BORDER WALL (A mighty fortress is our...), bearing musical witness, w/ Simone de HAAN. trombone

THIS IS THE fourth of a growing set of short occasional pieces. I like to think of these as part musical diary, and part musical bearing witness. The pieces are rather like MIRRORS MADE OF SOUND -- some would say shards of glass & barbed-wire -- mirrors that reflect in an open, honest, naked way the violent insanity of the present cultural, political moment. The basic theme is simple: Humanity seems caught in a contradiction between the Demonic and the Divine, caught between, on the one hand, the self-destructive violence of war and conflict, and, on the other hand, the great promise of the natural intelligence of Nature, the Sacred, and the living Earth. Becoming aware of this contradiction and how it manifests as a formative force in our culture, our politics, our thought and consciousness -- and, indeed, our art and music -- is, I think, a central challenge of our time. The texts used are generally selected at random. Computer synthetic speech is preferred here as a way of mirroring how mechanical our actual human speech -- to my ear so loud, fast, aggressive, utterly without rhythm and breath -- has become. Individual words, phrases, fragments of public discourse, documents, outright lies, propaganda, etc. are distributed using chance operations which then go on to form complex, polyglot temporal vortices. At the same time, two historical source texts -- embodying this contradiction between the Divine & Demonic -- are juxtaposed with each other throughout the whole. These are translations from the German, and are from J.S. BACH & Hannah ARENDT, Victor KLEMPERER, & from the English texts of David BOHM. The avian soloists featured here are native to the borderlands, the Black-capped Vireo...back natural and modulated for our orchestra. In addition, there is a VOCAL OCTET background stream--a kind of isometric motet, if you will, based on one of my MINIATURES, a 32-step sutra that goes: "The simplest & most powerful of all possible freedoms, is the freedom to stop doing what is contradictory or wrong." (As always with sutras, this is a question which asks, "Is this true?" 32-steps means in THE CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE 32-syllables. In the TALKING HANDS/TALKING FEET technique/practice, we learn these like MANTRAS, by heart, singing, dancing. chanting, conducting, reciting...It's fun!) ANOTHER VERSION of the BORDER WALL, recorded with Simone de HAAN playing all the many ensemble trombone tracks, is at: www.picture-poems.com/mp3/border-wall_2.mp3 Other pieces in the new series are: (3) ENEMY OF THE STATE https://soundcloud.com/cliff-crego/enemy-of-the-state-m4a-1 (2) DEVIL'S TRIANGLE https://soundcloud.com/cliff-crego/devils-triangle-wav (1) SUNSHINE & KITTENS https://soundcloud.com/cliff-crego/sunshine-kittens-a-musical-reflection-of-cultural-insanity-simone-de-haan-trombone IMAGE: Rime on Barbed-wire, the good Earth gracefully healing the thought -- the illusion -- of finding security in isolation.