for Stare at the Sun
SATB with soloists and bass drum
Performances:
Stare at the Sun, Chicago, IL 01/12-13/2019
Program Note:
The texts in A Strategy for Confrontation are drawn from responses to the violent confrontation that occurred between demonstrators and police in the parks and streets of Chicago during the week of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. In the aftermath, attempts to cast blame were carried out in the form of published reports, press conferences, and television documentaries.
The City of Chicago responded with “The Strategy of Confrontation,” a report released just days after the riots that attributed the cause of the violence to a small group of radical anti-Vietnam war protesters. The report also included a lengthy list of injuries sustained by police officers as well as injuries reported by local hospitals. “The Walker Report” – submitted to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence – reviewed thousands of statements from eyewitnesses ultimately attaching the label “police riot” to the violence.
Despite the extensive media coverage and best efforts to control the narrative via official reports, in the words of the great Chicago columnist Mike Royko, “the propaganda served only to solidify opinion, not to change minds.” The work closes with questions posed by Carl Sandburg in his poem “On the Way:” Let us ask ourselves: What is truth? What do you or I know […] about where we are going?