Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Last Night in L.A. - Manzanar

There were 1,800 people in the sold-out Royce Hall for the final program of this year�s UCLAlive series, the most adventuresome set of musical offerings west of BAM. Kent Nagano conducted the local American Youth Symphony in the Southern California performance of Manzanar: An American Story. This is a history with music of the Japanese-Americans in the United States in the twentieth century, with the forced relocation of peaceful American citizens because they happened to have been of Japanese ancestry and the forced internment of over 120,000 people, mostly citizens, for three years during World War II. Manzanar was the first of the ten internment camps to be established, in a former farming-ranching town in the Owens Valley of the Sierras, a town abandoned when the water rights were purchased to help bring water to Los Angeles through the Los Angeles aqueduct a mile away.

Manzanar was conceived--and Nagano became involved--in days when California state budgets included funds for a civil liberties education program. A major, multi-million dollar investment was planned; Robert Wilson was hired to put together the Manzanar project and Ernest Fleischmann was hired to be producer. Fleischmann recommended Naomi Sekiya as composer, and she was brought on. Sekiya had just received the award for young composers by the Ojai Music Festival and was completing her doctoral work at USC. Sekiya received her first mention in Sequenza21 a few months later when the then-weekly reported in 2003 on her upcoming Music Alive residency with the Berkeley Symphony. The budgets didn�t last; they didn�t even make it to the next year. Nagano, the son of citizens interned with their families, kept the program alive. A community college, a museum, an adult college -- began supporting the work, support with little money but a lot of involvement.

Phillip Kan Gotanda was brought on board to develop a script stemming from Wilson�s idea of combining the historical with the personal. As developed, the work is for six speakers, two who act as narrators of history and external events (we had Senator Inouye and �president� Martin Sheen in an unbilled appearance) and four who represent people (we had Pat Suzuki, Kristi Yamaguchi, Sab Shimono, and John Cho, with Suzuki and Shimono holdovers from the premiere at Berkeley). Unfortunately, the script is very pedestrian. Afterwards, I felt that the text needed images to provide the impact that the words lacked by themselves. I hope that in a future itiration of Manzanar it will be staged with a large screen projection of images from photos of the life before, during, and after the interment.

I�ve delayed speaking of the music. It would be easier if I could take an approach used in judging the sport of diving; I�d give very high marks for degree of difficulty but not quite so high for the execution. Some of the music is very good, sometimes dramatic, sometimes atmospheric. The work, however, was finished by a committee. David Benoit was brought into the project to add elements representing popular music of the time, such as late ragtime and early jazz, becoming �big band� sounds for the period of the camps. Jean-Pascal Beintus provided music for the internment section, with Sekiya�s music linking the contributions of the other two composers. Looked at another way, it�s easy to say that the music has no right to be as good as it is.

In its present form, Manzanar may not have a great future in the concert hall, but it has real value in teaching, adults and juveniles, of an important part of our history, a part which should not be forgotten. UCLA�s Design for Sharing gave a performance of Manzanar yesterday afternoon to 1200 students. (Photo by Ansel Adams)

posted by Jerry Zinser 6/03/2005