Nino P. Cocchiarella, Piano CD

Lorna Anderson has appeared in opera, concert and recital with the major orchestras and festivals throughout Europe. In the United Kingdom she has worked with the BBC Orchestras, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, The Sixteen, the English Concert, the St. James' Baroque, London Baroque, Collegium Musicum 90, the Bach Choir, the London Mozart Players, The King's Consort, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, London Sinfonietta under Sir Simon Rattle, the Bournemouth Sinfonietta, the London Classical Players and the Apollo Chamber Orchestra, and she has appeared at the Edinburgh and Aldeburgh Festivals.

During college, I also began to work with an organization called Seeds of Peace, that works towards the reconciliation of Israel and Palestine through simple co-existence in a summer camp in Maine. The friendships the teenagers make with the 'enemy' carry across political lines, too, when they return home, and they maintain their friendships through email, etc. After college, I was inspired to change the world, as many young folks tend to be, and decided to return to Jerusalem, where I had studied for 6 months during college as well. I used my contacts to start an organization of my own, called 'Sound Peace'. I wrote an entire curriculum, based on sound as the foundation for friendship -- children listening and playing together, teaching one another about their own music, and creating and learning about music in unfamiliar genres.

I traveled to Jerusalem in the summer of 2000, and worked to establish Sound Peace with great success and encouragement from every direction. Until, in late September, 2000, Ariel Sharon walked onto the Temple Mount with his political entourage, starting the worst violence perhaps in the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict. A close friend of mine, Asel Asleh, was killed in the first weeks of the fighting. He was a wonderful 17 year old with vision and intelligence, fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, killed in his Seeds of Peace t-shirt, walking the wrong way in a demonstration. His death crushed me, but I decided to stick it out -- I didn't want his death to mean that what I had started was impossible. I stayed in Bethlehem (where I lived in a small apartment behind a family house) for another few weeks, receiving phone calls from every relative or friend who knew where I was, and from reporters all across the US, asking me what the situation was like in the West Bank. The more my family watched CNN, the more I started to feel pressure to come home. My Palestinian friends told me to go home as well -- they would have left if they could. I wouldn't have been able to continue my work, so I made the right decision returning home. Now there is a wall between the countries, and 'peace' is as dim a thought as my first words.