“Children of Conflict is a powerful, classical work of music. Over six movements it touches the very soul, as it brings home the senseless, destructive hopelessness of War, of conflict; the wider effect, the long term grief, despair and tragedy which eventually changes nothingâ€.
The above quotation is the introduction to Bluewolf Reviews perspective of Peter Xifaras’s latest work Children of Conflict, but who is the man who creates such powerful alchemy through the medium of music and vision; what drives a man to create such powerful music.
Who will speak for the children, who will champion their cause to a life free from conflict?
Peter Xifaras first came into my very small orbit some years ago with a stunningly beautiful album from the symphoneX Orchestra®, Music That Tells A Story. The work took the genres of classical and modern or contemporary and delivered a unique blend that was a creation of immense skill and talent, of love and pure enjoyment.
At the age of nine Peter began taking guitar lessons and by his early teens, he was proficient enough to fill in for his talented older brother who was attending Berklee College of Music at the time, playing rock gigs at the local Clubs.
At thirteen years of age, he found this a great eye opener, but it also solidified his future pathway, as he decided he was going to pursue music as a career. Naturally he followed his brother’s lead in pursuing music and decided to audition for the music curriculum at the University.
Audition day arrives and so does he, with his Gibson Les Paul guitar and amplifier, presenting himself to the panel of Judges, who were looking rather bewildered at the long haired teen who had arrived, perhaps at the wrong venue!
His choice of pieces was pure Led Zeppelin but fortunately he saw sense, playing the only Jazz standard he knew, the beautiful ‘Misty.’ He later discovered he was supposed to have auditioned on the classical guitar! The rest is music history. To this day he still plays both classical and electric guitar and is just as happy belting out a solid piece of rock, or complex jazz beat in either medium.
When the digital revolution arrived it opened a Pandora’s box for creative musicians, allowing them to tap into a vast and worldwide range of Musician, vocalists, orchestras and genre’s, which has created a flow of music that crosses boundaries, moves into new levels of creativity and allows vision and sound to combine to create powerful, touching, melancholic, beautiful and outstanding concepts.
Now we reach 2022 and the world is a vastly different place in which to create music. Peter reached out once again to promote his latest and to date most powerful work, Children of Conflict, born from a deep sadness experienced when Allied forces pulled out of Afghanistan, leaving behind a vulnerable people, once again placed into the direct pathway of conflict, destruction and devastation.
Then along came the Ukraine Russia conflict, presenting once again the same story the world has grown tired of trying to understand, the media, ever moving on to fresher news stories.
So how can a musician create something that could remind people and bring attention to the plight of children whose lives have been indescribably altered, their parents either gone, or so traumatised they are struggling to simply cope with the ever changing patchwork their lives and futures have become.
The catalyst for Peter was the John Ondrasik (aka FiveForFighting) video Blood On My Hands and as the song a says ‘I don’t understand what’s happenin’………. and so Children of Conflict was born.
It raises a flag to the children who daily are faced with simply trying to survive in the conflict zones of the world, children who have never had a choice, children who think to live like this is perfectly normal. Once you look into the eyes of the men, women and children captured on the footage that complements the orchestral suite Children of Conflict, it is incredibly difficult to say their lives are anything like ‘normal’.
Their deep sadness of their very soul, is there for those to see, who seek to understand and is captured once again through the eye of the camera, the weeping of the violin strings, the faces of the musicians who created the music, the passion and desire to try to make a change through the healing power of music.
Get behind the music, share it with the wider public, support the many in Ukraine and throughout the world, who are reaching out through music to offer hope, healing and love in a time when more than ever, or at least for a very long time, the World needs to heal.
“Prologue contains the words Fear, Destruction, ‘it was clear nothing and no one would be spared’. Epilogue holds the spoken words Fate: Despair: for the present, is where the opportunities of the future, unwindâ€.
Hauntingly beautiful and immensely powerful words. Bluewolf Reviews- Janet Mawdesley
