I share this video from Mark Northfield, whose musical contributions I post here from time to time.
As Mark says:
It's hard to know how to deal with the gravity and horror of current events. But I felt the need to attempt a musical response, because it's how I best process things when the world is overwhelming. And because music can often reach places when words alone fall short.
The first half segues some carefully chosen tunes by Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Mussorgsky.
The largely instrumental second half interweaves the Ukrainian National Anthem with Beethoven's Ode To Joy - the anthem of Europe.
It's only a small piece of anger and defiance, but we all do what we can.
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A small poignant detail worth mentioning: only after recording this and searching for a suitable way to title it did I look up the source of the ‘if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ concept I subtly reference at the end of the first section. I known about it for ages, but not where it came from.
On the relevant Wikipedia page (‘Law Of The Instrument’), the two people credited for making the concept more widely known were Abraham Maslow and Abraham Kaplan, both Jewish, though it does also explain how the hammer/nail line predated both of them.
I then read their individual Wiki entries and discovered something about both men’s family roots: Maslow’s parents fled Kiev (as it was then) to escape Czarist persecution in the early 20th century, shortly before he was born in 1908; Kaplan was born in Odessa in 1918, but his family migrated to the US when he was just 6 years old (reason not given).
History echoes all around us.
Indeed….
A wonderful piece of work. Thank you, Mark. Years back, I attended a wedding in Moldova. In the capital, Chisenau, was a park that once had a cascading fountain pouring water down a hill but long neglected, dry and in ruins. At the top were stone columns in the classical style and on the columns, stencilled, the hammer and the sickle but crossed out, the stencil repeated and repeated with the crossings out, on the stone. Moldova is not at all a well off state but Channel 4 News has broadcast the fact that, having taken more than 100,000 Ukranian refugees, Moldova has, per capita of its own population, taken more refugees than any other country.