What a Rush - My Freedom & Protest Music Played in Ireland, Seattle and Anchorage on the Same Day

The image above, Taken Friday, is the MV Rachel Corrie, the 1,200-ton freighter, full of medical supplies, school supplies, concrete catalyst and other important items for the besieged prisoners of Gaza. It had just untied from its loading dock in Dundalk, Ireland. According to an email I received last week, crew members have been playing MP3s of The Skies are Weeping as they filled the vessel's main hold with the stuff of liberty, bound for the biggest open-air prison in the world, where the inmates are allowed only 40% more in calories per day than the Germans allowed workers at Auschwitz.

And on Friday, through today, my closest artistic colleague and dear friend, Peter Bevis has been playing Shadows on large loudspeakers, outside his bronze foundry in the Fremont District of Seattle, as he prepares to go to the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. When he arrives, he will cast victims of the BP oil spill, where they have washed up on the beach. Then he will bring them back to his foundry in Seattle, to cast them into bronze statues which will bring back memories of this awful crime for tens of thousands of years.

And on Friday the Anchorage Civic Orchestra performed the debut of my newest work, Hindu Kush, in Anchorage. It was well received:

The audience — some of whom had been trying to applaud since the end of the first movement — gave a standing and shouting ovation and called the composer, who was also the conductor for the concert, back for three bows.

I'm already going through my stand score and copying the changes we made during rehearsal into a version to send out to all Alaska orchestras, and some others in the lower 48 and overseas.

The Anchorage Civic Orchestra played magnificently Friday evening, from the beginning to end of the entire concert.