Efforts using music to bring people together can take many forms. Perhaps one of the best examples that I’ve experienced personally was a concert presented by Brady Allred and the Bach Choir of Pittsburgh in October of 2002, a program titled “Children of Abraham: Sacred Music from the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian Traditions.” As the program’s name suggests, it had three main sections, each containing music from one of the three Abrahamic religions, and it concluded with a wonderful, newly commissioned piece by Glen Rudolph that has become quite popular, “The Dream Isaiah Saw.” Rudolph set a poem by the Thomas Troeger that drew upon the prophet Isaiah’s vision of a creation restored to its intended order, a time when “blood will not darken the earth that God made.” The evolving text of the chorus repeatedly calls for a personal commitment to justice and peace:
Little child whose bed is straw,
take new lodgings in my heart.
Bring the dream Isaiah saw:
life redeemed from fang and claw.
The entire concert affirmed tolerance, promoted an awareness of our shared humanity, and overtly extended the hand of solidarity to the Islamic community in a time when some were expressing hatred and focused on revenge. The World Trade Center attacks had occurred just a bit over a year before, and it seemed to me that presenting this concert required courage.