Music in Memoriam 

• Takei Family

Moab Music Festival has, since its 1992 inception, been a space that unites the cultural beauty of music with an equally beautiful landscape; their catchphrase, "music in concert with the landscape," perhaps couldn't be more true. However, with Lost Freedom: Narrated by George Takei, that will become even more fitting, as memories of the American West's connections to the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II are dug up and paid right tribute to.

The festival's Music Director and one of its founders, Michael Barrett, didn't know that just 10-ish miles outside of Moab lay the barren remains of a World War II-era Japanese-American isolation center called Dalton Wells. "I only learned about the Dalton Wells camp five or six years ago ... how's that happen?," Barret says. "I'm an educated person... So how did this happen? Why was it so quiet?"

The sentiment is relatable. Even for those who've spent their lives in Utah, or indeed the West in general, there's a glossing over of the scope of the forced relocation of Japanese-Americans during the war, and following that, the racism that still lives today. Lost Freedom unites that past with our present by featuring the story of actor George Takei's childhood growing up in internment camps (first in California, later in Arkansas), which will be accompanied by a chamber music piece by composer and violist Kenji Bunch and help from Barrett to perfect the text.

Bunch, unlike Takei, was born well after the war years, into the overwhelmingly white Pacific Northwest where his father's fourth-generation Oregonian status contributed to a youthful avoidance of acknowledging his Japanese side, from his mother. He never even knew about the history of the internment camps until seeing The Karate Kid. As he got older, though, and learned more about the camps, he ended up on his own path to connecting to their history, one that would lead eventually to Lost Freedom.

"Where it really started was about five years ago, [when] I was at a festival in Sun Valley, Idaho," Bunch says. "I had learned that the site of the Minidoka relocation center was only an hour from Sun Valley. I drove an hour out of my way early in the morning on my drive home to Portland, and visited the site by myself. ... It was just a really powerful place to visit. I ended up writing a solo viola piece for myself."

The piece, titled Minidoka, is inspired mostly by a small stream at the camp, where Bunch found a plaque that explained that the prisoners there would get as close to the barbed wire fence as possible to see the stream's moving water, because it brought them comfort. "I thought of that when I wrote the piece. I thought of trying to heal the land itself ... Healing, to me, is something that drives me a lot in the music I write," he explains. "More and more I find myself thinking about this kind of transgenerational racial healing. I have kids, I have a nine-year-old daughter and a six-year-old son, and if we were around 70 years ago, we would have been raising our kids there."

After programming Minidoka at the Moab Music Festival two years ago, Bunch and Barrett got to talking about the Dalton Wells site, so nearby, and the idea of a larger piece on the subject came up between them, with Takei as the star. It was a clear choice—Barrett had worked with Takei in the past, and Takei had long been telling his story in different formats, like his graphic novel They Called Us Enemy.

And for Bunch, his framing provides a specific inspiration. "What I think is so compelling about [Takei's] story and the way he tells it is that he was just a kid," he says. "Not all of us can relate to being Japanese-American or Asian-American, or [part of] a marginalized community, but all of us can relate to being a kid."

Takei's story includes bittersweet details like the fact that, despite his family first being relocated to converted horse stables, the five-year-old Takei found fun and excitement in the prospect of sleeping "with the horsies." "I think that is really my entry point," Bunch adds. "My job as I see it as the composer is to help underscore the humanity here ... maybe in some way to restore a sense of humanity to the people who were in a dehumanizing situation."

The world premiere of Lost Freedom will be joined by a performance of Minidoka, and music from other Japanese-Americans, including percussionist and composer Andy Akiho, as well as Paul Chihara, a camp survivor who actually spent three years of his childhood in the Minidoka internment camp. "This was all conceived before this resurgent wave of anti-Asian hate and it's in that sense so unfortunately timely to remember this story, and to remember [that] the practice of othering Asians has been around ever since there were Asians in this country," says Bunch. "It's been a long history of consistent oppression and harassment and bias. I want it to be better for my kids."

Moab Music Festival spans Aug. 30 - Sept. 16, and Lost Freedom will debut Sept. 4 at 7 p.m., on the lawn of the Red Cliffs Lodge, overlooking the scenic Colorado River. Tickets are $40 at moabmusicfest.org.