Caleb Middleton

About this Offering

“When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.” —Jimi Hendrix

For my peace offering, I decided to write a short composition using the text from a famous quote by Jimi Hendrix. I was inspired by this quote because of everything that is going on in the world today. In today's world, the love of power has taken over our communities and our governments. People care more about their political positions than the actual lives of other human beings. When politicians and people in authoritative positions stop abusing their power, then the world will begin to know peace. The question at hand is when will the abuse of power stop? When will black people stop being gunned down by the men that swore to protect us? When will women be given equal rights and be treated with the respect they deserve? When will members of the LGBT community be allowed to be who they are without being persecuted by those who are too stubborn to accept that love is love? The issue is that the people abusing their power know that it is wrong, but they are too afraid to lose their position of power that they disregard basic human rights. When all humans start to love their neighbor as themselves and start to treat everyone with the same respect, then we will begin to have peace.

When I began writing this piece, I had a hard time deciding what chord structure I wanted to follow. As I began writing, I decided that I wanted certain words to be on certain chords. For example, on measure 4, I decided to use a minor chord to signify the change of thought into the negative portion of the text. The “love of power” is something that we don’t want in this world, so I used a minor chord with a suspended second to signify the hate in that phrase. I added a rest at the end of measure 5 to indicate that the positivity of the text is being introduced again. On measure 6, I added the word “Then” to the text in order to have a better transition of lyrics after the rest I added in the previous measure. Lastly, in measure 9–12, I had the alto and tenor repeat the phrase, “the world will know peace.” because of the textual significance that it holds. That ending phrase is the goal that we all strive for so I decided that it needed to be repeated to make sure that the text is the last thing that listeners remember.

Daily Peace Action

One thing that we can all do is treat others with respect and love our neighbors as ourselves. Everyone deserves to be treated equally even if you do not agree with what they are doing.