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It was a night spent in the basement of a burnt out building.
People injured by the atomic bomb took shelter in this room, filling it.
They passed the night in darkness, not even a single candle among them.
The raw smell of blood, the stench of death.
Body heat and the reek of sweat. Moaning.
Miraculously, out of the darkness, a voice sounded:
"The baby's coming!"
In that basement room, in those lower reaches of hell,
A young woman was now going into labor.
What were they to do,
Without even a single match to light the darkness?
People forgot their own suffering to do what they could.
A seriously injured woman who had been moaning but a moments before,
Spoke out:
"I'm a midwife. Let me help with the birth."
And now life was born
There in the deep, dark depths of hell.
Her work done, the midwife did not even wait for the break of day.
She died, still covered with the blood.
Bring forth new life!
Even should it cost me my own,
Bring forth new life!
by Sadako Kurihara
Sadako Kurihara was at her home in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb exploded on August 6th 1945. Two days later, in a nearby basement shelter just a mile from ground zero, a baby was born in pitch darkness surrounded by the dead and dying. The seriously injured nurse who delivered the child died, but the baby survived and grew into an adult who sixty years later still lives in the city.
After the trauma of Hiroshima Sadako Kurihara was determined to express her furious hatred of nuclear weapons, and to campaign against their use. Her talent as a poet gave her a powerful outlet for her beliefs. Her most famous work is the story of the baby born amongst nuclear devastation. In Japanese it is Umashimenkana, which translates as Bring forth new life.
For the rest of her life Sadako Kurihara was a staunch anti-war and anti-nuclear campaigner. She published a literary magazine on the theme of the atom bomb attacks on Japan, and circulated an anthology of anti-war poems when discussion of the bombing was restricted by the occupying Allied powers. The author of more than five hundred poems in a writing career spanning more than seventy years, she died in March 2005 aged 92.
Now take An Overgrown Path to the radiance of a thousand suns.
Credit for image and text, Tomiko Miyaji September 15, 1945, from Hiroshima Peace site. Please visit the website of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) who are a non-partisan international grouping of medical organisations dedicated to the abolition of nuclear weapons. They work with the long-term victims of nuclear explosions and accidents from Hiroshima to Chernobyl, and their work has been recognised with the 1984 UNESCO Peace Prize, and 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.
Aldeburgh Festival's new production of Benjamin Britten's Death in Venice has been hailed as a 'triumph' by the critics. Director Yoshi Oida is singled out for particular praise, and this production is yet another example of Japanese influence on cosmopolitan Aldeburgh. Britten's homage to Noh Theatre, Curlew River, is the best known Eastern connection, but the Festival has some other interesting, and lesser known, Japanese links.
In 1984 Toru Takemitsu visited the Aldeburgh Festival for the first time, and fell in love with that most sublime of all performing spaces, Snape Maltings. The result of his visit was the Festival commission, Archipelago S., which was given its first performance at Snape in 1993. The work is an essay into surround-sound, and uses two mixed ensembles on either side of the main stage, a brass quintet along the back wall (there is no balcony at Snape), and two clarinets play behind the audience to either side of the auditorium.
Archipelago S was commissioned by Oliver Knussen when he was artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival. Knussen has recorded it on a DG CD which also includes Takemitsu's Dream/Window from 1985. Archipelago S is for large orchestra with integral small ensemble, and the composer described it as follows: The title "Dream/Window" is taken from the Buddhist name of a Zen priest of the Muromachi Period. Muso (mu = dream, so = window) Soseki (1275-1351). Among the many famous gardens designed by Muso Soseki is that of the Saiho-ji Temple (popularly known as the "Moss Temple") in Kyoto. My music has been profoundly influenced by Japanese historic gardens. For example, "Arc" for piano and orchestra (1963-66/76) and "In an Autumn Garden" in the complete version for gagaku orchestra (1979) were based on relatively concrete images of gardens.
I was fortunate to visit Kyoto some years back and visit the famous temples, and this sparked a fascination for Japanese garden design. I bought a copy of Kiyoshi Seike's book on Japanese gardens when working in New York in the early 1980s, and created my first garden using it a few years later. My photo above is another example of Japan meets East Anglia - it is the view from my study here in Norfolk where I write On An Overgrown Path, and shows the small Japanese garden outside the patio doors.
No post tomorrow as we are at Aldeburgh for a full day of music, Nono in the morning followed by a picnic on the beach, and then Death in Venice at Snape in the evening. But continue the thread with going Buddhist with Lou Harrison.
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