The United States government has slid into fascism, says a group of Guadalajara-based musicians, and they want you to know it.
The warning is spearheaded by Colleen Blake, composer of a five-minute classical piece tinged with 1970s rock and based on a poem by Dylan Thomas, “Do Not Go Gentle into That Goodnight.”
She has assembled a cadre of professional musicians—eight singers and three instrumentalists, plus producers, technicians and musical director Timothy G. Ruff Welch, well known in Guadalajara and Lakeside.
Blake, a horn player retired from the Jalisco Philharmonic Orchestra, said she wanted to compose music since she was a child, and was influenced at the age of 19 by a horn teacher who held Thomas as an artistic influence.
In 2014, the centennial of the Welsh poet’s birth, a tune came into Blake’s head which would culminate in this composition. Then, in 2024, when Thomas’s poem became public domain and Donald Trump again slammed into politics, Blake’s ambitious project further coalesced. It drew on Thomas’s well-known opposition to fascism, said to spring from witnessing the German Luftwaffe’s bombing of Britain in World War II. Blake, who has long been involved locally with Democrats Abroad, was particularly incensed at hearing about roundups of Latinos by ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and, drawing on the popular view linking lack of due process with fascism, she connected the dots.
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