Sound & Spirit

TIME
TITLE OF SELECTION
COMPOSER
PERFORMERS
ALBUM TITLE / INFO

00:15-01:44
Allemanda
J.S. Bach
The Hilliard Ensemble
THE HILLIARD ENSEMBLE - MORIMUR (ECM New Series 1765)

01:52-03:05
Jong ching (The Tip of the Finger-Cymbals/The Long-tailed Crocodile)
Trad., arr. by Bun Loeung
Rak Smey Khemera
RAK SMEY KHEMERA - LIGHT FROM HEAVEN (Classical Cambodian Music)

03:44-05:04

• Reis Glorios/Motet: Pucelete/Segnieurs
  Trovere songs from 13th century France, Gregorian Chant
  Bun Loeung, Barb Weiss and Dick Hensold
  THE NEW INTERNATIONAL TRIO - THE NEW INTERNATIONAL TRIO
  - ATD 1102

05:08-05:53
Khmer Bmpay Goan
Trad., arr. by Bun Loeung
Rak Smey Khemera
RAK SMEY KHEMERA - LIGHT FROM HEAVEN (Classical Cambodian Music)

05:58-07:52
In the Mood
Joe Garland
Bun Loeung, Barb Weiss and Dick Hensold
THE NEW INTERNATIONAL TRIO - THE NEW INTERNATIONAL TRIO (ATD 1102)

08:03-11:22
Fast Car
Tracy Chapman
Tracy Chapman et al
TRACY CHAPMAN - TRACY CHAPMAN (Elektra 60774)

11:25-12:32
America - Before the war
Steve Reich
Kronos Quartet
STEVE REICH - DIFFERENT TRAINS, KRONOS QUARTET/ELECTRIC COUNTERPOINT, PAT METHENY (Elektra/Nonesuch 79176)

12:32-13:05
Europe - During the war
Steve Reich
Kronos Quartet
STEVE REICH - DIFFERENT TRAINS, KRONOS QUARTET/ELECTRIC COUNTERPOINT, PAT METHENY (Elektra/Nonesuch 79176)

13:39-14:05
Den Tod . . .
J.S. Bach
The Hilliard Ensemble
THE HILLIARD ENSEMBLE - MORIMUR (ECM New Series 1765)

14:06-16:20
Allemanda
J.S. Bach
The Hilliard Ensemble
THE HILLIARD ENSEMBLE - MORIMUR (ECM New Series 1765)

17:00-18:10
Ciaccona
J.S. Bach
The Hilliard Ensemble
THE HILLIARD ENSEMBLE - MORIMUR (ECM New Series 1765)

18:15-19:29
Lament I
Eleni Karaindrou
S. Sinopoulos, C. Tsiamoulis, P. Dimitrakopoulos, A. Katsiyiannis, M. Bildea, A. Papas, V. Iliopoulou and The Chorus of Trojan Women
ELENI KARAINDROU - TROJAN WOMEN (ECM 1910)

20:18-22:24
Home/Auld Lang Syne
Tinh Mahoney
Tinh Mahoney
TINH - ACOUSTIC RAIN (East Wind Records 87)

23:20-25:38
Unknown Thing
Carol Noonan
Carol Noonan et al
CAROL NOONAN - BIG IRON (www.carolnoonanmusic.com)

26:02-26:32*
Allemanda
J.S. Bach
The Hilliard Ensemble
THE HILLIARD ENSEMBLE - MORIMUR (ECM New Series 1765)

26:32-28:18, 29:14-30:26
Luka
Suzanne Vega
Suzanne Vega et al
SUZANNE VEGA - SOLITUDE STANDING (A&M; CD 5136)

30:27-33:02
We're Still Soldiers
Tinh Mahoney
Tinh Mahoney
TINH - ACOUSTIC RAIN (East Wind Records 87)

33:39-34:49
Hope
Ysaye M. Barnwell
Sweet Honey in the Rock
SWEET HONEY IN THE ROCK - 25 (Rykodisc 10451)

34:57-37:07
Graveyard
Loudon Wainwright III
Loudon Wainwright III et al
LOUDON WAINWRIGHT III - LAST MAN ON EARTH (Red House Records 158)

37:31-40:39
The End of Wishful Thinking
Cindy Bullens
Cindy Bullens et al
CINDY BULLENS - SOMEWHERE BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH (Artemis 1012)

41:19-42:39
Without You
Indira Shrestha
Indira Shrestha et al.
INDIRA SHRESTHA - TIMI BINA/MODERN SONGS OF INDIRA SHRESTHA (Music Nepal 074—Not commercially available in the U.S.)

43:51-48:12
Predictions
Bob Franke
Bob Franke et al
BOB FRANKE - IN THIS NIGHT (Flying Fish 70563)

48:34-51:48
Thanksgiving Eve
Bob Franke
Bob Franke et al
BOB FRANKE - IN THIS NIGHT (Flying Fish 70563)

52:14-55:30
New York City
Suzzy Roche
Suzzy & Maggie Roche
SUZZY & MAGGIE ROCHE - ZERO CHURCH (Red House Records 157)

55:43-58:03
Corrente
J.S. Bach
The Hilliard Ensemble
THE HILLIARD ENSEMBLE - MORIMUR (ECM New Series 1765)

* An asterisk indicates that only a brief portion of the piece or track is heard, or it is used as background music.

In this program, Ellen Kushner reads excerpts from:

* All Over But the Shoutin', by Rick Bragg (Pantheon Books, 1997). Permission granted by International Creative Management.

* For Those I Loved, by Martin Gray (Little, Brown and Company, 1971). Permission granted by Editions Robert Laffont.

Thursday, September 13, 2001

The day before yesterday, I watched a beloved piece of my world blow up, taking with it thousands of lives. All I could think was, Nothing else matters now. The things I have cared so passionately about were suddenly meaningless. Poetry? Art? Music? The first shock made everything but the trauma - even beauty - seem irrelevant. A friend's long-awaited photography exhibit was pointless; my newly-finished novel was a relic of the values of an exploded past.

I woke up the next day drowning in fear and grief. I didn't want to be part of the world that I believed I could see coming. It took a note from friends in Europe, anxious about our safety, to rouse me from my despair. "The world will never be the same again," they wrote; "May we unite to make it a better one, in however humble a role."

My friends' letter reminded me that we are in the season of the Jewish High Holiday of Rosh Hashanah, a sacred time of year I always love to celebrate - and that one of the great observances of the "Birthday of the World" is to rededicate oneself to the "Healing of the World," tikkun olam.

There is work to be done. And each of us must find what our own work is, and do it. But to be sustained in our work, we must pursue the things that give us strength. We owe it to the world we wish to heal to look for that strength where we can. We may find it in community, in solitude, in family; and, like generations before us, we may find it in language, in music and in art.

The things we celebrate each week on Sound & Spirit did not come into human existence for no reason. Across time, around the globe, they bring us strength.

A Danish friend wrote on Tuesday: "...there is an emotional atmosphere all over Denmark. All night long there were thousands of Danes singing in front of the US embassy. And this morning an ocean of flowers and candlelight covers the street..."

We can sing songs, like the Danes, or like the congregations gathered in churches to commune with familiar hymns, or the kids in D.C. singing the "Star Spangled Banner" in front of the White House, or a mother lulling a frightened child to sleep.

We can consider history: the crazy courage of Londoners during the Blitz, when bombs were dropping from their home skies and St. Paul's was ablaze; we can read their novels and memoirs that suddenly seem to reflect our own lives...

We can tell our own stories: Where were you when it happened? When you heard? You may need to tell that story more than once. You may need to write it down. You may need to remember what you lost. You may need to listen.

The medieval mystic Julian of Norwich said, "But all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."

All of us here at Sound & Spirit pray that she was right. Our hearts and thoughts are with you, and we hope that you are finding good places to put the anger and distress, shock and fear that attend this terrible time.

After the final no there comes a yes,

wrote American poet Wallace Stevens;

And on that yes the future world depends.

The things that have always helped us are still there in these times, to give us strength in our quest for healing and for repair. It is important not to forget.

Ellen Kushner
Sound & Spirit
Boston, Massachusetts

Books:

All Over But the Shoutin', by Rick Bragg. (Pantheon Books, 1997)
A Pulitzer Prize-winning national correspondent for the New York Times, Rick Bragg grew up in rural Alabama. In this book Bragg tells of his hard-working mother and alcoholic father, and the struggles of survival for everyone in the family. From it, our show quotes Bragg's description of taking his mother to New York on a plane for the first time, to witness his Pulitzer award ceremony.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written By Himself (1845)
Over 150 years after its original publication, Frederick Douglass' story still bears eloquent witness to the horror and triumphs of surviving and escaping from a life of slavery.

For Those I Loved, by Martin Gray with Max Gallo. (Little, Brown and Company, 1971)
"What's life if not doing things for other people?" Martin Gray, a Polish-born survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and of Treblinka concentration camp, goes on to tell of his new life in America, where he married and had children, only to lose his loved ones in a fire in 1970. This book is difficult to find, but is worth the hunt (try the public library!).

In his memoirs, Gray writes of creating a foundation in his dead wife's name Ð but nowhere we've checked online bears witness to this, and many have wondered what's become of Martin Gray since 1971. If you know, drop us a line (spirit@email.pri.org)!

See Under: Love, by David Grossman (Picador USA, 2002)
This stunning novel interweaves a narrative about a popular German children's author who survives the Holocaust through the beneficence of his biggest fan, a death camp commander, with the story of a little boy growing up in Israel the child of other survivors who will not tell him what it was they survived.

Edmund White of The New York Times Book Review wrote: "It crackles with sparks of artistic invention. It scrambles art and life together. It tells its multiple tales of memory and suffering and degradation and courage with a Dostoyevskian compulsiveness."

"DX," in None So Blind (1996, AvoNova), by Joe Haldeman
Science Fiction writer Joe Haldeman explores his Vietnam War experiences in his writing. He finds healing in both the writing and the greater Science Fiction community of artists. Haldeman wrote "DX" about being the only member of his squad to survive Vietnem.

The Reawakening (originally titled The Truce), by Primo Levi. (The Bodley Head, 1965)
Italian chemist Primo Levi tells his own story of surviving Auschwitz, and how he returned home while struggling with the very concept of his survival. He writes movingly here of being unable to believe in the reality of his own survival.

Apples from the Desert: Selected Stories, with Foreword by Grace Paley, by Savyon Liebrecht. (The Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1998)
Liebrecht grew up in Israel as the daughter of concentration camp survivors, and many of her most powerful stories deal with the effects of survival on the survivors and their families, in the ways that survivors choose to speak or to be silent. Liebrecht's parents never spoke directly of what had happened -- from the book's Introduction by Lily Rattok: "The wall of silence did not crumble when the writer took a trip to Poland with her parents. Even though her father made an attempt to tell her about his past life, during a train ride to Treblinka concentration camp, he did so in Polish, a language that... she did not understand. [She says,] 'he was finally telling me his story, but to this day I have not heard it.'"

East Toward Dawn - A Woman's Solo Journey Around the World, by Nan Watkins. (Seal Press, 2002)
After the death of her college-age son and the end of her marriage, writer, librarian and musician Nan Watkins undertook a great journey - to travel around the globe, alone. She explores and commemorates not only the cultures she encounters, but her own personal journey through grief and loss. In the program, we hear her voice describing how she felt seeing "the full arc of his life, from birth to death."

The Armless Maiden and Other Tales for Childhood's Survivors (anthology), edited by Terri Windling (Tor Books 1995)
Terri Windling, the artist and author who speaks so movingly of her own survival of a violent childhood in our show, invited contemporary authors to take on the theme of survival and healing through their own modern adaptations of traditional fairy tales also dealing with those subjects. (This book is out of print, but easy to find on the Internet through used book services like abe.com).

This collection, though out of print, is worth finding for Windling's own remarkable essay on her childhood salvation through reading (which we also quoted in our Sound & Spirit show on Fairy Tales).

The Essential Bordertown: A Traveller's Guide to the Edge of Faerie , edited by Terri Windling and Delia Sherman. (Tor Books, 1998)
The seventh book in Windling's Borderland series, this is a compilation of short works by many authors: Charles de Lint, Ellen Kushner, Steven Brust, Midori Snyder, Felicity Savage, Patricia McKillip and Donnard Sturgis. From Robert Francis' review of the book: "The premise of this series is that one day, in the not too distant future, the Realm of Faerie suddenly intrudes into our world next to a modern city. Although most of the Realm remains protected from curious humans by the Border, which supposedly no human can cross, travelers from Faerie enter our world with relative ease."

"Transformation", (essay) by Terri Windling in Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore their Favorite Fairy Tales, edited by Kate Bernheim. (Anchor Books 2002)
Bernheimer's remarkable collection includes essays by Alice Adams, Julia Alvarez, Margaret Atwood, Ann Beatie, Rosellen Brown, A.S. Byatt, Kathryn Davis, Chitra Baneriee Divakaruni, Deborah Eisenberg, Maria Flook, Patricia Foster, Vivian Gornick, Lucy Grealy, Bell Hooks, Fanny Howe, Fern Kupfer, Jane Miller, Lydia Millet, Joyce Carol Oates, Connie Porter, Francine Prose, Linda Gray Sexton, Fay Weldon, and Joy Williams.

In her essay, our guest Terri Windling writes eloquently of surviving childhood domestic abuse with the aid of fairy tales and the arts.

Links:

Cybercambodia provides an overview of Cambodian history, including a timeline of the Killing Fields.

A page of extensive bibliographic resources on Cambodian dance, whose revival has brought fresh meaning to the lives of many survivors of the killing fields and their families.

Dance, the Spirit of Cambodia: A Study Guide About Dance, Ecology, and History
This is the beautiful website of the dance show Dance, the Spirit of Cambodia. The dance troupe hails from the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh. The site focuses on traditional Cambodian arts, with sections also exploring the state of dance in Cambodia and abroad. The website also features an extensive

"What Happens After Sorrow: Cambodia Remembers Itself"
This magazine of crimesofwar.org explores how a group of Cambodian holocaust survivors have found healing in artistic expression (classical dance, folk dance, and traditional puppetry) while developing the stage performance The Continuum: Beyond the Killing Fields

Background information on Christopher Poppen and the Hilliard Ensemble's disc Morimur.

On this BBC website, you'll find British army nurse Helen Bamber's quote about holding Nazi holocaust survivors in her arms "while they told their story and you would receive it."

For the Holocaust 'Second Generation' an Artistic Quest: This is an article by Dinitia Smith (reprinted from the New York Times) about children of Holocaust survivors who find healing in theater and comedy.

Remember.org holds an archive of interviews, letters and other writings of Holocaust victims, perpetrators, liberators, resisters and bystanders. We were moved by the oral histories on this site, and even though we didn't quote directly from them in the show, we thought you would be interested in them.

The bulletin board of Yossi's parents, telling of their grief and trauma at surviving their child's death.

Playing for the Fighting 69th: This is the original letter by Julliard student William Harvey describing his experiences playing violin for 9/11 rescue workers in a New York City armory on September 16, 2001.

We also consulted the work of Peruvian musician Susana Baca for Surviving Survival. Marco Werman, of Public Radio International's news show The World, interviewed her for his daily segment The Global Hit.

First, explain the phrase "Surviving Survival."

All survivors find themselves asking the question: "Why me? Why was I spared, when others were not?" Whether it's as huge as war and genocide, or as personal as the death of a partner from cancer, the survivor faces a lot of guilt and confusion. The question I wanted to bring up for this show was: "How do you survive your own survival?" In other words, what gives you the strength to go on, to find meaning in your life, meaning in life itself?

Why did you choose to do an entire hour of Sound & Spirit on this topic?

It's a topic I've been hoping to tackle ever since I started the show in 1996, and something I've been thinking about for a lot longer than that. Whether it's AIDS or the Holocaust or Vietnam vets, I've heard survivors speak poignantly about how they dealt with being the one to survive when people they were close to did not.

And, then, some of my friends who are writers and artists are themselves survivors of terrible childhoods, of domestic violence and deprivation. I've always found their talking about their "escape" from those backgrounds to be very moving, and I've been inspired by the ways they have found to deal with their past.

I also know that each of them, in her time, has felt very alone, and has felt a lot of guilt for the family and friends she may have left behind, who may not have escaped from that ugly and vicious and really hopeless place to the world of art and literature and education and possibility.

What kind of connection can there be between the survivors of genocide and of domestic abuse?

You'd be surprised. In the show, I speak to Chat pierSath, a survivor Cambodia's killing fields, and to my friend, the writer Terri Windling, and they both say pretty much the same thing: that what allows them to go on, what gives their life meaning, is that each one has dedicated their lives to going back and helping others. Obviously, they do this by different means - Terri through art, Chat through social work - but they're driven by the same need to make their survival count for something. That seems to be something that all survivors have in common. They also value the healing power of storytelling: of bearing witness, and letting the truth be known as a way of redeeming the experience for themselves, and maybe even preventing it from happening to others.

What relationship does all this have to the events of September 11th, 2001?

As I say in the show: On September 11, everyone in America became a survivor. As we became aware of the death toll, I think we were all wondering, "Why was it them, and not me?" Especially here in Boston, where a lot of us could have been on those flights, or been visiting New York or D.C., or we knew someone who was lost. As Americans, we knew any of us could just as easily have been the targets. And the next question is, "What do we do now? How can we make it OK that we are still here?"

"Surviving Survival" sounds like a very difficult subject. Should I have a box of tissues standing by when I listen?

(laughs) Well, certainly there will be some deeply moving moments in there but ultimately, the message of the show is redemptive and uplifting. Some of that happens with the music: our theme throughout the hour comes from a Chaconne and Chorale by J.S. Bach which Bach wrote as a tribute, a memorial to his beloved wife, as a way of letting both his deep religious faith and his ability to make art render his own survival bearable. And we end the show with a remarkable song written by one of my favorite groups, the Roches, about all of New York City coming together as survivors of 9/11. When I hear it, I just break into a grin at what the human spirit can accomplish! There's a lot of places in the show, really, where the weight of the knowledge seems almost too much to bear, and then the music comes in with a message that you can take that pain and turn it, through the alchemy of art, to beauty, to redemption, to repair.

2003 Gracie Allen Award: Surviving Survival: A September 11th, 2002 Special, presented by American Women in Radio and Television

2003 Gabriel Award: Best National Release: Surviving Survival: A September 11th, presented by Unda-USA