6 Lives of Jack McBride

The work’s main theme is based on an old Gaelic theme from the Orkney Islands.

The idea to write a work which deals with the notion of global-historical time travel has always fascinated the composer. He gives here an account of Jack McBride’s six previous lives, which happen to be the times and places that fascinate him the most:

1. Auschwitz – During World War II approximately 4 million people, mostly Jews, were dragged from their families and homes and sent on trains to the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp. Jack McBride was among them.

2. Texas on a Sunday - 1850 – The early settlers of the wild western plains, stretching from Canada to Texas, built their farms sometimes several days’ ride from another human being. On certain Sundays the settlers from all over central Texas would come together at the church and after service and business discussions, they would dine together and enjoy one another’s fellowship. Jack McBride remembers.

3. Bounty - In April 1789, the crew of the trade ship was forced to mutiny against the captain, the notorious lieutenant Bligh. Aware of their crime against the British Crown, they sought out a remote uncharted island, where they set fire to the ship and lived out the rest of their lives. On the ship’s register: Thomas Hampton, boatswain.

4. Greenland - In 981, Erik the Red set sail from Iceland to explore and settle the land he called Greenland (he said “people would be more tempted to come if it had an attractive name.”) Most of thee settlers established themselves in Julianehaab, but due to increasingly poor conditions, they were cut off from the rest of Europe, and it is unlikely that any of them survived into the 16th.century.

5. Sermon on the mount - According to Matthew 4:25 in the Holy Bible, “Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and the region across the Jordan” met on a mountainside and listened to Jesus Christ preach his message to the world. A voice from somewhere deep in the past of Jack McBride’s transmigrations gives an account.

6. Masada - The year 73 CE, in the citadel on the eastern edge of the Judean desert, after probably two, three months of siege, the Romans could finally breach the wall of the fortress with a giant ramp and discovered to their horror that the occupants of Masada had committed mass suicide or killed each other. A witness through the eyes of one of the Roman soldiers