This weekend, my assistant, Eric Bleicher, and I finished editing and proofing the scores, and adding or editing percussion parts to the first three movements of Hindu Kush. I should be able to create, format, edit and print all 87 orchestral parts to those three movements over the next few days. We begin rehearsals on March 2nd, for the work's premiere on May 14th, at the Anchorage Civic Orchestra's Spring Concert.I'm almost done with the fourth and final movement, called Peace Song.
Here is a link to the MIDI version of Bamyan Voids, the opening movement, which you may listen to, or download for free.
Bamyan Voids is about the destruction of the 6th Century Buddhist statues in the Bamyan Valley of Afghanistan by the Taliban in March, 2001.
The work opens, depicting the statues, alone in their cloisters hollowed out of the sandstone cliffs rimming the valley.
One morning the Taliban team arrives in their trucks, given them by American oil companies, with explosives from similar sources. They rig the charges, blow up the statues, and celebrate. Then they leave.
As the dust settles, nothing has really changed. The statues weren't idols. They weren't representations of something indifferent to Allah. They were merely symbols of the devotion of the people who created them, representations of what those people had believed. The destruction changed nothing. Perhaps, even, their destruction completed the missions of those who created them.
The second movement of Hindu Kush, Women's Ghazal, may be found here.
The third movement, War Dirge, is here.
2 comments:
The destruction did accomplish something for the Taliban - it wiped the face off of an infidel idol, so that people under Taliban control would not be polluted by looking at the face of it.
No idol, no faces.
Why do you think at the fall of Constantinople the Aye Sophia was transformed into a mosque - so that the idols of Jesus and the Chirstian Saints could be removed, to be replaced by non-pictorial geometric images that now fill the then largest man-made structure on Earth.
Now when you go to see it, the inside is Islamic wallpapered with geometric shapes.
Of course, there is also gender segregation too - complete with a male side and a female side, lest the sexes mingle in a holy site.
See, this is really a lesson in multi-culturalism for the West, where no one value system has value over another.
But in the Brotherhood, it is just getting back to basics.
"One morning the Taliban team arrives in their trucks, given them by American oil companies, with explosives from similar sources. They rig the charges, blow up the statues, and celebrate. Then they leave. "
So we see where PA thinks the blame lies. Not with the Islamic teachings followed by the Taliban but with the evil American oil companies . The knee-jerk Anti-Americanism of this site is beyond parody.
Post a Comment