WE Blog

First came a Rumsfeld song cycle. Now there’s the Gonzales Cantata, a 40-minute work for soloists, chorus and orchestra based on the transcripts of two 2007 Senate Judiciary Committee hearings and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ 2007 resignation statement. Melissa Dunphy wrote the piece while still a student; it was performed at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival last weekend. “It’s about a man who made some mistakes and is facing the music. It’s also an exploration of how a man could so brazenly politicize the Department of Justice without really standing up for the reasons he went into politics in the first place,” Dunphy told the Wall Street Journal. Unpredictably, Dunphy uses female voices for the men in the story and vice versa. Predictably, the phrase “I don’t recall”  is frequently heard.