don’t want enough…and that is terribly sad.

We went on and our discussions about the percussion were indeed thorough and helpful. In fact, there was so much to talk about that we ended up dedicating the entire day to it, so none of the conductors had to conduct a movement (secretly I think many/all of us were relieved).

We ended the day with a visit from Oxfam Novib’s (Netherlands) general director Sylvia Borren, the librettist for the Requiem. She was articulate and passionate as she described the genesis of the work, what drove her to start the project, the difficulties she encountered as she sought to capture this issue in the poetry. She clarified sections of text in the fourth movement I didn’t understand: the words are happy and seemed out of place to me. She explained that the happiness in the text was hallow – that she has met so many people who adopt a kind of ‘forced happiness’ to keep themselves from feeling the full weight of their losses and struggle to survive. She told us about meeting a mother and asking her how many children she had. The woman answered, ‘fourteen.’ Sylvia then asked how many were alive that day and the mother answered, ‘seven.’ Most if not all of those children probably died from hunger and/or preventable diseases – how can we allow such a thing to continue?

So this work is so important, so incredibly important. We need as many people involved as possible. People must be made more aware of these issues; even more importantly, we must make them feel the horror and sadness of it, so that they will be work to change it. The Poverty Requiem has the power to make us feel that horror and sadness, but it also give us the hope that we can (we must) do better.