Word: abrahamics
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...Arab-Jewish relations for too long. Each people came to nurse profound grievances against the other based on mutually exclusive interpretations of history. Jews knew that they had been dispossessed by Caesar, dispersed into exile and repeatedly persecuted, in fact nearly destroyed; returning to the home God promised to Abraham, they saw themselves in mortal danger again. Arabs viewed modern Israel as colonialism by a new name, one more indignity visited on them in a 1,000-year-old struggle between the West and Islam...
...romance of railroading is intact. Richard Davidson, U.P.'s chairman, sits in his 12th- floor office above Omaha's Dodge Street, named for engineer Grenville Dodge, who drove the original line west. Davidson, once an 18-year-old brakeman on the Missouri Pacific, views the Missouri River bluffs where Abraham Lincoln stood and pointed to the spot where the Union Pacific would begin in 1862. Through Davidson's window come the faint calls of trains hustling along the valley. "I still get emotional when I get on a locomotive and listen to those turbochargers kick in," he says...
Thus, when a Jewish interviewee named Ephraim Isaac says, "Abraham, for me, is my ancestor -- my very own personal ancestor," his words are shredded, sliced, diced, pureed by a live vocal quartet and set to the implied, inherent music of his speech rhythms and intonation, accompanied by a small instrumental ensemble. In works such as the 1912 Pierrot lunaire, Arnold Schoenberg invented the device of sprechstimme, or speech-song; in The Cave Reich has perfected the principle and built an entire work upon...
Reich has long heard music in the inflections of the human voice; indeed, his earliest works, such as the tape-looped Come Out (1967), were constructed entirely of speech fragments. The Cave -- the title refers to the cave of Machpelah where Abraham and his family are supposedly buried -- is Come Out come out. Projected on five huge video screens, the interviews -- all in answer to the question, Who is Abraham? -- are treated both as the opera's text and as its musical raw material, from which Reich draws every element of his score...
...gives each one a chance to shine. The dark, committed faces of Jerusalem -- so alike and yet so dissimilar, and each so convinced of its beliefs -- stand in stark contrast to the sunny, open, uncomplicated American visages of the third act. An American, the sculptor Richard Serra, says blithely, "Abraham Lincoln High School, 'High on the hilltop midst sand and sea' -- that's about as far as I trace Abraham." Coming as it does after two acts of religious zealotry, the comment expresses a contemporary, secular kind of cultural truth -- Who cares who Abraham was? In the end that point...