Rise - Chanting!
A call to dialogue

Bind me - I can still sing -
Banish - my mandolin
Strikes true within
Slay - and my Soul shall rise
Chanting to Paradise -
Still thine.

- Emily Dickinson

Last night's premiere performance of "Rise Chanting" at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts was a thriller. Commissioned by Krannert for the San Francisco-based Alexander String Quartet, the piece immediately engaged its Great Hall audience. "I like music that is alive and jumps off the page and out of the instrument as if something big is at stake," said Augusta Read Thomas, composer, "Rise Chanting," musically encoding the powerful, evocative words of Emily Dickinson's poem.

The members of this 21-year-old internationally acclaimed quartet-originally from Wuhan, China; Boston, Massachusetts; Clearwater, Florida; and Northumberland, England-adroitly brought the notes off the page, indeed, and aroused our sensibilities ... grief, compassion, fear, faith, calm.
Forty "low-intensity" wars are blasting around the world right now; eye-for-an-eye daily attacks in the Middle East provide continual focus for media coverage:

bind me! banish! strike! slay!

A week ago, also at the Krannert Center, a large audience stood quietly at attention for our national anthem and that of the Royal Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Introduced by Dr. Earl Kellogg, Associate Provost for International Affairs, H.R.H. Prince El Hassan bin Talal, brother of the late King Hussein, told of his and the Princess's sustained efforts to promote peace through education and dialogue. Challenged by a member of the audience as to his travels and speeches, his not joining those in the taking up of arms, the Prince restated his unshakable belief that peace cannot ultimately be achieved without the law of peace, not the law of war; without the building of cooperative, constructive alliances, not the perpetuation of destruction of peoples and their environments; without dialogue contributing to the building of relationships, dialogue promoting "anthropolitics," not oil politics. Leadership, he said, must focus on humanity, on winning the human race.

Does all this relate to the 19th Annual International Dinner and Performance Night sponsored by the University YMCA, the Office of International Student Affairs and the Cosmopolitan Club on April 7th? A resounding "Yes!" Each spring, this coming together of over 300 participants from the four corners of the globe to cook, to serve, to sing, to dance, to "dialogue" in every way possible, is the climax of the year of coffee hour and dinner conversations at the Cosmopolitan Club House itself. In our microcosm, we are spawning ripples of dialogue that reach around the world and beyond the limits of place or time:

My mandolin strikes true within - Rise Chanting!