Boston, Longy School of Music: Rodney Lister's ‘Friendly Fire’

Abstract

The American public has been left in an odd position for the past few years in terms of the War on Terror. As the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan slowly trickle away our news outlets have lost interest in calculating the statistics of death, and we have become complacent and apathetic. The greatest fallacy in our vision of war is that wars have an end, when in reality war has never ended, but rather switched conflicts, like influenza. War will never end as long as natural human short-sightedness remains intact. Large-scale global communication may help in ending the threat of war, as new moral conflicts arise once we realize we can have a face-to-face conversation with a colleague on the other side of the world. Rodney Lister's Friendly Fire, premièred at Boston's Longy School of Music this past May in the coincidental wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, is a wide-ranging and harrowing plea for pacifism in the face of apathy. However, its performance by Charles Blandy and Collage New Music may betray its cause, meeting terror with tenuousness.