Messiaen - The Music Point

Today spent a fascinating hour doing spontaneous interpreting for a meeting of the Association of Czech Music Schools with the EMU (European Music School Union) where both sides discovered (through yours truly) that they in fact share the same aims and ambitions. Which are, by the way, that we do not send our children to school to learn what we teach, but

1) to learn their craft,
2) to learn social responsibility, &
3) to inherit, nurture and pass on their cultural identity.

Make of that what you will.

Present at the meeting was a rather fascinating gentleman - Albrecht Goetze - a German composer and I suppose performance artist (formerly with the Royal Shakespeare Company). He is the driving force behind the "Meetingpoint Music Messiaen" in Gorlitz, not a stone's throw from here, where Messiaen was imprisoned in the POW camp StaLag VIIIa for 7 months during WWII. Messiaen wrote his Quator pour la Fin du Temps there, now the site of a new centre for young European musicians to compare their various experiences and beliefs. A hellish place which once screamed racial and religious hatred, today breathes tolerance and an attempt at musical understanding.

Albrecht is one of the handful of people you meet in your lifetime who, without consciously trying, change the way you see the world. If you understand German, go to the website and investigate. If, like me, you feel that children can learn more about their peers through music than through most other subjects on the curriculum, go to Gorlitz.

www.messiaen.themusicpoint.net