Anchorage Daily News

It may have started with good intentions, but a University of Alaska Anchorage public forum two weeks ago to "clear the air" over a new composition by a UAA music instructor soon went from bad to worse.

About 80 people gathered April 8 inside the UAA Arts Building to hear adjunct instructor and local composer Philip Munger explain the artistic intent behind his new cantata, "The Skies Are Weeping," which celebrates an American college student who died in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip.

They also came to hear Rabbi Yosef Greenberg, who claims the words to the cantata unfairly characterize Israelis as murderers while ignoring acts of terrorism by Palestinians.

Munger and Greenberg had jointly and voluntarily co-sponsored the meeting, which ultimately grew so contentious that university officials and campus police were called to maintain peace.

The event received virtually no immediate news coverage, but a videotape recorded by a student captured the proceedings on film.

The tape shows Munger at the outset reading a long paper he composed to explain the creation of the cantata, the delivery of which lasted about 45 minutes. It shows Greenberg taking the floor after Munger to speak extemporaneously for a few minutes, expressing some of his reservations.

"He's entitled to his opinion," Greenberg told the audience. "(But) every word that he said to explain himself has a meaning that the Israelis are wrong, the Palestinians are right. ... I don't think this is mainstream America."

As he finished, Greenberg told the audience: "Now I will answer any questions anyone has. ..."

"Rabbi, I thank you," Munger said, walking quickly across the stage toward Greenberg. "Will you please return to your seat?"

"What?" Greenberg said, looking confused.

"Will you please return to your seat?" Munger said.

"Do I have to?" Greenberg said.

"Will you please be polite?" someone in the audience said.

"I am being polite," Munger said.

A different voice in the audience boomed: "Mr.

Munger -- show the rabbi some respect!"

"I am."

"You're not!" roared a man with a long gray and black beard sitting by himself in the back row. "You're a piece of s---!"

And that was just the beginning.

Two participants who identified themselves as Republican Party activists questioned why taxpayer dollars were being spent on such radical political opinions (though Munger later said the only money ever spent on the project was his own).

"I have to say I'm outraged at what I heard tonight," added state Rep. Bob Lynn, R-Anchorage. "This is a time of war. It's a time of terror. Thousands of people of all different ethnicities, all different backgrounds, all different nationalities were killed on 9-11. I wish we had a cantata to celebrate those people."

A man in his 20s who identified himself as a Palestinian, however, said he wanted to shake Munger's hand. "I want to say, 'Thank you,' " he said. "I do not see many people in this country like him: fair ..."

He began to describe what life is really like for Palestinians.

"Do we have a question here?" someone yelled at the speaker.

Then a few seconds later: "Shut up and sit down!"

A bystander named Markus Bishko, a friend of Munger as well as a member of Greenberg's congregation, suggested the meeting needed a moderator, then stepped up to do the job himself. For a while, the exchanges grew more civil.

A quiet-spoken man in a pale blue shirt addressed a question to Munger: Why had he spent all his time lecturing them on history, he asked. Wasn't he a music professor?

"You talked to us about the lack of democracy and all that," he said. "I would like to know when you're going to have the next open election in Saudi Arabia or Jordan ..."

"Can I respond to that?" the Palestinian asked, standing up again on the opposite side of the room.

"No," someone said.

"Why not?" the Palestinian said.

"Because you're a towel-head!" yelled the bearded man sitting in back.

Eventually Bishko called on Bruce Farnsworth, a writer and occasional performer in local poetry slams, who posed a question no one had asked:

Considering that Munger's musical composition hadn't even been performed in public yet, why was he being "called on the carpet? ... Why did you even agree to this forum in the first place?"

DEATH OF AN ACTIVIST

The answer begins with an Israeli bulldozer.

It arrived with others in the Palestinian town of Rafah in March 2003, apparently intent on toppling one more house along the border to establish a "security zone."

Then came Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old American peace activist, who seemed determined to stand in its path.

Serving as a human shield in the strife-torn Gaza Strip was standard procedure for Corrie and her colleagues from the International Solidarity Movement, a civilian organization dedicated to providing peaceful assistance to Palestinians.

What happened next, however, wasn't.

As several of her fellow activists looked on, one of the specially armored D9 Caterpillar tractors manned by the Israeli Defense Forces began steadily advancing on Corrie. As it neared, it dug up a wall of soil that began to curl over her feet.

"She tried to climb on top of the earth to avoid being overwhelmed," colleague and eyewitness Tom Dale told a Newsweek reporter, but then she lost her footing and fell toward the blade. The earth piled over Corrie as the bulldozer rumbled forward. In an instant, she disappeared.

A few seconds later, the driver threw the machine into reverse and bladed back over her body. Her colleagues rushed to her side, but Corrie was barely alive. Her skull was fractured, her ribs broken, her lungs punctured. She died en route to the hospital.

Whether her death was a deliberate act of murder, a game of bluff pushed too far or a total surprise to all involved (the Israeli army reservist who drove the bulldozer later insisted he never saw her) is still a subject of debate more than a year later. To some, Corrie's death was the height of foolishness. To others, she's a martyr.

To Munger, though, Corrie was an inspiration. Last year, the composer began to write a seven-movement cantata in her honor. The result, "The Skies Are Weeping" -- arranged by Munger for a soprano solo, chamber choir and percussion ensemble -- draws upon poetry, newspaper sources and Corrie's own words to celebrate her spirit while also condemning violence and the plight of Palestinians.

One of the last pieces of the cantata that Munger, 57, set in place was the fifth movement, "I Had No Mercy for Anybody." Against a hectic background of metal percussion instruments, it enters the point of view of Israeli Defense Forces bulldozer driver Moshe Nissum, who'd served in an urban demolition unit in the West Bank (unrelated to Corrie's specific experience in the Gaza Strip).

Munger says he was fascinated by a newspaper interview with Nissum that appeared in the May 31, 2002, edition of Yediot Aharanot, a wide-circulation Israeli newspaper, that was posted on the Internet. And from it he set the following to music:

"I had no mercy for anybody. I would erase anyone with the D-9, and I have demolished plenty. I wanted to destroy everything. I begged the officers, over the radio, to let me knock it all down, from top to bottom. To level everything. When I was told to bring down a house, I took the opportunity to bring down some more houses. For three days, I just destroyed and destroyed. The whole area. I wanted to get to the other houses. To get as many as possible. I didn't see, with my own eyes, people dying under the blade of the D-9. But if there were any, I wouldn't care at all. If you knocked down a house, you buried 40 or 50 people. If I am sorry for anything, it is for not tearing the whole camp down. I had lots of satisfaction in Jenin, lots of satisfaction. No one expressed any reservations against doing it. Who would dare speak? If anyone would as much as open his mouth, I would have buried him under the D-9."

Munger says the complete interview was even more revealing of Nissum's destructive mind-set -- and even more repugnant in content -- than the part he excerpted for what he admits is "this dreadful song."

"That was probably what was compelling about it," he says. "Basically it's people like (U.S. Attorney General) John Ashcroft who say that this marvelous work of art by Rubens is wrong because there's a nipple on it. Well, Rubens doesn't want to talk about the nipple. He wants to talk about the work of art."

MISGIVINGS SURFACE

But other artists have listened to CD versions of Munger's yet-to-be-performed cantata -- particularly the "I Had No Mercy" section -- and responded quite differently. Among them was his own friend Bishko, a klezmer musician, who heard "I Had No Mercy" during a March visit to Munger's studio in Palmer.

"He said it was dreadful, beautiful music -- and shouldn't be played," Munger recalls.

Later, he e-mailed Bishko a version of the entire text along with his permission to share it with members of his congregation at the Lubavitch Jewish Center, including Rabbi Greenberg, to gauge their reaction.

The reviews weren't good.

Bishko wrote back to Munger explaining why he was critical too.

"It pains me terribly to publicly oppose the performance of your cantata, which, without a doubt in my mind, contains the most masterful, powerful composing I have ever heard from you," Bishko wrote in an e-mail that Munger later posted on the Internet.

"But it is precisely the power of your compositional mastery that frightens me most of all, for you have chosen to glorify a dangerously misguided young girl who offered herself as a human shield for those who wish to kill me, and who raise their children to give their lives to mercilessly murder my sisters, brothers and their innocent children. Where is their cantata?"

"I e-mailed him back," Munger says, "basically saying: 'No, Rachel Corrie wasn't training people or helping people who want to kill you. She was trying to make it so people wouldn't want to kill you. And I don't think she wanted to die.' "

Bishko told Munger that his rabbi would like to talk to him. In late March, Greenberg and Munger met at the Cafe del Mundo coffee shop. Greenberg says Munger did most of the talking, detailing his version of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"I was literally shocked," Greenberg now says. "At first I gave him the benefit of the doubt. He's an artist and a musician. Maybe he's a little ignorant of what's going on. I wanted to listen to the man."

Instead of simply arguing about it between themselves, though, Greenberg decided to invite Munger to address the members of his synagogue.

Munger says he was willing but suggested that instead they open up the meeting to a much larger segment of the community.

THE MEETING

Receiving a go-ahead from the university, Munger reserved a rehearsal hall in the Arts Building and drafted a press release noting that "questions have arisen regarding the composer's sensitivity to issues concerning Israel" and that a public forum would try to address them.

The statement led to an article in the Daily News and on the newspaper's Web site announcing the meeting. But Munger also forwarded the press release to several e-mail recipients, including a pro-Palestinian blogger apparently based in Tel Aviv, who proceeded to post five of Munger's e-mails on a high-traffic Web site with the following introduction:

"These days in faraway Alaska, there is an important event: the first performance of Philip Munger's Cantata to Rachel Corrie. The brilliant composer was immediately attacked by the local Jews. Even Alaska is not far enough! Here is the dramatic story in five e-mails ..."

Almost immediately, Munger says, he was inundated with unsolicited e-mail from outside Alaska, a lot of it hateful -- "just threatening, harassing, bizarre ... short of the stuff you'd take to the troopers."

But some of his student musicians received threatening messages too, Munger says -- and that was a different story. It was one thing to invite problems on himself; it was quite another to inflict them on his students.

He says he talked the situation over with Department of Music chairwoman Karen Strid two days before the public forum. She felt the cantata's debut performance scheduled for April 27 should go ahead as planned, Munger says. He alone argued that it ought to be canceled. Finally she concurred.

Then, without telling the press, Munger wrote up a statement announcing the cancellation and took it to the public forum. But instead of reading it at the outset of the meeting and relieving some of the tension, he decided to keep it under wraps until the very end. Had he read it at the start, Munger says now, "everybody would have walked out."

"And I felt I owed it to my art and what I stand for to stand up and defend it. In retrospect, a couple people said that's what we have to do in these circumstances. If it's too dangerous to air it in a student environment, then at least the professor or the composer or the artist of the piece can stand up and explain what it means before it's drowned out.

"Or overexplain it."

In further retrospect, Munger says, a lot of the animosity he felt in the room was self-inflicted. He should have appointed a moderator for the meeting beforehand, eliminating the need for him to behave like a policeman.

He shouldn't have addressed the rabbi so abruptly. ("I am truly sorry for offending you or anyone in your congregation by any physical gesture I made on April 8," Munger later wrote in a public apology to Greenberg.)

And perhaps he shouldn't have read such a long defense of his cantata after all (though knowing that it wouldn't be performed as planned fueled his desire to explain himself all the more).

On the other hand, Munger says, he wasn't the only one in the room who misbehaved. Nor were the others necessarily Jewish.

"Most of the loudest, most insulting statements or shouts came from people I know to be non-Jewish, right-wing blowhards," he says.

He still believes in his cantata and looks forward to having it performed in its entirety somewhere else. He has already been contacted by interested parties in Toronto and New York City.

And Anchorage?

Maybe after a performance in Tel Aviv, Munger says.

"After what I've been through here, I think it's pretty important for me to have it performed in Israel by an all-Jewish or a Jewish and Arab and Palestinian ensemble," he says.

"I would really like to demonstrate that the premises these people have taken against me are just faulty in the eyes of some very formidable and talented Jewish people."

For his own part, Rabbi Greenberg sounds more amenable. He has reconciled himself to the fact that he and Munger simply view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a different light.

"There is a saying in Yiddish that there are three sides," Greenberg says, "your side, my side and the third side. Which is the truth."

Reporter George Bryson can be reached at gbryson@adn.com.