A Brilliant Piece on War

 This evening I watched a PBS program titled American Heart in World War I, A Carnegie Hall Tribute. At first I couldn’t stop thinking about singing in Carnegie Hall with John Rutter back in 2018. But this program was brilliantly done. It focused on a few individual stories and on one particular battle, the Argonne-Meuse offensive. But it did a brilliant job of conveying the tragedy and loss of war as well as the heroism. It used a lot of music, most of it from around the time of American involvement in World War I, especially the music of a Black composer I’d never heard of named Europe. The program was powerful and heartbreaking. It respected the people who fought in that war, especially those wounded in it, which, I imagine, was just about everyone in one way or another, but it certainly did not glorify war. At the beginning it made it clear that no one really knows why that war was fought at all. It was one of the best pieces on war I have ever seen. I highly recommend it.