"Remember the Future for Truth is Timeless . . ."
A Personal Message from SLM 2004
STORMWORKS Chapter V∞, Writings on the Wall

It takes a photon 38 million years to escape the forcible, unforgiving gravity of the sun and blast its way to the surface where eight minutes later it bathes the earth in the Light by which you find yourself reading this libretto.

In the Timestorm of that 38 million years and eight minutes, give or take a few hundred years... a mere and tiny moment of imperceptible dancing on the cosmic stage... the Human drama has seen unthinkable violence, pain, hurt, self-inflicted suffering... emptiness and longing. And with it? Untold Love, Sacrifice, Giving and Heroism.

Without Warning we are cast into the epic adventure. In the hollow of the heart, sense must be made of the constantly swirling storm, the unraveling of the mysterious. Free will. Choice? Fate? The seemingly endless succession of useless, inevitable, somehow destined to be traversed catastrophes as Man brutalizes his Brother... and then... steps forward to rise above such folly.

In your hands is a recording, the meaning of which escapes the moment of your listening. It leaps across Time... past, future, possible future and present. Rising above our mutual and many sins of the past, the Vision of Brotherhood is not merely written about... but finally, in a way only Human History could have produced... demonstrated.

We are a part of the convergent Moment. History is made.

Though all should be self-evident, allow yourself to contemplate the document in your possession. It is the first Recording to be released outside of Japan by the The Central Band of the Japanese Air Self Defense Force. With the Good graces of the Japanese government, the JASDF Band offers this document in the 60th year marking the end of World War 2. In the Music, we encounter an historically accurate and by our current view, a tragic and unfortunate Past. As Japanese Musicians render KAKEHASHI: That We Might Live, A Documentary in Music with the Choruses from Old Dominion and Shenandoah Universities, one cannot help but see an unchained intersection of time and culture-crunching dimensions. Have we done it? Have we laid strong the path by which Man exercises His greatest gift... the ability to short-circuit the needless predetermined march into more suffering? Has a new blueprint been established where, instead of embracing the False, the fleeting, and Art of the State, we have taken that lofty right-face into the Brotherhood of Man? Have we collapsed evolution into the moment of our combined Will and chosen to live by Love inviolate, an evolved position which must... after all... be our True Destiny?

Answers reside within. The document you hold is now History, a History of the Future. It is made possible by an important reality which can never be taken for granted. The Heroism that is "talked about", and written about and urged for and hoped for rises far above all former cliches. Music as a "universal language" is exposed for the many times it was mere hyperbole and its sentiment inappropriately invoked. The Heroes portrayed in this Recording, immortalized once again in the Living thing we call Music, are represented, indeed demonstrated by the Japanese Musicians who render it. They have become, in their transcendent DOING, the role models of a new generation of Heroes. A new JIDAI. It is impossible to thank them enough... for only THEY, at THIS Time, in THIS circumstance with our combined Histories, could have heroically donned the mantle of message bearer.

And their message is profound indeed.

In the spirit of eternal Brotherhood, ALL of us are honoured and humbled to be a small part of this Triumph! Through Time and Space, geography and culture, language and History, ALL of us who have made this Music, ALL of us alive and sacrificed who have lived and inspired it, ALL of us who have drudged through our brief moment like a struggling photon in search of Light... join with you in the Now and share with you a message of Forgiveness and Love... of Giving and Sacrifice, of facing the Storm and rising above it.

History is made. May you make it well.

Into the hope-filled Adventure... Godspeed! Stephen Melillo