TITLE: "PIECE OF A ROCK ~ IN MEMORIAM AUTHOR: Carol Ann Weaver ABSTRACT: none ARTICLE:

While musical memorials generally operate as expressions of grief which give dignity and respect to the persons whose lives have been taken, there are times and moments when the very specifying of names within a memorial also becomes an act of resistance to the very structures which would attempt to keep those names silent. Not only is war dangerous, but so is the very naming of victims.

As long as those killed remain nameless, the impact of their deaths is minimized if not forgotten, further dehumanizing the process of war. The very act of giving names becomes an act of resisting the structures which allow these victims to become statistics rather than human beings. No form of expression is better able to redress this situation than one which allows for individual names to be presented within the fluidity of a musical context where ironies, grief, hope, and healing can be expressed simultaneously. Such has been my discovery while attempting to create a piece of music in honour of civilians who died in the recent war in Iraq.

Beginning with web searches and communications to various international networks, I discovered that actual lists of victims' names were made accessible only by John Sloboda of iraqbodycount, who granted me permission to intone these names within my jazz-related composition, "Piece of a Rock - in Memoriam," a piece of music which hopefully can bring together divergent cultures into places of dialogue. While I have composed other memorials, I discovered that composing music for victims of violence becomes a strangely controversial form of expression where music becomes "news" rather than "art" per se, allowing for a social interaction among communities of people who are dealing with wider expressions of human dignities and rights.

Producers have asked that I keep this memorial happy, and that I speak about ALL wars, thus diffusing the focus and impact of a particular war and failing to address inherent grief of specific people within specific time.

However, because Picasso's Guernica was about a 'specific' war, it has become a piece against 'all' wars, creating a powerful model for other expressive arts. The local, if authentically expressed, becomes the universal. Therein lies the responsibility for any spiritually-connected music, the music of ever-constant change, to be alive and responsive to the world about us, offering further ways to activate changes within our human systems today. Carol Ann Weaver http://watserv1.uwaterloo.ca/~caweaver/ Bio type thing::: Carol Ann Weaver is an eclectic composer/pianist whose work has been performed and aired throughout Canada, USA, South Africa, and parts of Europe. Her genre-bending music ranges in style from classical to jazz, avant garde to folk, creating new fusions of roots and art music, much of it coloured by her long standing passion for African music. Her CD, DANCING RIVERS - from South Africa to Canada, features compositions she composed while in South Africa and performed and recorded with her band of leading South African jazz musicians. Her previous CD JOURNEY BEGUN features well known Canadian vocalist Cate Friesen, and contains Carol Ann's imaginative musical settings of Mennonite poetry. Her first CD DAUGHTER OF OLAPA, features music she wrote while in Kenya as well as settings of Canadian poet Di Brandt. Critics laud her work for its daring, its vitality, its blending of cultural voices, its embrace of various styles. She is a music professor at Conrad Grebel College/University of Waterloo, Canada, and is a member of the Canadian Music Centre and the Association of Canadian Women Composers. Her most recent collaborative compositional/performing work with Rebecca Campbell is resulting in a rich, innovative performance piece, AWAKENINGS, based on poetry of Di Brandt and Dorothy Livesay, commissioned for and premiered at the Wider Boundaries of Daring Poetry Conference in Windsor and Detroit. This marks the most recent in a series of collaborative works she has done with other writers such as Rudy Wiebe, Judith Miller, Julia Kasdorf and others.

This article was originally published in Cross Cultures Magazine in Volume 10 - Issue 1 - 2004. Unauthorized copying, distribution or other usage without express written permission of the publisher is prohibited.