First Meeting Packet (March 20, 2008)

KRISTALLNACHT 70th ANNIVERSARY

THE FIRST MEETING'S AGENDA
1. Introductions
2. Is this worth doing?
3. Dates November 7-9, 2008
4. Venues, Throughout the Quad Cities
5. Audience/Publicity
6. Some possibilities:

7. Other possibilities?
8. Who else should be at the table?
9. What have we missed?
10. What worked? What could we do better next time?
11. Action items.

INVITED TO PARTICIPATE IN NOVEMBER...
Martin Doblmeier
President and Founder
Martin Doblmeier is president and founder of Journey Films in Alexandria, Virginia. Since 1983 he has produced and directed more than 25 award-winning films on subjects of faith and spirituality, including:
The Heart Has Its Reasons: the story of the L'Arche communities for men and women with mental handicaps.
Taize: That Little Springtime: a profile of the ecumenical monastic community in France.
Bernardin: the story of Chicago's Cardinal Joseph Bernardin.
Final Blessing: a film about the spiritual issues of the terminally ill.
BONHOEFFER: the critically acclaimed, theatrically released documentary about the famed pastor and Nazi resister.
Martin combines a lifelong interest in religion with a passion for journalism. Over the years he has traveled on location to more than forty countries to profile numerous religious leaders, religious communities, heads of state and Nobel Laureates. His films examine how belief can lead individuals to extraordinary actions, how spirituality creates and sustains communities and how faith is lived out in the most challenging times.
In the last few years Martin has been a featured speaker or presented films and led discussions in some 100 churches, synagogues and theaters across America, and has been a guest on numerous national and international programs.


Victoria Barnett
Victoria Barnett is Staff Director, Committee on Church Relations. She is a graduate of Indiana University and Union Theological Seminary, New York (M. Div.). She is the author of For the Soul of the People: Protestant Protest against Hitler (Oxford University Press, 1992) and Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity during the Holocaust (Greenwood Press, 1999), and editor/translator of Wolfgang Gerlach’s And the Witnesses were Silent: the Confessing Church and the Jews (University of Nebraska Press, 2000) and Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography (Fortress Press, 2000), as well as numerous articles and book chapters on the churches during the Holocaust. She is also coeditor of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works project, the English translation series of Bonhoeffer’s complete works. She is also completing a doctorate in religion and conflict at the Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University.

WE ARE HOPING TO BRING DAVID BOWLIN, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF CHAMBER MUSIC QUAD CITIES TO PRESENT DIFFERENT TRAINS AS PART OF OUR WEEKEND OF EVENTS COMMEMORATING KRISTALLNACHT.
Here is a description of Different Trains
Different Trains
Different Trains is a three-movement piece for string quartet and tape written by Steve Reich in 1988. It won a Grammy Award in 1989 for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.
The three mouvements have the following title :
• America-Before the War (movement 1)
• Europe-During the War (movement 2)
• After the War (movement 3)
Steve Reich's earlier work had frequently used tape, looped and played back at different speeds; however, Different Trains was a novel experiment, using recorded speech as a source for melodies. This followed Scott Johnson's John Somebody of 1978, an early attempt to construct directed melodic motion by harmonising recorded speech.
In Different Trains, after each melody in the piece is introduced, usually by a single instrument, a recording of the spoken phrase from which the melody derives is played. The melody is then developed for a while, with the instruments playing along with the recording of the phrase or part of the phrase. The music for the strings makes extensive use of paradiddles rhythms, with alternating pitches instead of alternating drum sticking. In addition to speech, the piece calls for recordings of train sirens.
Much of the recorded speech that forms the basis for Different Trains is among the first recordings made on magnetic tape. It is taken from interviews with people in the United States and Europe about the years leading up to, during, and immediately after World War II. In the first movement, America — Before the War, Americans speak about train travel in the US. American train sirens are heard in the background. In the second movement, Europe — During the War, Europeans, many Holocaust survivors, speak about the conditions in Europe during the war, in particular how trains were used to transport millions of civilians to concentration camps, and the sirens used are European train sirens. The third movement, America — After the War, features people talking about the years immediately following World War II, and a return to the American train sirens from the first movement.
During the war years, Reich made train journeys between New York and Los Angeles to visit his parents, who had separated. Years later, he pondered the fact that, as a Jew, had he been in Europe instead of the United States at that time, he might have been travelling in very different trains.
Reich developed his 'speech melody' work further with projects such as The Cave (1993) and City Life (1995).
Reich created these works by transferring his speech recordings into a digital sampling keyboard (a Casio FZ-1). Musicians in the pop, dance and electronica fields had been using samplers for years, but this was one of the very first 'classical' works to use sampling. City Life actually used sampling keyboards in performance (rather than using a backing tape) and the samples are notated and played in exactly the same way as the conventional instruments.

Here is a description of David Bowlin
David Bowlin, violin
Founding ICE violinist David Bowlin is active as a soloist and chamber musician, as a performer of music both new and old. As first-prize winner of the 2003 Washington International Competition for Strings, he presented a debut recital at The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. last year. Recent performances include recitals in New York, Illinois, Maine, Washington D.C., and Ohio, and concerto performances in New York and Washington, D.C. In addition to his ICE activities, he is a member of the Naumburg Award-winning Da Capo Chamber Players, with whom he has toured extensively in the US and former Soviet Union. In 2007 he will present the world premiere of Mahagoni for violin and chamber orchestra at Weill Recital Hall, written for him by Bulgarian composer Alexandra Hermentin-Karastoyanova. As a chamber musician, David has performed in New York in most major venues, including Bargemusic, Alice Tully Hall, the Knitting Factory, Symphony Space, Miller Theater, the 92nd St. Y, Merkin Concert Hall, Weill Recital Hall, and Zankel Hall. As a participant in the Marlboro Music Festival, he will perform in a Musicians from Marlboro tour with Kim Kashkashian in 2008. Recordings for the Naxos, Albany, and Bridge labels. David was appointed to the faculty of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music this spring, after having served as teaching assistant to Ronald Copes at Juilliard from 2002-2005. Principal teachers include Roland and Almita Vamos, Ronald Copes, Philip Setzer, Ani Kavafian, Pamela Frank, and Stephen and Kimberly Sims. He is a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory, the Juilliard School, and is a doctoral candidate at Stony Brook University.