This morning Music of Remembrance circulated viewers with the URL for a performance of composer Shinji Eshima’s “August 6th.” That date is when the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, and “August 6th” was composed for the 50th anniversary of one of the darkest memories in history. (Those who saw the film Oppenheimer know that even the most objective of the scientists contributing to the Manhattan Project could not ignore the full extent of devastation wrought when the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima.)
Violinist Natasha Bazhanov and Jonathan Green on double bass performing Shinji Eshima’s “August 6th” (screenshot from the YouTube video)
Eshima’s composition covers the extremes of the string section. The instrumentation is a duo scored for violin and double bass. A YouTube video has been created for a performance of this work by violinist Natasha Bazhanov and Jonathan Green on double bass. The video was created in Seattle, Washington, at the llsley Ball Nordstrom Recital Hall in Benaroya Hall. The entire video is slightly less than five minutes in duration, using a single camera source with Bazhanov on the left and Green on the right.
Eshima’s mother was born in Hiroshima, so it goes without saying that he approached the composition of “August 6th” from a very personal perspective. He even visited the room in which the atomic bomb project was launched when J. Robert Oppenheimer showed his plans to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In the notes that he prepared for the YouTube Web page, Eshima wrote that his composition “hints at Haiku in meter, trying, if just briefly, to express the unspeakable.” However, I must confess that the mournfully smooth flow of the two instruments kept me from trying to establish a metric foundation.
I suspect that many of my generation are as familiar with August 6 as they are with December 25; but I have always felt that the former is a date that deserves serious contemplation, rather than any vestige of celebration.
