In March 1940, when the recording was made, Parisians lived in a strange mix of awareness and denial about what was surely coming. War was on the horizon. People tried to carry on living life as usual while the inevitable was waiting in the wings.
All of this was unfolding during the Landowska–Scarlatti recording sessions, where everyone was undoubtedly focused on the music. In moments like these, the intensity of making art can heighten one’s concentration.
If it’s the last thing we do, we are creating something good, something of value. It will say something to those listening in the future. They will hear this and they will know. Maybe they will know better.
This is art in time of war. But even as art captures something true, something human, the brutality of war continues to spread.
We’ve been chronicling wars since the dawn of recorded history—at least 5,000 years. With all this constant reporting, why has there seemingly been an inability to understand the root of such conflict?
War seems inherent to human nature, a reflection of our animal instincts—yet instead of learning to overcome our response to conflict and advance civilization, so much innovation has been devoted to increasing war’s scope and efficiency.
There are many ways to create bridges between people. Many ways to raise the consciousness of both the individual and communities. We know this. It’s education, community, and prioritizing meaningful connection—fostering understanding through shared experiences, art, and dialogue.
We know all of this.
We have experts everywhere—historians, political scientists, military strategists—studying wars at universities, think tanks, and global institutions like the UN and NATO. And yet, what’s our response? Build bigger bombs. That’s it? That’s all we could come up with?
Where is imagination, intelligence, vision?
It’s so obvious what the issues are about—religion, land, power, and resources. The same struggles, century after century, just with different borders and new weapons.
The reasons and justifications for engaging in war—are they just about the need to be right? If they are, where does that leave us?
After we hopefully find a way to make peace with today’s conflicts, what does the future of war look like? And what can we do to break the cycle? Do we allow our differences to continue to be reason enough for war? That is, if anything about war can truly be called reasonable or rational—maybe it can be rationalized, but never rational.
Any thinking person who understands the game of chess—which is, after all, a game of war—should see that all war ends in misfortune, death, and destruction.
And like the game, war and its many battles create the need to start again—to see who can win the next round.
What really is solved by war? It only makes itself over and over. It feeds on itself like fire and has no end. If you think war is a well-thought-out idea, it isn’t.
And yet, we spend so much time on it—coming up with plans, laying out justifications, and improving the tools of destruction. So what are we really doing? Not solving anything, just keeping it going. War is an unmovable pit that lives in a primordial section of the brain, a cancer we still haven’t figured out how to remove.
“Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race, or shall mankind renounce war?”
—From the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, issued by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein (1955)
There is a moment in the Kurukshetra War (c. 3100 BCE)—the great battle in the ancient epic poem, the Mahābhārata—where a pivotal event unfolds. In the sacred text of the section called the Bhagavad Gita, a philosophical and spiritual dialogue takes place within a kind of bubble, a moment frozen in time.
Arjuna, our protagonist, is in a state of personal crisis. As a warrior prince, he turns to his divine charioteer, Krishna, who counsels him to accept his destiny as the one who must call the battle to begin.
Krishna guides him through different stages of consciousness, leading him toward a deeper understanding of duty, detachment, and the nature of existence itself.
Arjuna’s duty is to fight as a warrior, yet as he looks across the battlefield, he sees his relatives, friends, and neighbors—lined up by the thousands on either side, facing one another, waiting—waiting for Arjuna to raise his bow and take the first shot—but he can’t bring himself to do it.
The morality play takes on cosmic significance when Krishna—his divine guide—sees Arjuna locked in a battle with his own conscience and offers him an alternative view. He tells Arjuna that this battle isn’t just about him—it’s part of something much bigger, something already set in motion. A destiny he must fulfill.
For many, this lesson is a way of life—to simply do what one is meant to do. But what if the real lesson isn’t about surrendering to duty, but about seeing beyond the battlefield altogether? What if, instead of resigning ourselves to the cycles of war and conflict, we recognized the moments when we could step away from them? What if true wisdom is understanding that war is not the way?
The objective reality is that peace and war are two sides of the same coin. We can’t seem to escape the cycle because we, as people, don’t know how to rise above it and meet in the cross-section where we are all together as one—one whole, all on the same side. Instead, it has to be about differences. And for that, we either accept the differences or we pay.
It is possible—if we give ourselves over to math, which is the true logic—we can see how flawed the war equation is. It always leads to the same terrible outcome. This is why education is so important: not to follow teachers, but to deeply understand how to think for oneself—in other words, what we call today, two and a half millennia later, the Socratic Method.
It’s a radical concept, the idea of learning to think. Like Socrates—whose insistence on questioning and independent thought ultimately led to his condemnation—Paulo Freire, the Brazilian writer, was exiled for teaching illiterate adults how to read and write—not just by following the words, but by thinking about their meaning. He wrote about his philosophy of education in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. If he could teach adults to think for themselves, maybe we are not all lost.
But how are we ever going to get free of the warring mentality?
With a lot of creativity. We have to go beyond previous ways of reacting and make a conscious decision to raise the entire level of our discourse.
In his statement in response to the assassination of JFK, Leonard Bernstein wrote:
“Our music will never again be quite the same. This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”
His words are timeless. Art has always been a response to crisis, not just an escape from it.
Art is that fabulously subversive thing, which by its very nature causes people to think for themselves. It is a revolutionary remedy—one we should embrace for how much it has to offer the individual, society, and civilization.
And Then There’s the War Economy
Yeah, war is a business—one of the biggest businesses in the world. That includes guns, of course—on an individual level, it means an armed public, and on the military side, armies equipped with large-scale weapons, fueling endless conflicts.
We’re told it’s defense spending—that’s a real play on words, isn’t it? A clever way to convince us it’s all about safety when, in reality, it’s about the perpetuation of the war mentality. And we all know how powerful the lobby is for that—lobbyists who shuttle huge sums to our representatives, ensuring the cycle never stops.
Recently, we’ve witnessed a dramatic shift—from a military-industrial complex to a technology-driven one: a techno-industrial complex where power is now measured not just in weapons, but in algorithms, data, and code. And we need to keep up, because this is the most overwhelming challenge our species has ever faced.
At its core, this shift is about control—control over information, how we think, what we think, and how we respond to the world around us. It’s a chaotic fusion of social media manipulation and an information ecosystem flooded with both accidental misinformation and deliberate disinformation: false narratives, doublespeak, and propaganda—all exponentially amplified by AI.
There is no escape from this. Awareness is the only survival tool we have. That’s it.
The choice is to pay attention or not. It only takes one maniac.
Bang. Boom.
We can hope for some kind of world consciousness–raising event—something to shift our thinking toward a deeper understanding of the fragility of all life, the temporal nature of being, and the interconnectedness of everything.
But what would it take? Maybe an environmental catastrophe so extreme that people finally come together to save the world—and each other (from their own demons). Or who knows—maybe advanced extraterrestrials landing on Earth, waking us up (or having us for dinner).
Some have suggested the idea of a modus vivendi—a way of coexisting where we accept our differences, live and let live. But it’s more of a temporary truce than a lasting peace—an arrangement without guarantees.
The stakes are too high. We are racing forward at breakneck speed, with too many people engaging on the frontier of inevitable conflict. Where are the cooler heads with alternative ideas?
Let’s be clear: no one is going to save us from ourselves.
And Armageddon? Not something to look forward to.
No, thank you.
So what’s left? What Plato called the rational soul—the part that seeks truth, pursues wisdom, and brings harmony to the whole—or what we might call creative intelligence.
Art requires thinking, feeling, and experiencing—it’s about getting real with oneself. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde takes this idea into overdrive, forcing the subject to confront his own depraved soul.
It’s a reminder that art isn’t just about beauty or escape—it’s about reflection, about holding up a mirror to society and to ourselves.
Art is truth—a truth that is seeking an audience, an audience that is also seeking truth—one that longs to understand, to be moved, to connect. It is a conversation across time, a meeting of minds and emotions, connecting through their senses, their intellect, and their whole being. In this way, art is the great unifier.
It is around art that we can come together. That is the great meaning of “concert”—from the Latin concertare, meaning “to work together.”
What About Peace (Or Are We Resigned to War)?
When we think about peace, it’s often in the realm of what you might wish for from Santa Claus—or the very predictable response in a beauty pageant:
Question: “What would you most like to see in your lifetime?”
Answer: “World peace.”
Peace is an imaginary concept and, seemingly, biologically impossible. We are naturally capable of violence—often seeing it as the quickest way to achieve our goals. It’s the fastest way to get from point A to point B. And if you follow the model set forth by Konrad Lorenz in his book On Aggression, it is simply part of nature—our nature—to turn conflict into something more.
Science fiction writers—the prophets of the future—imagine a world where divisions are largely put to rest and civilization finally lives up to its name, becoming truly civilized. Writers like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke envisioned such futures, where reason and progress triumph over conflict. And now, with predictions of warring machines built purely from AI—who knows?
Art operates in a different realm altogether, creating reflections on levels of understanding and communication that extend beyond politics, religion, territory, and economics. Whatever your perception, art in general—and classical music in particular—has the advantage of speaking a language that crosses every cultural wall.
Music is its own blank slate—a true tabula rasa, ready to carry the imprint of whatever culture, language patterns, or idioms that are cast upon it. Music transcends, and we with it.
So what about peace? Does it even exist, or is it just a fairy tale?
The idea is still alive and well. It’s talked about and still wished for. After all, how else are we going to collectively save humanity—and the planet?
For his part, Federico Gad Crema has come up with a plan—a starting point—with a vision that he has implemented. If you haven’t heard about it yet, it’s called the Peace Orchestra Project, with the happy acronym POP.
And now, for some questions…
Kathy Geisler Can you talk about what inspired you to create the festival and orchestra? Did you conceive of them together or how did the format come about?
Federico Gad Crema The original idea was to create a unique music festival to showcase humanitarian projects that use classical music as a vehicle for human development, such as El Sistema from Venezuela and Neojiba from Brazil, with the aim of inspiring more and more people to continue the work of such exemplary endeavors.
During the COVID pandemic, I felt the need—the urge—to make those ideas and dreams come true, and I have relentlessly worked ever since to make it happen.
The first edition of the Oropa Music Festival took place from the 28th of August to the 3rd of September 2023. It was a week-long festival at the foothills of one of the most beautiful valleys in Europe, where world-renowned soloists performed alongside internationally acclaimed conductors and exciting chamber music ensembles.
In the process, however, I also decided to create something that could generate an even bigger impact on our society—and this is how the Peace Orchestra Project was born!
It’s an inclusive program based on the core values of social and religious integration, with the goal of giving a renewed purpose to the symphonic orchestra and to use it as a platform for social transformation, peace, and integration in our society, through the power of music.
The orchestra consists of accomplished young musicians between the ages of 18 and 25 from all over the globe, including talented individuals from specific disadvantaged communities, who come together to participate in a life-changing experience.
A humanitarian project for a new world.
KG How will you present the mission of the orchestra to the audience?
FGC I feel that the best way to make an impact is through music, and in particular through our exciting performances. Nothing is stronger than witnessing almost a hundred wonderful young musicians, coming from all over the world and with all kinds of different backgrounds, united through the most powerful universal language—music!
KG How do you see this project evolving in the future? Do you envision it expanding to new locations or reaching new communities?
FGC I believe this project is a wonderful opportunity, a step further to unite a fragmented society through the power of music, in the most inclusive environment where excellence is key.
The international core and essence of the Peace Orchestra Project makes it naturally open to potentially adapt to any location and/or community. I decided to organize the first edition in Biella, Italy—one of the most beautiful, inspiring locations, and a truly special place for me, as it is my hometown—to then depart on an exciting international tour. However, I also believe there will be wonderful new challenges and locations all over the world on the horizon.
After the successful launch of POP and the Oropa Music Festival in 2023, the Festival continues to present concerts with the mission of the organization central to these events.
The second edition happened between September 9 and 15, 2024, with the addition of Off-season events throughout the year called “Oropa Music Festival – OFF.” All the cool facts are on the website.
The next POP will be in 2026, since the main theater, Teatro Sociale Villani, is under renovations. At that time, I’ll be stepping in not only as founder and artistic director, but also as conductor—making it an especially meaningful milestone in this journey.
KG Thanks for taking us along. M
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