The Tuscaloosa Meditations is spiritual music composed during turbulent times, so please, take your time with the music. Allow it to have its own pace and place and, if you like, allow yourself to move in your own time.  

I traveled with my friend, Janet Wong, down to Tuscaloosa, Alabama (upon invitation from the University of Alabama) to learn more about George Wallace and his stand in the school house door; Vivian Malone Jones, James Hood, and their stand against him; and to stand, gaze upon, and learn from Foster Auditorium itself.  Being in that building, walking along the dusty floor, and playing the violin through that same, infamous door, has, in very real and significant ways, changed my life.  My life is changed because I have a better understanding of what happened there, why the events there unfolded as they did, and just how much consideration was given to everyone involved.  

And that is all I want to do, really, is to be considered---that is, for you to consider me and this music, this meditation on everyone who has gone through all the things that we all do just to live and to be alive.  There's a saying someone once told me: we all suffer but not all of us survive.  

The American composer Charles Ives' The Unanswered Question asks similar questions in its musical language.  That work inspired this one. More than anything, Vivian's courage and James' strength, in the face of so much opposition and oppression, laid the foundation for why I chose to memorialize them and to pay homage to Foster Auditorium.  There are still so many questions to be answered, so many stories that still linger in the hallways of that place.  Mine is only one of them.  All the rest must be answered by us.

Are we prepared?

DBR,
Paris March 2007