This story from Art and Seek, a culture site for North Texas, shows how the JFK story still resonates in the American imagination: Two Composers To Take on JFK Assassination Next Year.
One of the composers is an 18 year old musical prodigy named Conrad Tao.
For Tao, the commission is not about re-living the motorcade, the shooting or the funeral. It’s about our responses, about the shattering effects then and the long-term echoes – 50 years later. For Tao, the JFK assassination has become pretty much the air we breathe.
“I’m a first-generation, American-born Chinese,” he says, “but at the same time, I don’t think it’s accurate to say that I have no connection with JFK’s legacy or JFK’s history. I mean, it’s something that I’ve grown up hearing about, it’s something I’ve grown up experiencing.”
That’s why, for his title Tao chose a line from President Kennedy’s inaugural address: The World Is Very Different Now.