In these high-tech days, letter writing seems to be a lost art relegated to the past. Some musical artists are taking a step back into the past, preserving wartime letters soldiers wrote to loved ones for a recording project in celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday.
Words written long ago find a new voice as they’re set to music.
Letters written between U.S. military members and their loved ones have been set to music for the upcoming release of the album “Letters From The Front.”
The letters in the project come from archives and from soldiers’ families. They are raw accounts of life in the nation’s most crucial wars, from the American Revolution all the way to the Gulf War.
There’s a single thread: the soldiers all knew they might not survive.
“They weren’t looking for nice prose, or they weren’t trying to filter out words, these were just right on the spot, ‘This is how I feel. I don’t know if I’m going to come home the next day,”” said executive producer Ian Gindes. “They were speaking from the heart, and I think that that’s what really drew me into this.”
“Letters From The Front” has special meaning for Gindes, who has been a member of the Illinois National Guard for 21 years.
“It’s given me the experience to see people that actually have been in wartime,” he said. “These were almost diary entries to me.”
Gindes, an accomplished pianist, collaborated on the project with composer Patrick Zimmerli.
“The next step is we need to find the singers,” Gindes said. “It had to be somebody who actually specialized in Americana, because there’s a different type of pronunciation, and the wording that they used, the way that they sing.”
The result is stirring, especially for Civil War buff Charles Larimer, and for him, it’s also personal.
“Two of the letter writers in this musical program were my great great grandparents, Emeline and Jacob Ritner,” Larimer said.
Larimer first learned of the letters when he was just 8 years old. Years later, when his son was in junior high school, his teacher asked him to help his son with a history project.
“So I re-read the letters as an adult and just fell in love with them,” he said.
One letter features Jacob Ritner writing his wife, telling her how he would often lie awake at night thinking about both of them lying under the same moon and stars.
“It’s the man sort of expressing how he’s … despite how much pain he’s feeling of not being with his loved one, he’s like, ‘I don’t regret this. I have a higher calling defending the ideals of peace, of freedom,'” Zimmerli said.
Gindes said the letters are special because they’re “the naked truth.”
“At the end of the day, we – a lot of us folks, we just go home, we live our lives, and we don’t think about what some of these guys sacrificed,” he said.
The hope is that “Letters From The Front” will bring healing and gratitude.
“I think it’s easy for people to take for granted what we do have as Americans, and what values have brought us as far as we are,” Zimmerli said.
The album is set for release by this summer. There also will be live performances.
Larimer also has written a book about bringing his ancestors’ letters to life. It’s called “Love and Valor : Intimate Civil War Letters Between Captain Jacob and Emeline Ritner.”
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