MONTAGE Cry: violist Sarah Darling ’02 and violinists vine. It spans three religious traditions: a their first live-streamed concert, and—in Miki-Sophia Cloud ’04 and Alex Fortes sequence from medieval Christian abbess a decision debated at length—the first ’07. All three played in the self-conducting, Hildegard von Bingen’s The Origin of Fire, time they will ever be conducted, as they still-kicking Brattle Street Chamber Play- played by the violins in monody; a com- collaborate with composer Matthew Au- ers (BSCP) as undergraduates. Fortes re- mission from Turkish composer Mehmet coin ’12 on an opera at the American Rep- members the ensemble fondly, but also re- Ali Sanlıkol, inspired by Sufism; and a new ertory Thea ter. Darling and Lee say that A calls how its rehearsals could devolve into arrangement of Jewish composer Osvaldo Far Cry feels more like a “thirties group” “very little playing and a lot of talking.” Golijov’s The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the than a “twenties group,” but also that ag- Darling’s experience with the challenges Blind. It also includes one of Cloud’s favor- ing has made the orchestra more, not less, of the BSCP and groups like it colored her ite pieces, Beethoven’s String Quartet No. experimental. When skirmishes break out first reaction to the “Criers” when, as an 15, “Heiliger Dankgesang,” written after in rehearsal, they’re easier to control. “The NEC master’s student, she heard they had the composer had recovered from a long worst thing you can do,” explains Lee, “is formed: “I smiled to myself and thought, illness. In the liner notes, she writes about take two striking views and average them.” ‘Oh, haha, we’ll see how that goes—you how, before each concert, she freed the au- The wild urgency of their youth, when guys don’t know what you’re in for.’ ” Then dience of their obligation to clap politely. any season could be their last, has ebbed she attended one of their concerts, and They could sit in silence to absorb the last away. A Far Cry can look toward a longer discovered a group “so gorgeously in sync notes of a piece as it faded—or, as some future together than they’d dared to hope with each other and the music—every- did during the livelier works, get up, clap, for. As Darling says: “Your repertoire of one dreaming about Beethoven in just the and whoop. sounds increases, the longer you stand on same way.” The Criers’ eighth season will include the earth.” No group of this size and kind could come so far without some rules. In earlier years, rehearsals sometimes became free- for-alls, getting feisty and then derailed, as members quarreled over how to play A Love Afair with Haiti a particular work. These days, A Far Cry runs like the high-functioning parliament Amy Wilentz on her “touchstone and central obsession” of a small country. Each work has a new set of principals—one leader from each in- by craig lambert strumental section—who lead the group’s practice. Only a principal may stop a run- t was probably Graham Greene’s The into Haitian Creole.) She also grew interest- through. Then, the floor opens to any Comedians that sealed the fate of Amy Wi- ed in reading Haitian newspapers and sto- two musicians who wish to comment on lentz ’76. Set in midcentury Haiti, the ries on Haiti in The New York Times and Time, an issue small enough to be quickly ad- I 1966 novel paints a scorching portrait where she worked as a writer. dressed—a few bars, a particular phrase. of the dictatorial regime of François “Papa In early 1986, Wilentz [will-entz] Because of this system, a rehearsal for a Doc” Duvalier and sensed that the re- single concert can shift styles from hour his secret police, gime of Papa Doc’s to hour. One set of principals may tape the Tonton Macoutes, son, Jean-Claude up a diagram of a Mozart divertimento, to who ruled there for Duvalier—“Baby help the group visualize its shape. Another decades. Greene’s Doc”—was about team, leading a Stravinsky concerto, may novel brought that to fall, and re- narrate a scene to evoke a desired mood, unsettling world solved to go to instructing everyone to imagine “Romeo vividly alive for Haiti. Otherwise, first setting his eyes on Juliet—‘I see you, Wilentz, who was she says, “I was I want to dance around you, feel you out.’ ” living on the Up- going to miss the On rare occasions, the Criers appoint a per West Side of dictatorship.” She “spanker,” a member empowered to uni- Manhattan in the secured an assign- laterally cut of a discussion, or just to yell. mid 1980s. She had ment from The Vil- They follow equally civil procedures to noticed Haitian lage Voice and flew determine the year’s concertmaster, pro- refugees showing to Port-au-Prince gramming, and distribution of principal up in her neigh- just before Baby parts. borhood, and over- Doc was over- This fall, A Far Cry launched their own heard snatches of thrown and left recording label, Crier Records, with their their conversations. for France on Feb- first concept album. Miki-Sophia Cloud (Though very com- ruary 7 on a U.S. conceived of Dreams and Prayers as an ex- fortable in French, Air Force plane. ploration of mysticism, and of music’s she was just begin- Wilentz’s in- OURTESY OF AMY WILENTZ AMY OF OURTESY role in humanity’s relationship to the di- ning to feel her way C coming flight be- Harvard Magazine 65 Reprinted from Harvard Magazine. For more information, contact Harvard Magazine, Inc. at 617-495-5746 MONTAGE gan a love afair with Haiti that has lasted ing down the Grande Rue, I friend I had run into said, ever since, including 30 or 40 trips to the saw black smoke from near ‘No, take the press signs of, island nation—she has lost count. For two the market…,” she writes of it’s the Army, they shoot years in the late 1980s, she was a full-time one episode. “I noticed that at the press.’…[S]ome mar- resident, and today she is one of the most everyone in the street was ket people had seen two knowledgeable Americans on Haiti; she looking at it, stopped dead city garbage trucks leaving has published many journalistic reports, in their tracks. Then there town, unusual on a Satur- essays, and two books on the subject were shots, and everyone day, when most government (amywilentz.com). started running. The mar- workers were not on the Her first book, The Rainy Season: Haiti Since ket women packed up their job, and then they noticed Duvalier (1989), renders a nuanced portrait stalls in a rush, and shop- feet and arms sticking out of the chaos under the series of juntas that pers jumped into their cars. I got into of the backs of the trucks. Corpses—and seized power after Baby Doc’s fall. “Walk- my car and put my press signs up, but a the people presumed the government was is formed in England) and an A (açai) Marrying Out: Jewish Men, Intermar- to Z (zucchini blossoms) directory riage, and Fatherhood, by Keren R. Mc- Off the Shelf of favor affnities, dishes, etc. With Ginity, A.L.M. ’97 (Indiana University Press, Recent books with Harvard connections yummier photos than the average $28 paper). In a companion to an earlier reference book. volume on American Jewish women and intermarriage, the author probes attitudes What Does a Black Hole Look Like? Bridging the Gender Gap, by and behaviors through oral histories, ex- by Charles D. Bailyn, Ph.D. ’87, JF ’90 (Princ- Lynn Roseberry, LL.M. ’92, and Johan amining assumptions about the gendered eton, $34). The Giamatti professor of as- Roos (Oxford, $44.95). Combining legal, transmission of faith, heritage, and ethnic- tronomy and physics at Yale (and inaugural academic, and business experiences, the ity. Spicily illustrated with telling photos dean of faculty at Yale-NUS College in Sin- authors address persistent gender imbal- (Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft, Eddie gapore) steers a middle course in explaining ances in positions of leadership as issues of Fisher and Elizabeth Taylor’s wedding kiss) the science of observing black holes: some governance. They colorfully address com- and other examples from popular culture. undergraduate physics helps, but you need mon misconceptions about gender, even not be an advanced theorist to follow along. searching cultural sources as diverse as A Tale of Two Plantations, by Richard the nursery rhyme about “Slugs and snails/ S. Dunn ’50 (Harvard, $39.95). The author, Why Government Fails So Often, And puppy-dogs’ tails.” long emeritus from the University of Penn- by Peter H. Schuck, J.D. ’65, A.M. ’72 sylvania, spent 40 years tracing 1,103 slaves (Princeton, $27.95). Summing up why Frontiers of Possession: Spain and from the Mesopotamia sugar plantation in Americans hold a “dismal view of the Portugal in Europe and the Ameri- Jamaica and 973 slaves from the Mount federal government’s performance,” the cas, by Tamar Herzog, Gutman profes- Airy plantation in tidewater Virginia, using Yale Law professor emeritus considers sor of Latin American affairs and Radcliffe their owners’ “property” records and fam- problems of incentives, information, pow- Alumnae professor (Harvard, $35). A ily trees. The painstaking result explicates erful markets, and the limits of the law. global history of Spain and Portugal, in- both their lives and the differing econo- No bomb-thrower (the subtitle is “And teracting on both sides of the Atlantic, mies of Jamaica (where high mortality led How It Can Do Better”), he points to as established nations and newly colonial to constant slave importing and buying) successes (the GI Bill, Voting Rights Act, powers, by one of the University’s recent- and Virginia (where high natural growth and Earned Income Tax Credit) and me- ly arrived Latin Americanists.