Flash choir at Times Square

I request the blog reader to visit the website below to experience what it's like to be in Times Square while the world premiere of a choral work by the great Philip Glass is sung. This left me with goose bumps all over, especially when I read that the lyrics sung by the soprano were from Sufi poet Rumi.  Thank you, National Public Radio, for innovative ways of bringing art directly to the street.

http://www.npr.org/event/music/156493791/a-flash-choir-sings-philip-glass-in-times-square

by ANASTASIA TSIOULCAS

To honor Philip Glass' 75th birthday this year, we here at NPR Music commissioned Glass to create a short work that would be great fun for amateur and professional singers alike. A big part of what we do is to try to make all kinds of music engaging and accessible — and wouldn't it be great to invite anyone who wanted to come and sing in a world premiere by one of the most celebrated composers of our time?

So Glass took a work he had first written for soprano and instruments as part of his 1997 3-D "digital opera" Monsters of Grace, and arranged it for soloist and eight-part chorus. And were very lucky indeed to team up with the Make Music NY Festival, member station WQXR and the Times Square Alliance to realize this project at one of the world's most iconic spots, the Crossroads of the World, Times Square.

About 200 singers gathered to sing with the ebullient Kent Tritle, one of America's most accomplished and beloved choral conductors, and soprano soloist Rachel Rosales. (And a handful of singers were folks who had simply been walking by and were swept up in the moment.)

On this sweltering day, the singers' mindful intention to gather in Times Square and its visceral result — all breath and sweat and palpable effort in the middle of glossy Times Square, with stifling heat, noise and a zillion blinking distractions — was just amazing and honestly quite moving.

For his text, Glass selected words from the medieval Sufi Muslim poet Jalaluddin Rumi, as translated by Coleman Barks. In his poetry, Rumi urges the reader to break free of the constraints of daily life — to upend expectations and jettison traditional thinking in an unending quest to unite with the divine. "Here's the new rule," Rumi wrote. "Break the wineglass, and fall towards the glassblower's breath." And somehow — beautifully, magically and only briefly — this fleeting chorus became the heartbeat of Times Square.

Re-composing a Life

“When you're a certain age and becoming conscious that you're inadequate in school — which I was — it's a lonely feeling,” Hopkins adds. "You feel isolated and bullied and all the rest of it. I was pretty strong, so nobody bullied me, but I did feel isolated. And I look back on it all now as the greatest gift that I could have been given, because it was the rocket fuel that sort of drove me to do something with my life. So life and destiny are very peculiar. God, whatever God is, has a great sense of humor. And here I am, composing at the age of 74.”—“Anthony Hopkins Lives Out A Long-Deferred Musical Dream,” www.npr.org/music

even if mr. hopkins is covered with embarrassment
over an early work like “distant star”
that combines his welsh voice with music
apologia is unnecessary for the work
that continues to pour out of him
& magnify his image on
the screen afterwards

now here’s a man who shows
there are worlds within reach,
worlds to see & long to be in
when shadows start encroaching

it’s a world that puts a slight lie
in the truth of that langston hughes
line of “What happens
to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?”

it’s a thought worth reviewing
as one elderly after another casts aside
long-ago dreams for want of resources,
for lack of will, for forgetting
they once nursed other  dreams
after they’ve gone past survival mode
& accrued the means to complete
that phrase in their youth’s slum books:
“when i grow up i want to be…”

the dots have been connected since
in ways beyond the elderly had expected
but that first & second acts of their lives
aren’t enough to quiet their yearning souls

a big vat remains unfilled inside them
nearly emptied by a lifetime's sacrifice

save some for yourself!
that is mr. hopkins’s message
for the time when you
can tinkle a cottage piano
compose fresh notes of music
& put the original plan
back in place again

--Babeth Lolarga

Source of quotation and photo: http://www.npr.org/2012/03/10/148302534/anthony-hopkins-lives-out-a-long-deferred-musical-dream