I am personally baffled as to what I can do. Send money, yes, but haven’t people sent a great deal of money already and still nothing changes. Put pressure on my representatives in Congress? Write to the President? The President has already stated, a very long time ago, that what is happening in Darfur is genocide. Both my senators have spoken out loudly about what is happening in Sudan and have demanded action. My representative, Congressman John Olver, actually participated in civil disobedience to bring attention to what is happening in Darfur. Everyone, it seems, agrees. So what is the problem? Where is the distance between words and action? If we all agree, why are people still dying?

I think the lack of attention by most Americans is more about confusion and helplessness. We are at war, our soldiers are dying every day in Iraq, we are helpless to stop that either. There was a time when the words of an American president mattered, where the declaration of a situation as “genocide” would have meant we needed to take action to stop it. Clearly, that is no longer true.

Perhaps, while listening to Verdi’s Requiem, as that great space of darkness fills with music, the people sitting in those plush seats will ponder the gates of hell into which we have fallen and consider what they can do to spur action and change.

I just heard the Weekend Edition piece on Requiem for Darfur. Your words about responding in the silence that follows catastrophe were very compelling. I remember you from the UMN as a very thoughtful musician. So glad to know you are continuing to find purpose and hope–as well as artistry–in the art.

–David Evan Thomas

Thank you so much for putting this together. I’m unable to attend in person, but I am hoping your performance will be simulcast and available for purchase as a recording. I know that I am only one of many who would like to participate, even if it is only by listening to a cd, in this wonderful event you have organized. Best of luck tomorrow night!

Thank you for your beautiful response. Soltrekker, your unease at my posture and indeed the posture of the whole enterprise is a microcosm of our own struggle to find a proper response to the scale of what is going on in Sudan and elsewhere in the world. It is a struggle is that laden with stumbling, recovery, pulling together of people, more stumbling, greater recovery and compassion, some great great music. On one thing I agree with you completely. Stephanie, my wonderful colleague and partner in REQUIEM FOR DARFUR and on OPEN SOURCE, is not only the heart of the show on Thursday, but the heart and battery off our entire operation.

This is an effort to bear witness to what Leonard Bernstein called “our boastfully held little blue pilot flame of Humanity” — our ability to love no matter what our own flaws are, no matter what the cirumstances, no matter how large or small the context is.

The response to Darfur has been tied up in knots by our well-meaning commitment to legality and an old-fashioned, perhaps even Old Testament notion of justice. Our effort with these concerts is not just to bring great music to the service of people in need by raising money for them and by raising awareness for them but by creating an enterprise which is driven by love, by inclusion, by embrace not only in the beautiful velvet-seated environs of Carnegie Hall but in the sweaty, hectic, deadline driven of the everyday life whereever we might be.

George Mathew

Artistic Director

requiem for darfur