Local Performers Join a Global Remembrance

Grieving in private over acts of terrorism was not enough for three Southland artists, who chose to reach out to their communities in acts of remembrance.

Conductor Rachael Worby decided to participate in a worldwide event. The artistic director of Avaz International Dance Theatre, Jamal, made a dance available to all comers in six cities. Composer Sharon Farber sent an unsolicited new work to the Los Angeles Master Chorale, and the ensemble’s conductor, Grant Gershon, was so taken by it that he added it to the opening program of his season.

Worby had been looking for something to do to commemorate Sept. 11. “I’d been pursuing ideas that involved music and people and community,” she said, “but had not really embraced one notion that I thought would be powerful enough.”

That’s when she discovered an idea that got its start in Seattle: a “rolling” global performance of Mozart’s Requiem.

“The entire world wrapped in the arms of Mozart’s Requiem--I couldn’t imagine not being a part of such an extraordinary tribute,” she said. “Musicians all over the world have been hungering to be able to touch people with what they do best, which is quiet the soul and heal the spirit.”

So Worby signed on to lead her Pasadena Pops Orchestra and more than 200 singers in Mozart’s work, outdoors at Pasadena City Hall. (At least one other local choir, the Santa Clarita Master Chorale, will participate as well, at the United Methodist Church in Valencia.)

All the performances will begin at exactly 8:46 a.m. in each time zone on Wednesday--marking the time that the first airplane crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York.

The concept originated with members of the Seattle Symphony Chorale, who were approached after a January performance of the work by a patron who envisioned a choir singing the Requiem at ground zero in New York, with one singer for each person who died.

“The logistics of that were impractical,” said Madeline Johnson, a chorale singer and chairwoman of the Seattle Rolling Requiem committee, established in February. “So we thought another good idea would be to ring the Earth. We began e-mailing and snail-mailing invitations to choruses around the world.

“Within 24 hours we heard from Riga, Latvia: They’re going to have 19 choirs singing in their cathedral. By late June we had 30 choruses lined up. Now there are more than 180 choirs from 25 countries, and 21 time zones are represented and we continue to hear from people daily.”

The Requiem will start in New Zealand and end in Samoa. The California performances will begin 20 hours after the first performance.

Jamal, who was born in Iran and has been in the U.S. since 1976, has been mulling a Sept. 11 response from the day the towers were attacked. The head of a folk dance troupe that focuses on Central Asian and Middle Eastern dance, he says the attack changed his life, in part because of the “way I look.”

“I saw a few but direct reactions from people,” he said. “The terrorists gave people all the reason for that, but I was devastated for days.

“Even though that evil act wasn’t crafted in Iran, I was hoping for some sort of comfort for myself and felt other people should know that we Iranians are basically part of the sorrow that the victims are going through, too.

“I thought it would be great if I could create a piece. Then I realized I already had a piece, which I choreographed early in 2001. It was an evocation of a mourning ceremony that I saw many years ago in Iran.”

He started calling friends in the L.A. dance community; the idea was to schedule a performance for as many dancers as were interested.

Dancers from companies run by Ramaa Bharadvaj (Angahara), Gema Sandoval (Floricanto/Danza USA), Gustavo Gonzales (AguaLuna) and Linda Yudin (Viva Brazil) quickly took it up. As word spread beyond L.A., Jamal sent videos, dance notation and a recording of the music to dancers in San Francisco; San Jose; San Diego; St. Paul, Minn.; and Washington, D.C.

Now his “Funeral for a Fallen Hero,” based on a traditional Muslim ritual, will be performed Wednesday at noon in L.A. and the other cities. He estimates that at least 200 people will perform the work, a six-minute procession of dark-clad men and women walking slowly, dropping to their knees and performing stylized gestures such as reaching up or out or crossing their arms across their breasts.

“The whole thing translated from a personal feeling to a community feeling,” said Jamal. “It’s not my piece anymore.”

Though not directly responding to the World Trade Center’s destruction, Farber’s “Haem Hashlishit” (Mother’s Lament) commemorates another heinous event: the abduction and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Farber, who lives in Burbank, is a composer who has arranged music for the Los Angeles-based choir LA Shir, which Pearl’s father, Judea, conducted for eight years.

“When Daniel was kidnapped, I was just thinking of writing music about that,” Farber said. “I knew it was going to be a cappella only because the human voice is so powerful. I was very inspired. It went very fast. But at one point I had a block. The next day, I think, he was murdered. That released all of my emotions.”

She recorded the piece with a small group of friends and sent it to the Pearl family. “I have heard it 17 times,” said Judea Pearl, a professor of computer science at UCLA for 32 years. “It’s a very intense musical piece. The words are very strong. I cannot read the last two sentences without tears in my eyes.”

The work is a setting of a 28-line Hebrew poem by Nathan Alterman, a Hebrew poet who died in the 1970s and a favorite work of Farber, who grew up in Israel.

“It’s painful and dark and about three mothers who are crying about their sons’ deaths,” said Farber. “We have been very private until now,” said Pearl, who will be at the concert on Sept. 29.

“There’s an outpouring of emotions around us. And we didn’t have a way of responding.” The family’s approval of the performance is, he says, one way to acknowledge the sympathy.

Gershon said that although it’s unusual for him to program unsolicited music, the piece stood out for its musicality. “It’s beautifully written for the chorus,” he said.

“A lot of music comes down the pike these days toward me,” he said. “I really do look at everything that comes in, at least to leaf through.

“It’s a very important to me that the Master Chorale is relevant, is able to speak directly to our community,” Gershon added. “But we were very sensitive of programming a piece that cuts so close to the bone, for lack of a better metaphor. We made sure that this is appropriate and sensitive to the concerns of the family.”

Farber hopes that the piece will also reach beyond the immediate family. “It’s dedicated to everyone,” Farber said. “It could be your sister, your mother, your brother, anybody who gets hurt. It’s enough; mothers are going through this pain on this side and on the Palestinian side. It’s enough. Why should more people die?”

*

Wednesday

Mozart’s Requiem

* Pasadena Pops Orchestra, 8:46 a.m. Pasadena City Hall, 100 N. Garfield Ave., Pasadena (626) 792-7677.

* Santa Clarita Master Chorale, Valencia United Methodist Church, 25718 McBean Parkway, Valencia. (661) 254-8886.

“Funeral for a Fallen Hero,” noon, Japan America Theatre plaza, 244 S. San Pedro St., Los Angeles. Free. (323) 663-2829 www.avaz internationaldance.org.

Sept. 29

Los Angeles Master Chorale, “Haem Hashlishit,” 7 p.m., Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles, $20-$58 (213) 972-7282.