I heard their words.
And in the morning when I awoke
all around the world, in every nation,
the bells in the towns and the cities were ringing for freedom and peace.

• Statement
  
• Program Notes
• Reference Notes

It wasn't too long after in Revelations of Secret Surveillance
I criticized invasive mind-body control research that I took a
very minor fall while cross country skiing and suffered months of
pain and a return to crutches. At times the pain was so bad
that I imagined that I was being virtually tortured.
In the winter and early spring of 2005, from this pain
began the elegiac tone that pervades Concerto for Narrative Data.

On the other side of the railroad tracks, behind the house where
I grew up in Winchester, Massachusetts was the Aberjona River, the
river of A Civil Action that, polluted by WR Grace and other
companies, flows through the neighboring town of Woburn.

The mood of Concerto was intensified by my finding of an
Internet copy of a directive from Nazi Chemist Otto Ambros,
who, despite being convicted of war crimes at Auschwitz,
was hired as a consultant by WR Grace company
and the US Army Chemical Corps.
In the memo, Ambros orders that the concentration camp inmates
whom he worked to death, be flogged out of sight of free workers.
I saw it as a metaphor for the use of covert strategies and technologies
to hurt people in ways that could not be witnessed.

In the fictional voices of six artists and writers,
Concerto for Narrative Data, a web work that could also be performed,
postulates a relationship -- between covert technologies
developed by the Department of Defense
and intelligence agency-funded researchers --
and interference in the lives of artists, activists, athletes, soldiers,
leaders and many other people.

Written for a fictional ensemble or concertare,
Concerto is interfaced with a contrapuntal score in which the speakers' words
parallel each other and the user's coactive choices
determine the flow of the narrative information.
The voices are scibe, a computer artist who walks with crutches;
Gwen, a writer and environmental activist;
Dorothy, a painter who came of age in World War II; Sid, a curator;
Cassie, an Irish American poet; and Archie, a Chicano performance artist.

The work can be experienced by selecting links anywhere in the concertare
-- a diffuse six-voice interface in which the soloists and ensemble
come together and alternate, resulting in an accumulation of narrative information.
After a link is selected from the concertare,
the reader can either return to the concertare
(clicking on "concertare" brings up the animated version;
clicking on "Concerto for Narrative Data"
returns to a static interface) or, by clicking on the space bar below the text,
follow the words of an individual voice.

Concerto can be thought of as hyperpoetry or as a score in the
fluxus tradition, such as a John Cage score, where, if it were performed,
interpretation is partially determined by the performers.

The interface for Concerto for Narrative Data is a variation of
the narrative data structure interface that I developed in 1991 for
Wasting Time, A Narrative Data Structure ("After the Book",
Perforations 3, Summer, 1992)

The photograph on the cover page (taken by my mother
Barbara Lillard Powers) is a World War II US Army training camp.
Located in Texas, Camp Hulen is the place where I was conceived
when my father was stationed there in 1941. Later in the War,
while my father was fighting in Normandy and on the German front,
Camp Hulen was used to house German prisoners of war.

My tears are for the stilled feet of the dancers who died of AIDS.

The concerto opens with the voice of painter
Dorothy Abrona McCrae, whose first husband was killed
on the Pacific Front in the Second World War.

Dorothy begins a painting in which she sets four actress heroines
in the center of the canvas. Using a Renaissance background --
"sandstone-colored columns and arches
like those that Quatrocentro painters created in the magical landscapes
that surround their resonant Biblical narratives" -- she suggests
a parallel with the lives of the early film stars - Jean Harlow,
Rudolph Valentino, Veronica Lake -- and the lives of Renaissance painters,
such as Pietro Perugino, some of whose panels in the Sistine Chapel were painted
over by Michelangelo by commission from the Medici Pope Clement VII,
such as Masaccio, painter of the graphic nude figures in
Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, who died at age 26.

The four actresses in the center of Dorothy's painting are Grace Kelly,
who gave up acting when she became the Princess of Monaco, supported
the arts, and died when her car went off a road in Monaco; Myrna Loy
who was on Hitler's blacklist for criticizing him and found it difficult
to get roles after she criticized Senator Joseph McCarthy; Audrey Hepburn,
who carried messages for the Resistance in occupied Holland; and Carole
Lombard, who was killed in a plane crash after selling a record number
of war bonds.

From the death of Carole Lombard, Dorothy moves to the death of actor and poet
Audie Murphy. The most decorated soldier in World War II, he also had the
courage to speak out about Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Audie Murphy was
killed in a plane crash on Memorial Day Weekend.

Searching for parallel histories in the stories of the men with whom her
first husband served, Dorothy then looks at the life of a WWII Naval hero,
Arleigh Burke. She reads a biography of Burke and is surprised by the appearance
of a manipulation of his life and career that is similar to what she has been
seeing in the lives of artists.

"I could almost see unseen hands pulling strings
to make the lives of a Naval officer and his wife
difficult."

The finale of Dorothy's part commences with a disturbing dream sequence:
Adolph Hitler's terrible change from a painter of watercolor scenes to a
mass murderer.

"The nightmare continued. Like a faded postwar newsreel,
fast forwarded into the twenty-first century on a VCR of uncertain origin.
I was not sure whether I was awake or still asleep.
Dreaming or remembering, I saw millions of people.
Like the people I had seen in the 1940's,
their backs were turned to what was happening."

Sid opens his part by speaking of Chiricahua Apache sculptor
Allan Houser's Morning Prayer that so eloquently expresses
the significance of the beginning of each day. Allan Houser's
father had been imprisoned by the US Government; his mother was
born in captivity.

Next, Sid speaks of Frida Kahlo, who, although severely hindered by a life
of pain, created an extraordinary body of work. He describes her prophetic of
neuro-interference self portrait Diego on my Mind; her death a
few days after participating in a demonstration against CIA involvement
in Guatemala.

Sid then looks at diversions and silencing in the lives of artists.
For instance, the African American artist Robert Blackburn devoted his life
to working with other artists in the printmaking workshop which he founded,
but as a result had less time for his own work; Alice Austen's 8,000
photographs, particularly her photographs of women together, are mainly
confined to a museum in the house she had to sell because of poverty.

He speaks of Margaret Mitchell, the writer of Southern historical
fiction who died when she was run down a few blocks from her home,
and of the hard luck that stalked the interracial cast of the movie
version of Gone with the Wind.

Clark Gable lost his wife, Carole Lombard, in a plane crash.
Hattie McDaniel, the first African American to win an Academy
Award, was only 57 years old when she died.
Leslie Howard was killed when the Nazis attacked the plane
he was on, although British Intelligence knew in advance
that the plane was going to be attacked. Vivien Leigh contracted
tuberculosis. Screenplay writer Sidney Howard was crushed by a tractor.
Butterfly McQueen found it difficult to get work as an actress,
and she died of burns after a fire at her home.

"And then something else I hadn't known,
that Margaret Mitchell had raised money for World War II,
that she had funded a scholarship for African American medical students,
that she supported the integration of the Atlanta Police Department.

She was run down only three blocks from her home."

Of the death of choreographer/dancer Arnie Zane, from AIDS,
Sid says:

"The losses to our culture are relentless.
I set them forth not to imply that tragedy is the fate of every artist,
but rather because I think that if they are documented,
it will become clear that there are patterns,
that the losses are beyond coincidence."

Sid's part concludes with a return to the work and life of Allan Houser,
and to Unconquered II, his sculptured memorial for the Apache people.
Allan Houser was the first child born out of captivity after the
Warm Springs Chiricahua Apaches were imprisoned.

Perhaps because of the surprising eugenics views expressed by
James D. Watson, the man who with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins
received the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA,
Gwen's dream takes her to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory,
where Watson is now head of what was once a notorious haven for
eugenics. And then, her dream sequence moves to an underground
computer system that houses a national breeding system, like that
once proposed by Harvard eugenicist Earnest Hooton.

"In the dream, I was in a room
where the records of everyone in the country
were stored on silent supercomputers.
The doors were guarded by uniformed sentries;
a group of people were gathered around a monitor.

On the screen, a complex visual came slowly into focus.
I saw my name and beside it,
details of meetings with past boyfriends,
known, I thought, only to me."

In the closing lexias, Gwen looks at ways that brain interference
technologies could be used to hinder the work of creators and places
this in the context of the virtual imprisonment of the creative community.
She speaks of the lives of scientist Norbert Wiener, who refused to do
Defense work after 1946 and began to have trouble remembering; of
painter/philosopher Mu Xin, who was imprisoned by the Chinese communists;
and of Japanese American painter Chiuru Obata, who was interned in
America during World War II.

Gwen's part closes with writer and environmental activist John Muir, who did so much
to conserve wilderness but died of pneumonia shortly after he lost the battle
to save Hetch Hetchy Valley:

"The spirit of John Muir walks with us
in the meadows, forests, valleys and mountains
but not in the Hetch Hetchy Valley of the Tuolumne River."

In the memo Ambros recommends flogging Auschwitz worker inmates
inside the concentration camp so as not to impact the morale
of the other workers.

Archie then speaks of how governments on all sides of the political
spectrum persecute artists:

"Poet Jose Marti chained in a Cuban prison by the Spanish government.

A century later, poet Heberto Padilla under house arrest in Castro's Cuba."

He suggests the potential for virtually imprisoning artists
using covert technologies and systematic life interference.

He calls attention to the documented existence of covert technologies --
weather interference and brain interference to control and cause pain;
technologies such as remote control guidance systems to commit murders
and to cause disabling events that are seemingly accidents -- and he emphasizes
that it is not necessary to prove that they are actually being used against
civilians, in order to legislate the use of these technologies as weapons
against civilians.

Archie closes his part with the words of African American
Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, who suffered from multiple sclerosis
and died of leukemia and pneumonia:

"The majority of the American people still believe
that every single individual in this country
is entitled to just as much respect, just as much dignity,
as every other individual."

Then she herself speaks:

"I survived a terrible accident.
I walk with crutches.
Now battle scarred, observing systems that others
do not observe,
I am not afraid to speak.

This is a story of the manifestations of covert revenge.

A call for the shared strength to acknowledge the presence
of attacks on civilians with intelligence agency technologies,
the courage to confront them."

scibe looks at the lives of skiers and skaters --
Gretchen Fraser, The Owen family, Dick Buek, Jimmy Griffith.
Reminding the audience that the US Army 10th Mountain Division of skiers,
snowshoers, and mountaineers won an important battle against the Nazi
Gebirgsjager, the "mountain hunters" that the Germans thought were
invincible, she suggests a possible connection with life interference
and deaths of our athletes and World War II history.

She concludes by returning to the dream that began her part.
Perhaps because she has been reading about mind-body control technologies
and sees the potential for controlling athlete's bodies,
scibe dreams of a wireless computer system that records the brain waves
of the legendary tennis champion Helen Wills. Symbolically, this dream
represents the triumph of athletes over the potential use of such systems:

"Her ability to anticipate the moves of her opponents.
Stolen by researchers and machines.

But she, winner of Wimbledon, stands tall,
wearing white on the green grass courts.

Remembered forever for her grace and skill. "

She speaks of the loss to everyone when our heroes and heroines are killed:
Pittsburgh Pirates Outfielder Roberto Clemente who died in a plane crash
when he was taking food and supplies to earthquake-stricken Nicaragua;
Britain's Princess Diana, who died after advocating an end to landmines.

Cassie points to a system where Intelligence agencies from different
countries do each other's dirty work -- spying on civilians in each
other's countries and then, as the US and Great Britain do, sharing
the intelligence. Looking at the deaths of musicians, she wonders if that
extends to assassination.

She speaks of the School of the Americas, (now the Western Hemisphere
Institute for Security Cooperation) where the US military trains Latin
American terrorists, of the role of graduates from this school
in the death of Archbishop Romero,
murdered while conducting Mass in a chapel in El Salvador,
shortly after he asked the military to stop the killing.

Cassie looks at the potential for new technologies -- such as brain
interference technologies that can disrupt work and cause pain --
to be used against civilians, and she expresses a plea for a coming
together of people of different political outlooks to fight interference
with our lives and environment:

"Who among us believes that scientists have the right
to experiment on people without their consent?

To use human beings as guinea pigs
because of their world view, beliefs, ways of expression,
lifestyles or heredity --
causing them pain, ruining their lives,
taking away their freedoms."

She closes with the dream sequence from Ask for Sanctuary:

I dreamed that all around the world --
people who work for our communities,
churches, people who speak for peace,
advocates for people and human rights,
advocates for animals, advocates for the environment,
scientists, doctors, psychiatrists, inventors, the media
writers, musicians, dancers, artists of all kinds,
veterans, unions, statesmen and women, intelligence agents,
and many others -- came together to expose the systems of persecution.

I heard their words.
And in the morning when I awoke
all around the world, in every nation,
the bells in the towns and the cities were ringing for freedom and peace.

The people and technologies referenced in Concerto are informed by three years
of extensive research, as well as of many years of working as an artist, writer and
arts journalist, and of working as an information specialist for defense and NASA-funded
industries.

The following links, which take you to other sites on the Internet,
may not be active in all versions of this work.

The narrative Revelations of Secret Surveillance and the Resource Pages for
Revelations of Secret Surveillance provide background material for those who are
interested in following the themes in Concerto for Narrative Data. The resource
pages include extensive references that document the existence of brain interference
technologies, surveillance technologies and intelligence agency stalking of the
creative community.

For links to biographical information on the people mentioned in Concerto for
Narrative Data visit The Lives of Leaders, Artists, Athletes, Scientists,
and Soldiers, the biographical resource that I compiled for Revelations
of Secret Surveillance and Concerto.

A few core references are listed below.

.............................................................................................. Judy Malloy

A Civil Action is a book by Jonathan Harr (Vintage, 1966)
and a movie written and produced by Steven Zaillian about the legal
case regarding the impact of pollution of Woburn's water.

After Carole Lombard died, her husband Clark Gable joined the
Army Air Force and flew many missions over Nazi Germany.

"...where he was led in his final years..."
Dorothy refers to the pressure that was put on Burke to take part in the
founding of the right wing Center for Strategic and International Studies.
see E.B. Potter, Admiral Arleigh Burke, New York, Random House, 1990.

Allan Houser, "Morning Prayer," bronze sculpture, 1987

Frida Kahlo, "Diego on My Mind", oil on masonite, 1943

"...It seems that like many other artists, particularly women
Alice Austen's work is under house arrest...."
The methodology, suggested by eugenicist Max Nordau's suggestion
that artists should be confined under guard and kept from reproducing,
is discussed on p. 144 of George L. Hersey, Evolution of Allure,
Sexual Selection from the Medici Venus to the Incredible Hulk,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.

Nordau's Degeneration (University of Nebraska Press, 1993;
original German edition: 1892) uses eugenic pseudo-logic to advocate
controlling artists and keeping women subservient.

Robert Blackburn, "At Home-Beginning", illustration in The Magpie,
22:2, June 1938, p.5

Blauvelt Mountain, (1980) choreographed by Bill T. Jones in
collaboration with Arnie Zane, was first performed at the Dance Theater
Workshop in New York City; music by Helen Thorington; set by Bill Katz;
lighting by William Yehle.

Allan Houser, "Unconquered II", bronze sculpture, 1994

"...In my mind, a disturbing eugenics-laden speech played and replayed..."
Gwen refers to a speech on the Berkeley campus by James Watson:
Tom Abate, "Nobel Winner's Theories Raise Uproar in Berkeley
Geneticist's views strike many as racist, sexist", San Francisco
Chronicle November 13, 2000.

A primary source of information on the history of eugenics in the
US is Edwin Black, War Against the Weak, Eugenics and America's
Campaign to Create a Master Race, New York, Four Walls Eight
Windows, 2003.

"And then, as if a writer worked on a terrible psychological
battleground for which a cowardly enemy held the knowledge of her
battle plan..."
Gwen refers to the potential for intelligence agencies and the
Department of Defense to use brain interference technologies on writers.
She postulates that a cowardly desire to control opposing generals might have
been the cover for the research and testing of these technologies on the
creative community, but that the covert use of these technologies on artists
is actually meant to enslave artists and writers in the way that
Communist countries do.

John B. Alexander, "Acoustics", in Future War, Non-Lethal
Weapons in Twenty-First Century Warfare, NY, Thomas Dunne Books,
1999. pp. 95-102 Details the use of high-power ultrasound weapons
on humans and the built environment. These weapons, developed in the US
by Scientific Applications and Research Associates (SARA) in California,
among others, have the capacity to cause pain, to cause inattention,
sleepiness, and fatigue, to disrupt mental reasoning. PPS (Pulsed Periodic
Stimuli) weapons also developed at SARA according to Alexander, are capable
of causing neurophysiological distress and perceptual disorientation.

"On my desk there is a copy of a memo,
written by chemist Otto Ambros when he was Operations Manager
at Auschwitz."
A copy of the memo Archie refers to, written August 9, 1941, was available
on the Internet but is no longer available. The case of Otto Ambros is
discussed in Joanne Tuck, "Preliminary Study on Ethics and German Engineers
During the Nazi Period", Context, Spring, 1999.

WR Grace President Peter Grace was also President of the American Association
of the Sovereign Military Order of the Knights of Malta. Although it may not
be appropriate to associate this with the conduct of his corporation,
or to indicate without evidence that there is a connection, it is of interest
to note that according to multiple sources, there are also extensive CIA
connections with the Knights of Malta.

"...US Military Intelligence and the Central Intelligence Agency,
who brought the men who worked slaves to their death
in the concentration camps where the V-2 rockets were built
to the United States to direct our Space Program..."
Archie is referring to Operation Paperclip. See Linda Hunt,
Secret Agenda, The United States Government, Nazi Scientists,
and Project Paperclip, 1945-1990. St. Martin's Press, 1991, for
a well-documented and comprehensive account that documents the bringing
to this country of about 1000 Nazi scientists and researchers under
"Operation Paperclip" which recruited Nazi war criminals.

National Security Archive, "The CIA and Nazi War Criminals"

The complicity of Marshall Space Flight Center Director Wernher von Braun,
Saturn Moon Rocket Project Director Arthur Rudolph, and Walter Dornberger,
(hired in the United States after the War by the US Air Force and Bell Aircraft
Corporation) in the deaths of workers and the brutal use of slave labor in the
Nazi rocket program is discussed in Michael J. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, pp 225-228.
U.S. Army Ordinance's role in obscuring Wernher von Braun's complicity
in the use of slave labor is discussed in the "Epilogue". (pp. 270-271, 278)

"...He ordered that the prisoners be whipped inside the concentration camp..."
Forinstance in The Plutonium Files: America's Secret Medical
Experiments in the Cold War, NY: Random House, 1999, Eileen Welsome details
experiments on American civilians and soldiers by the US Atomic Energy Commission.
Of Particular interest in the potential of staged accidents to acquire body parts
for experimentation are Chapter 8: "Ebb Cade" pp. 82-87 and Chapter 32:
Body-Snatching Patriots" pp. 299-312, which covers the methods Willard
Libby used to acquire 9,000 samples of human bone and 600 fetuses and human legs
from Massachusetts, Houston and other cities; and the accident
that caused the death of former paratrooper and Sun Valley ski instructor Cecil
Kelley, whose body was used to begin the human tissue program at Los Alamos.
Welsome concludes this chapter by noting that: "For many years, anyone who
died in the town of Los Alamos was autopsied, including visitors, whom
pathologist Clarence Lushbaugh called `extras'".

Experiments by Joseph Hamilton and his colleagues in Berkeley are documented
in Chapter 9: "Next in Line: Arthur and Albert" pp. 88-96.
Experiments on prisoners, including the testicular irradiation of prisoners by Carl
Heller at Salem Penitentiary are documented in Chapter 37: "Captive Volunteers:
Prisoners in Oregon and Washington", pp. 362-382. The failure of the Advisory
Committee on Human Radiation Experiments to adequately protect American citizens
and to place responsibility on unethical doctors is documented in Chapter 44:
"Closing the Book": p. 459-468.

"...The technologies for cybercontrol of our bodies exist..."

Note that some of these technologies could have positive uses, but the
ramifications of their uses have not adequately been discussed. Public dialogue,
legislated limitation of use, and an enforceable requirement of informed consent
(for instance for mind invasive technologies) would do much to validate neuroscience
research that is not invasive and may be of benefit. For instance, although there may
be instances where neural implants could help people with disabilities, to this author,
an artist with a disability, it appears that people with disabilities are, in some cases,
being used as an excuse to develop very invasive research and that neither the public
nor the disability community are being adequately informed of the dangers of the
technologies being developed, of alternative approaches, or of the potential military uses
of these technologies on the soldiers in our own Armed Forces.

Yet there is hope that if the public is adequately informed and protections
are in place, in the frontiers of neuroscience research there may indeed be
benefits for the disability community and for many others.

The laboratories and institutions that have and or are developing mind invasive
technologies include the US National Institute of Mental Health, the Central
Intelligence Agency, US Defense Advanced Projects Agency, (DARPA) the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration, (NASA) the US Navy, Princeton University,
Yale University, Harvard University, Vanderbilt University, Brown University, MIT,
the University of California at Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, (SRI)
University of Southern California, Stark Neurosciences Research Institute,
Duke University, State University of New York the California Penal System,
George Washington University, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, The University
of Michigan, Advanced Brain Monitoring, (Carlsbad, CA) Brain Fingerprinting
Laboratories, (Seattle, WA)Russian Penal System, Lauentian University, (Ontario)
Kyushu University, (Japan) the University of Reading, (UK) the University of Zurich
(Switzerland) and many others.

"...Union activist Karen Silkwood, who died in a car crash..."
Covert technologies to cause automobile accidents were used in the US by
British Security Coordination (BSC) during World War II and are likely to have
been adopted by other Intelligence agencies, such as the OSS (later the CIA) that
had close ties with BSC. Among the possible methods for staging accidents is the
use of remote control (RC) to subtly control vehicles. RC research and development
in the US includes Tesla's radio controlled boat, MIT-developed WWII guidance
systems; the US Navy's WWII TDR-1 Assault Drone and the US Air Force Global Hawk
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. During World War II Nazi scientists developed and produced
remote controlled demolition tank units

The potential for using cancer as a weapon of attack is not well documented in
non-classified literature but because causal agents for many cancers are known, such
a strategy for attacks on civilian populations would be possible.

"...The potential use of weather as a weapon..."
see Col Tamzy J. House and others, "Weather as a Force Multiplier:
Owning the Weather in 2025", Air Force 2005, 1996.
In this revealing report, the Air Force treats the control of
global weather as a battle strategy.

"...and strategies for behavior control..."
Ron Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy, Princeton, NJ,
Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press, 2001.
A chilling account of the role of behaviorists, and in particular RAND Corporation,
in formulating policies such as "rational choice" that could be used to make the
lives of those who challenge the prevailing status quo difficult.

Nathan Leites and Charles Wolf, Jr., Rebellion and Authority,
Chicago, Markham Publishing Company, 1970. A RAND Corporation Research Study
Through anecdotes and unsubstantiated evidence, Leites and Wolf present a
picture that advocates rational choice (hurting people so that they will conform)
as opposed to constructive choice. (making life better for better) Of particular
interest is Chapter 6: "Inflicting Damage", pp 90-131. RAND was influential in
formulating Vietnam era policy.

"...that every single individual in this country is entitled to just as much
respect, just as much dignity, as every other individual."
Barbara Jordan, Remarks at a symposium "The Johnson Years: LBJ:
The Differences He Made," sponsored by the University of Texas at Austin and the
Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, May 3-5, 1990 as quoted by the Order of Service--Good Hope
Missionary Baptist Church.

10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry)"Climb to Glory"

"On February 15, 1961, the entire US Skating team and their coaches
were killed in a plane crash."
Nikki Nichols, Frozen in Time, The Enduring Legend of the 1961
U.S. Figure Skating Team., Cincinnati, OH: Emmis Books, 2006

The loss hit me particularly hard, because I grew up in the same town as the
Owen family, and Laurence Owen was in one of my classes in school.

"...The terrible impact of circumventing laws intended to protect
citizens is demonstrated by the training of native Central American
terrorists by our own US Army.."
Cassie is referring to the School of the Americas, which was renamed
the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

"...is demonstrated by US Intelligence agency information sharing
with informants from Central American dictatorships that contributed to
the persecution of the church-based Sanctuary movement"
Cassie's observations are backed up in Ross Gelbspan, Break-ins, Death Threats
and the FBI, the Covert War Against the Central America Movement,
South End Press, 1991.

"...The US National Security Agency collected over a thousand pages
of classified information about Princess Diana..."
Vernon Loeb, "NSA Admits to Spying on Princess Diana", Washington Post,
December 12, 1998; Page A13

"...The musicians also. Their lives like hers. Like mine.
Lived in the shadow of relentless observation..."
Intelligence agency harassing of musicians is documented in Alex Constantine,
The Covert War Against Rock, What You Don't Know About the Deaths of Jim Morrison,
Tupac Shakur, Michael Hutchence, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Phil Ochs, Bob Marley,
Peter Tosh, John Lennon, The Notorious B.I.G., Feral House, 2000.

"...remember the Irish musicians excluded from British territory
in the 14th century. Remember the Irish musicians and artists
who were executed by Queen Elizabeth I."
The History of St. Patrick's Day - Irish Music. The History Channel
Queen Elizabeth I decreed that all Irish Musician's and artists be hanged
In the 14th century, Irish Minstrels, were excluded from districts that belonged to
the English Government. The British "Statues of Kilkenny" and the Penal Laws were for
the Irish akin to the Nuremberg laws enacted by the Germans against the Jewish people.

Natalie Robins, Alien Ink: The FBI's War on Freedom of Expression,
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993. p. 213
Robins documents FBI surveillance of writers. Among the many writers who were spied
on for years by the US Government were James Agee, Allen Ginsberg, Ernest Hemingway,
John Cheever, Randall Jarrell, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Muriel Rukeyser,
Langston Hughes, James Thurber, Kay Boyle and Mark Van Doren. There were at least
1,429 pages in novelist James Baldwin's FBI file.

Herbert Mitgang, Dangerous Dossiers, Exposing the Secret War Against America's
Greatest Authors, NY, Donald Fine, 1988.
Mitgang documents FBI and/or US Army Intelligence and CIA surveillance of writers
and artists. Among the writers and artists who were spied on by the US Government were
Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Alexander Calder,
Thomas Mann, Carl Sandburg, Dorothy Parker, Nelson Algren, Thornton Wilder,
Lillian Hellman, Truman Capote, Georgia O'Keeffe, Dashiell Hammet and Archibald MacLeish.

"I heard their words.
And in the morning when I awoke
all around the world, in every nation,
the bells in the towns and the cities were ringing for freedom and peace."
The dream sequence with which Cassie ends Concerto for Narrative Data is from Judy Malloy, Ask for Sanctuary, 2002-2004.