Rights

In 1948, a subcommittee of the nascent United Nations General Assembly crafted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document which reflects both the trauma and the optimism of the immediate postwar period and is now recognized as a landmark text in the global history of human and civil rights. Anyone reading it, however, will recognize that many of its provisions remain wildly aspirational and unevenly distributed. It espouses ideals of which we perennially fall short, but which are still worth aspiring to. We must credit its authors for the fact that they valued these forward-looking rights, and for their strength to believe that the future could be better than the past. To create the text, I selected lines directly from the Declaration. I lightly edited some of them in order to make them more suitable for use as a text for music. I have set them in the second person in order to create a more dramatic dialogue between the singers and their audience. In making my selections, I sought to focus on the rights which are most relevant to our public discourse in 2024. These include rights which are resonant because they have been fully secured only recently, as well as rights which remain stubbornly insecure in some parts of the world. Scott Ordway (2024)