Art is not pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is a great matter. Art is an organ of human life, transmitting our reasonable perception into feelings. The task of art is enormous. Through the influence of real art, aided by science, guided by religion, that peaceful cooperation of people which is now obtained by external means - by our law courts, police, etc., should be obtained by humanÍs free and joyous activity. Art should cause violence to be set aside. And it is only art that can accomplish this. (Leo Tolstoy, What is Art?, p. 138.)

This quote raises many questions which, combined with other Socialist and Feminist issues, are the topic of this thesis. To what extent is art vital to existence? What are the internal powers of music that can be conveyed to a listener through music alone? What is our music saying, and are we as composers aware of how it effects people? How do the composer's feelings affect the listener's perception? Can music create peaceful cooperation between people? Could the music ritual ever replace the religious one?

It is through these questions and an analysis of my multimedia composition The Walled City Trilogy (the score and text begins on page 21 of this paper) that I intend to examine TolstoyÍs belief that it is through art that we can create and mold society, the will, and humanity as a whole. We are able to compose music that is an organ of human nature, essential to life.

The Walled City Trilogy was composed with particular stories in mind from the very beginning. Experiences that I had in my life that I felt were unique and honest led me to several prison stories. Through my experiences of having a loved one wrongly incarcerated and my subsequent involvement with death penalty issues, I became increasingly more familiar, both on an intellectual and emotional level, with the prison system in America. It is my intention to continue to write music based on a subject with which I am intimately close. My goal is to continue writing music that expresses my hopes for and fears of American society.

Why, though, bother to make music, if it is only telling a story; why not just tell the story? Why would artists go out of their way to state the obvious in so cryptic a form? There are some situations where language is inadequate; where thought and language are different. There exist experiences which escape language and which language is simply not equipped to communicate except by representation or metaphor. I was not trying to merely represent a situation in the Walled City Trilogy, but rather trying to immerse the listener in an environment where they might actually feel what it would be like to be involved with or live in the prison system. Through music, the audience should be able to enter this environment, to live and make decisions in this environment, without the physical consequences of the situation itself. I allowed the listeners to gain insights into a predicament which could then foster new thoughts and ideas. Their conclusions could be put to use in the real world only because they did not have to deal with the consequences of the situation. Had they actually been thinking for the first time about the situation after incarceration, it would be too late for them to make a difference.

How different would a man have felt about this prison situation than I? This has been an area of keen interest to me. Is there a difference between womenÍs experiences and those of the men they are usually reading about and listening to? Through my humanistic approach, was I able to show all audience members, regardless of gender, the emotional issues of this situation? Did they experience the situation differently than they had intellectually thought about it before? Was my concern for the prisoners and society portrayed adequately through my music?

My goal with the Trilogy was to revive feelings I have experienced, and then transmit those feelings so that others may experience them. I was less interested in transmitting the story itself than evoking an emotional response in a listener. This is the ultimate activity of my music. Music is a distinctly human activity where one person consciously hands on to others the feelings they have lived through, and consequently other people are infected by these feelings. Throughout this paper I intend ïinfectedÍ to mean that we affect people in order to influence feeling or action. In this sense, music has both the power to raise consciousness and empower the audience to follow a commitment or dream.

Music is not the manifestation of some idea of beauty, nor a game in which a person lets off their excess stored up energy. Composers need to choose music as something that is not used to promote ourselves, but rather to forward humanity and encourage solidarity. As is the case with many politicians, we must not merely obtain a social status with which we do nothing, for power in itself is empty. We need to consciously strive to make a difference in the world.

When we hear music we attempt to understand the composer and ourselves as well. Through the composerÍs individual style flow those general strivings and satisfactions which are common to us all. Music can create a union among people which affirms its position as an organ necessary to human life. It is through this common bond that humanity itself progresses. My suggestion is that music be used as a means to imprint the soul and the mind with what is good and evil alike. Composers have the power to make humanity stronger in the pursuit of what is noblest.

In our music, we must not only express feelings, but also must attempt to stimulate them. Music must be considered as intellect paired with emotions. A piece of music proceeds outward toward humanity when it not only contributes to the evolution of life or creates new values, but produces a meaningful moment: the moment which is the musical experience.

The musical experience is a distortion of reality. The experience is something that is separate from normal life, where listeners can move about within their own consciousness in the context of a larger community. Just as music is an altered sense of reality, so is the Catholic Church. The ChurchÍs cathedral is a machine designed to give you an emotional experience of a religious nature. Traditionally, it has temperature control, a large volume of space, carefully controlled acoustics (so that the choirs performing in this space actually sound as if coming from heaven), and stained glass windows which are all elements intuitively or consciously designed to blot out the everyday world and remove us from normal life.

Music frees us from our individual personalities and allows us to enter humanity as a whole. The musical environment is one in which we are free to react according to our own inner nature. Music, which can only evolve over time, allows the listener no chance at advance warning. It can powerfully stimulate the growth of impulses in us that we had never suspected. When we react we have no time to think or censor our feelings.

Is the musical experience a gathering of souls which form a community? Can this musical experience extend past the length of time a piece takes to perform or to listen to? How do we as composers make our music live on after the concert has ended so that we may, in fact, alter the course of humanity? Is there an equivalent to smelling a favorite apple pie which brings back feelings of nostalgia which are reactions to some action that happened long ago? Can we be forced to recall a musical experience based on certain external conditions?

Music is a temporal art and the basis for understanding it is memory. The job of historians is to record our collective memory. Through the traditionally male point of view of history, our pasts are catalogued for future generations to refer to. How do women look forward to the future when there is only a male documented past to recall? This places women in an awkward but potentially powerful situation. Women have limited role models with whom we guide our path, yet we are not limited by what past generations have accomplished. We have the ability to invent our future and write our own histories. Women today have as few political role models as they have musical ones. The women altering humanity at this point need to insure that their accomplishments are recorded for future generations. If we do not do it ourselves, it may never get done. Our ears must be well tuned both musically and politically. In reflecting reality, the composer reflects herself and, in the process, her time and class as well. We reveal certain truths about reality that cannot, or have not, been recorded in words. Composers are capable of creating a new language where ordinary language fails. Our music can be a symbol and symptom of collective realities which involve the fate of society.

Art and music are no longer required to be allegory, emblem, or votive offerings. In searching for a position in society, where does art now turn? To avoid being abandoned within elite society, and succeed in touching every soul and join the community together, todayÍs music must redefine itself in terms of a more powerful position. The music which creates solidarity is the popular music of the time. Today we see children growing up in a world where many social issues revolve around popular music. This is the music that succeeds, both in joining together groups and in making money. Our society then gets transmuted into the world of MTV. Although this music succeeds in creating common bonds, we arrive at hyper-stars. Musical heroes are born and die very quickly in this type of situation. In a capitalist society, we deprive the artist of creative freedom. In a society where a work of art can sink to the level of merchandise, art becomes alienated and impoverished - it loses its essence. When art is removed to this zone of safety, it may still remain very good art, and also very popular art, but its effect upon our existence will vanish.

Walking this thin line between popular capitalist art and obscurity, how can composers create music with both integrity and accessibility? If music is to truly create a bridge connecting what people can do with what they can perceive, how do we convey meaning? Society places several levels of meaning onto our music, regardless of whether we ask it to or not. All people have associations and emotions which become aroused while listening to music, although most do not understand how or specifically why. The more deeply entrenched we as composers and theorists become in strictly formal explanations, the further away we are from admitting that music has emotional power.

On the objective level, value judgments are constantly getting placed on every piece of music. Was it too long? Was it too fast? Listening subjectively, an audience member may feel that the music was sad or funny. We must understand that a great deal of people listen to music because they would like to feel happy or sad as well as for many other purely emotional reasons. Many academic composers seem to ignore that, but the average concert go-er expects to be fulfilled by music in this way. Can we as academics attend to them without compromising the essence of our music? If we do attempt to create so that all may partake, do we eventually become super-heroes who tend to stop confronting and demanding more from society?

I think it especially useful to todayÍs composer to fill in the answers to the listenerÍs questions on certain levels. We do not compose in a vacuum. Undoubtedly people associate certain sounds with certain meanings, such as church bells or a prison door slamming. Perhaps, if someone had entered the hall after the Trilogy had begun and the hall was completely dark, they would not know that I was intending to represent a specific situation. Although I usually choose not to include program notes, the mere title Walking Dead has certain implications. But our late-comer would have no information about what they were hearing. If nothing else, the referential sound of the prison door was exactly that link with which the average listener could easily identify.

Through these judgments and identifiable associations, an important part of the musical experience is constructed by the listener. The composition does not need to be an object with a clear identity, but a source of opportunities for the listeners to make and analyze their own perceptions. This way we involve the listener in our compositional process, without sacrificing our integrity. There is much that we do not know about our audience. I had no idea whether there were ex-convicts in the hall, District Attorneys, etc. Perhaps the only thing I could be sure about the audience was that they were all human and had all, at some time in their lives, experienced emotional reactions. Hitler believed that it was through the deeper strata of emotional nature that people were easily corrupted rather than either consciously or voluntarily. If society really is easier to reach on the common level of emotions and fear, perhaps composers will look to this to discover our common bond and attempt to create camaraderie and peace rather than using it for corruptive means.

What are the physical and emotional reactions that listeners have to music? How are you affecting people with your music? What are your intentions towards the listener? The listenerÍs mental activity should be the utmost concern to a composer. In Letters from Prison the intent of the constantly trilling pianos is to affect both performers and listeners. Both are trapped in a position where they need to be doing the same thing for an extended period of time. For the performers, the work being done is an accurate representation of the physical demands of being in prison. The listeners walk into an environment of unknown duration. Since the audience is not given program notes, and the concert is already in progress, they are left only to react to the music instead of trying to intellectualize the experience they were hearing. Unexpectedly the listener is arrested and thrown in jail before they have a chance to think about their actions and how to negotiate their way around the situation at hand. The element of surprise is left open to them. There is a marriage between performers and audience in that both are challenged to be in an exhausting situation for the entire length of the work. My goal is to place listeners in as challenging and important a position as the performer so that there is no hierarchical relationship between the two. Eventually, I hope to have the pianos trilling for an indefinite and extremely long period of time. In this way, audience members would be asked to share the responsibility of performing and become even more active in the piece. Music would become something that we could all be encouraged to actively participate in. It would not be something reserved for those who have devoted their lives to it. We would therefore move from an elite group which call themselves composers, to a society which works together to encourage change.

Listeners place meaning on music in the light of what they already know. Most people have no personal idea of what it would be like in prison, or what it is like to know that the state will kill you or someone you know in a matter of hours. What I am trying to do with works like the Trilogy is to show people things which they have not experienced, where all they can do is imagine a story about it. I invite the listener to enter a carefully designed environment and engage in an imaginative experience of their own. This is related to my transformation of reality into music.

During the real life murder trial of our inmate in Letters from Prison, there was a massive amount of information given by witnesses and experts regarding the crime. Yet in the final verdict, a jury is left with those facts, and with whatever story they create which fills in the missing information. A jury creates a story in their own consciousness from both facts and their imagination. In the same sense, I encourage the listeners to act as juries and to decide the course of our collective futures.

The meaning of a piece of music is not in the information it give us, however valuable and important this may be. Rather than knowledge, music increases power; the power to understand and evaluate experience. With this power, we gain the ability to look back and reconsider whatever intellectual decisions we have made in the absence of such an emotional experience. Emotions are weakened by thought, but thought is strengthened by emotions. What power can any thought have without emotion? In Walking Dead a listener encounters the gas chamber. Once inside the gas chamber the listener is left only to react to the situation at hand. Rational thought is no longer applicable. The ability to react (or the need to react) intensifies the experience. After having heard the piece, the audience is then left to think about the situation with a power and integrity which may not have been possible before the emotional reaction.

Barry Morris, a defense attorney in San Francisco who works on death penalty cases, questioned his role in the sentencing of convicts. He said that he believed that all the death penalty trials did were to give a jury some intellectual justification for a decision which they had already reached for emotional reasons. The juries had decided long before any trial whether they believed that an inmate should be sent to the gas chamber or not. They did not really need to know the facts before they sentenced a prisoner to death. (D. Slater, ñThe Death Squad,î The Express, Volume 14, No. 50, September 25, 1992: p. 12 - 18.) We need both facts and emotions to come to truly informed decisions about such a catastrophic question.

Music has the power to affect the will and therefore has an immense social responsibility. Human will can be described as the power of the mind to choose and control its own actions. If music is able to enter into the depths of our mind, composers ought to consider what power they have in promoting change. Composing is certainly a noble gesture which we need to treat as if it had all the power to coerce the mind. It is so powerful a medium partly because most listeners have little rational control over the way it influences them.

Certainly when we think of music as a means of creating a homogeneous society based on common experience, music becomes a powerful medium. Music does not just passively reflect society; it serves as a public forum for ideas. If composer have the power to model society, to what purpose do we strive? With the corpse of Christianity rotting, humanity can now be defined by the members of its society. No longer are we necessarily driven by submission to a male leader, but rather through our interpersonal connections to each other. We have used the design of the Church for too long as a model. It has been a model which has all but invalidated the feminine experience. It is a model within which individuals see limits as to what can be achieved and which diverts them from the issues at hand. We need to encourage action over prayer. Art is not an opiate, but rather a tool we can use to enhance our collective consciousness. We have the power to design a society that allows us the fullness of being human, rather than one that controls its citizens.

The ability to show tenderness and compassion towards every member of society would seem the ultimate end for me as a composer. I would like to try to create a society where all participate in shaping the future by empowering others to demand more of themselves and more of humanity. The ability of women in this domain should be embraced and fostered. Women need to realize that we have the strength and courage to forward this goal. Women for so long have been the keepers of family histories, the story tellers, and those who herald compassion, cooperation, and the community over the individual. Women had almost no say in how humanity was to be in the days of the Church. The creative potential of women, which is now coming to the forefront, is sure to create a profound forward motion in our society.

Today, rather than the Church, the law is the force that breeds fear in society. Looking back to Tolstoy in the initial quote of this paper: art should cause violence to be set aside. And it is only art that can accomplish this. The law merely punishes the violence that is continually growing stronger, whereas art can cause violence to be set aside and wipe it from society.

Could a composer knowledgeable in coercive techniques and with access to mass infiltration reshape humanity? How have we as consumers been coerced through the use of Muzak-type systems? How does this ever present and totally designed manipulation alter our mindÍs natural cognitive function? Muzak provides a type of security system and social surveillance by anesthetizing peopleÍs minds. It keeps us occupied and creates a false sense of security. Muzak successfully sedates the masses.

Music is the food of the mind and soul. It can influence the morale of a nation so that in times of stress everyone is able to meet serious challenges and emergencies. For generations there have been war songs, patriotic songs, protest songs, and work songs which have bound people together and made work more tolerable. Music could create a unified organic society. Our society has almost never been so unified that its parts equal anything other than parts of a whole. If we look back to the death of such great and powerful people as Martin Luther King, Jr. and President John F. Kennedy we obtain brief glimpses into a society where the sum of all the parts is much greater than the whole.

In the Church, we find the most common solution to achieving group bonds was by means of coercive persuasion. The repeating of words, in the form of prayers, over and over, seems to place the mind in a trance. In the case of the condemned on death row, resorting to prayers seems to be the only escape from reality. Those who have never been religious before begin the ritual of praying with the priest who reads them their last rites. It is the mere act of keeping the mind occupied that allows it to enter an alternate state that is attainable in no other way. Speaking requires too much actual attention to oneÍs own mind, rather it is the repeating of simple phrases that allows us to enter into normally inaccessible regions of the brain; perhaps the same regions that music reaches. We can also see this with the use of a mantra uttered during meditation. When we concentrate intensely on this simple syllable or phrase, we gain access to other dimensions of ourselves that we seem incapable of entering any other way.

It is possible that the more limits one places on oneself, the freer one becomes. The repeating of simple words, instead of making up complex sentences, allows the mind access to other regions. Schoenberg eventually limited himself to the 12-tone system, which he felt allowed him the greatest freedom to compose. Perhaps necessity is really the mother of invention. In Letters, I was trying to show the day-in and day-out physical life that was portrayed to me by a prison inmate. By placing listeners and performers into that same physical environment, the mind tends to wander. What would I do in this situation? These restrictions lead to what Steve Reich refers to as the psycho-acoustic byproducts of sound. In ReichÍs case, our minds become forced to hear other things. Inmates become forced to think of other things. For example, a common contraband item in prison is the hand-wound speaker. Most people would never consider winding the coil around a magnet and placing them into an available Styrofoam cup for a resonator. Yet what if we were able to get outside our normal daily lives, what could we imagine and make possible through resources currently available?

How much control does a composer have over a listenerÍs specific emotional response? On the first level it would seem that every individual has different emotions. There is probably no direct one-to-one relationship between experience and emotional response among all of society. Yet there is a commonalty between the emotions that joins us. Everyone has experienced fear, love, anxiety, yet we all have had different experiences to prompt those emotions. That emotions are recalled in memory, and that music lives in the memory, is the avenue which we must begin to explore.

Through music perception, memory, and imagination, composers look for a balance with which we can influence the mind. A type of musical ïa-haÍ takes place. For example, out of the blue we finally remember the name of our second grade teacher. How did I come up with that? We are not conscious of all the processes going on in our heads. Perhaps we remember this name two days after someone questioned us about it. What caused the information to become available then? How was our mind processing the information request for two days without us ever being conscious of it? It is this act of impulsive remembering that can make our music live long after the amount of time it takes to perform it. This can only be achieved if our music infects the listener.

Music is dangerous in its power to infect all without distinction. If the work does not infect people, no explanation can make it contagious. Perfect integrity in a work of art implies that all it needs for its explanation is to be found within it. What makes a piece of music powerful is that it is accessible to all and that no technical knowledge is necessary to it. We strive to listen not to something which the music describes, but ultimately to the music itself. The music is telling a story that no words can convey. In the act of listening we are brought into a total environment of emotions which a mere telling of a story may not be able to bring about. It can be taken from the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words. Nothing we can ever say about it can accurately represent what it actually is.

I believe that the degree of infectiousness of a piece of music depends on several factors: the individuality of expression, the clearness of expression, and the sincerity of the artist. In reference to the Trilogy specifically, my expression of the situation was always from my own point of view. It was not intended to be an outpouring of the facts, but rather an expression of my emotions from my personal involvement with a situation.

It is the clearness of expression that has become an important issue for me. If we are actually trying to compose music which is accessible to all, yet not driven by a capitalist need, we need to consider time and again this clearness of expression. If people lose all connection with art it loses its power. When composers work counter to the soul of humanity, the gulf between society and art becomes an unbridgeable abyss. The Trilogy expresses a certain situation, and it does so without program notes. The slightest indication of an idea which an audience can grasp is perhaps all we need to compose. Music has no power if it needs to be intellectualized; it never reaches that area of persuasion if the mind is too active. There is information inherent in the Trilogy that makes its meaning clear and straight-forward. The message is accessible to all; not just within a prestigious group of the musically elite. Composers that use bland formulas and overly extended program notes attempt to intellectually justify their right to be unclear. This is a myth we must destroy if music or art is to survive and if we expect anyone other than ourselves to listen to it with respect. People need to understand that music and art are not their right to excessiveness, but are as essential as food and shelter.

We are composing music that we intend others to hear. We as composers should not need to prove to the listeners that we are somehow greater than they are, and that they are just too stupid to really understand the music. We need to rebuild the bridges between the artist and the people. Art should destroy, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between listener and the artist, and also between listener and all whose minds receive the work. Something should be gained by the mere fact that the audience has experienced a challenging or rewarding situation together.

With the Trilogy, I was looking for a means of being clear, accessible, and creating an environment where the listener could actively participate in the composition. The music moves from the specific English of describing a prisonerÍs situation, to a musical representation of the death penalty, then to a totally abstracted situation. It was through this gradual removal of identifiable information that I tried to draw the listenerÍs attention closer to their own perceptions, so that they would be infected by the falling minor third in the Epilogue and that they would remember that forever. While the music itself moved away from a specific representation of certain individuals, the actual sound moved closer to the individual listeners. The situation expressed in Letters from Prison is a story over which no audience member has any control. It is merely a story being presented to them; presented on a stage. In Walking Dead I bring a generic situation of the gas chamber physically closer to the audience by allowing performers who hold candles into the aisles of the concert hall. No longer am I presenting a situation that has actually happened to a specific individual in the past, I am presenting a situation which is happening right then, to everyone in the audience together. In the Epilogue, the situation is moved into the future, and happens someplace no one knows anything about. By means of a series of small hidden speakers placed all around the concert hall, the sound originates from underneath you, or close to your neighbor, or somewhere from behind you, or above you, or from someplace where you have no idea its origin. It presents a situation which could happen to you, but you are never quite sure what the situation is. It is a way I chose to have the listener be totally immersed in a situation they could not negotiate. A situation in which they could only react because they had no previous knowledge about the event. The will must remain active in the approach to new and uncharted regions of experience for which rational guides have not yet been formed. Suddenly the person in front of you was the one being affected, then someone to your right. The audience is given some common ground which draws them closer to each other. The common musical experience bonds people together. Over the course of the entire Walled City Trilogy, we come to realize that it is not the fate of a particular person; it is the fate of us all. For in a society which imprisons, society itself becomes a prison.

As composers, we need to realize that we can, in fact, shape humanity, in whatever way we choose. We will mold society each in our own sincere, clear, and individual way. With the knowledge of how powerful composers are to society, we need to take full accountability of our actions; full responsibility for our music. We need to be courageous yet vulnerable by expressing our most intimate hopes and beliefs.

If humanity is to progress, there must be a guide for the direction of that movement. To date, religions have always furnished that guide. The religious perception of our time should be the awareness that our well-being, both material and spiritual, individual and collective, temporal and eternal, lies in growth and camaraderie among all people. Music can unite us all; music is conducive to human progress. Let us now give to music the same power we afford religion.

In primitive life there were no distinctions between law, morality, art, and religion. It is now through the influence of art, aided by science, guided by religion that humanity is to progress. With the cooperation of the three, society loses the need to submit to a leader. Everyone becomes equal, enthusiastically working together toward a common goal called humanity. We then come close to following MarxÍs theories stated in his ñCommunist Manifesto;î to each according to need, from each according to ability. When a group cooperates with keen emotional interest in a project, there is value for the entire community consciousness. The heightening of consciousness is a prelude to transforming society. It is a necessary precondition for historical progress. Art is an activity with which humanity transcends the present, steps beyond the threshold of the given; it is a mode of human expression that provides passion and the enthusiasm to foster the transformation of the potential into the actual. We must leave our audience with the power to make changes which will be completed outside the concert hall. In this way, our music lives on in the will of all who listen and are compelled to act.

CONCLUSIONS

Women need to allow their feminine qualities to show through in their music. To achieve anything other than token equality, we need to realize that women complement men, rather than compete with them. Why not work together with men rather than encourage divisiveness? Women need to free themselves from the restrictions which have hampered both their self-expression and development in the past. Instead of proving we can make it in a manÍs world, we need to consider that we may be able to build a society that better suits our hopes and desires. Feminism is a force of liberation for everyone, both female and male.

Women need to pursue their visions without compromise. Within the field, we need to stop teaching women how to write menÍs music, but rather begin to encourage them to draw on their intensely personal experiences as women. We need to be confident in our beliefs and create a structure of free and open interchange with each other to aid the empowerment of women in the arts.

Art may well save our own lives. It has the capacity to give people the strength to follow a commitment. The more we as women risk towards this goal, the greater our ability to make a profound difference in society for the greater good. We must passionately believe in our ideas and put them forth to others in order to be successful leaders in the community. We need to learn that we have power in expressing our fears, our passions, our doubts, and our anxieties. We need not censor ourselves in things which others may consider weak, but embrace whatever qualities we feel define our positions as humanists. By sharing our dreams and visions with others, we empower them to demand more of themselves and of society. Artists can both raise peopleÍs consciousness about an issue and alter its consequences. Women are in an ideal position to create an alternative to the social vision that exists today because we have been excluded from the sources of power for so long. Our social vision looks forward to a society of justice and equality, cooperation and not competition. The genuine needs of our community will determine new social policy, not profit or prestige.

In reflecting society through socially conscious music, we portray ourselves and our time and class as well. We not only look forward to shaping the future, we effectively write our histories which for so long have included only men. The contributions of women over time to society, history, and culture have been invisible. The function of history is to record significant events that shape the world in which we live. In a larger sense, history is written in peopleÍs dreams and aspirations. The dreams are the truth. We must not be sedated and merely hope for someone to include us in history; we need to make the commitment to ourselves and other women to insure that our struggles and successes are recorded for future generations to learn from.

Acting as social historians, women should allow themselves to become intimate with and vulnerable to their society. For it is only if we follow our hearts, take risks, and through our personal integrity that women composers can serve and restore humanity. It is a brave and courageous thing that we do.