Coventry Prior Authorization: Fill & Download for Free

Prior to the 1974 reorganisation the West Midlands built up area straddled three counties . . . Staffordshire in the north, Worcestershire in the West and Warwickshire in the south.On the 1st of April 1974 a new ‘made up’ county was formed from parts of Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire . . . called the West Midlands County. This was for administrative reasons and made sense as most of the build up areas were now a single unit.At the time the area consisted of two cities Coventry (1345) and Birmingham (1889) together with many large and small towns and a royal borough (Sutton Coldfield). Under the new system the larger towns became local authority boroughs in their own right viz: Wolverhampton, Walsall, Dudley and Solihull. Each also took small towns around them under their wing. This still left a collection of small towns in an area referred to as part of the ‘Black Country’. This is an old industrial area which was said to be the cradle of the industrial revolution. These were grouped together to form the borough of “Sandwell”. Note . . . there is no town called Sandwell and the name comes from an ancient sand well next to which a medieval monastery was built in the area. Roughly central in this area is Oldbury where the new offices of Sandwell borough council were built.Sandwell borough is made up of six ‘towns’ or areas viz: Wednesbury, Tipton, West Bromwich, Oldbury, Rowley and Smethwick.So after the 1974 reorganisation there were three tiers to government each having it’s own elected representatives. . . . . . .Firstly: National Government from the parliament in Westminster, London. . . next down . . .Secondly: County Government in this case the County of West Midlands. . . next down . . .Thirdly: Borough level government which, in this case, was the City of Birmingham, The City of Coventry and the boroughs of Wolverhampton (which has since also been made a city), Walsall, Dudley, Sandwell and Solihull. It is important to realise that each of these seven has equal status in terms of local government administration.That was the situation for many decades but has since changed a little recently . . . . . . but I won’t confuse you by getting into all that!!!!Hope that makes it a bit clearer for you.Just for fun does anyone know what these two are . . . . . ?

The bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were horrific. And there were absolutely legitimate.1. Military bombing of cities was regarded as acceptable during the war. German bomber crews who were shot down for bombing London or Coventry were never tried for war crimes or treated any differently as POWs than other German or Italian troops. The only fliers I'm aware of during the war who were tried for war crimes were some of the captured Doolittle fliers who were executed by the Japanese. Now days, deliberate bombing of civilian population by massed bombers is considered a war crime. Not so in WW-II where all sides engaged in this (the Russians probably the least but they didn't have many heavy or medium bombers).2. After Midway, it was clear that Japan would lose the war. They lost their 4 best carriers WITH 4 sets of their most elite air crew--pilots they would never replace. Japan's strategy from that point on in the war was to make the fight so bloody that the US would get weak and quit. As a result, on islands like iwo Jima and Tarawa and Pelileu and Okinawa, Japanese forces fought to the death. The garrisons on these islands were aware before the first Americans landed that they had no hope of victory, there would be no re-enforcement or evacuation. Their only objective was to kill as many American Marines and GIs as possible in hopes that we would get tired of the bloodshed and give up the war. The Japanese succeeded in a way--they convinced the US that an invasion of the home Islands of Japan would be incredibly bloody with millions of casualties--that almost any other alternative would be a better option. And they raised the tolerance for bloodshed and cruelty in the Pacific. Please don't interpret this answer as saying the Japanese deserved what they got. I'm only saying that after the end of the war in Europe, with tremendous bloodshed going on in the Pacific, there was more acceptance that any end to the war would be bloody.3. The Allies dropped flyers before the bombing telling civilians to evacuate the city (both cities for that matter). In short, we warned the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (as well as some other cities) that they were targets. You could never specify just one city b/c sometimes cloud cover would rule out one target (Nagasaki is a good example--it was a backup for the 2nd bomb--not the primary target). In any case, the populations of both cities got warnings to evacuate. My understanding (though I may be wrong) is that Japanese authorities threatened death to any civilians who did choose to evacuate a city prior to a major air raid that was warned of by a leaflet drop.4. The Allies in a number of different means (through the Swiss Ambassador, broadcasts on radio channels that reached Japan, declarations to the public and press) demanded Japan's surrender. And before the bomb was first dropped, the US broadcast on radio waves that reached Japan that Japan needed to surrender immediately or they would face untold destruction from powerful weapons. Meanwhile, Japan's senior leadership had met and the only position they found acceptable was that Japan would give up any captured territory (but not Korea or China), would keep all of their weapons, the Emperor would remain in supreme power, no military occupation or any foreign troops on Japanese soil, no war crimes trials, and Japan would retain all of their remaining military forces and weapons....effectively, the only position they found acceptable was a return to the pre-Pearl Harbor status with no penalty or consequences to Japan. And if you want to claim that Japan would have changed their position or this was only an initial bargaining stance, when the Emperor decided to surrender after the second bomb, the Japanese military attempted a coup b/c they wanted to fight on. Quite simply, Japan was given many opportunities to surrender and refused to do so until the Emperor intervened--and even then there was a coup to continue the war.5. An immediate surrender was incredibly important. By this time, the Japanese had issued an edict that no POWs were allowed to be returned to their nations. They had begun executing any POWs they had. For instance, there were over 200,000 Chinese soldiers who were captured by the Japanese and less than 80 were left alive by the surrender. You had a better chance of surviving some extermination camps in Europe than you did being a Chinese POW held by the Japanese. One camp with American prisoners in the Philippines, the POWs were herded in to an air-raid bunker, the doors blocked, gasoline poured in the vents and it was set afire. This was also done to another prison full of US fliers in Tokyo. The day AFTER the surrender, the Japanese beheaded 15 US POWs at Fakuada Air Base--they'd already surrendered and they were choosing to kill as many POWs as they could rather than hand them over alive. In New Guinea, word of the surrender was received and the Japanese commander ordered some Indian and Australian POWs killed and their livers eaten in a special dinner. If the war had dragged on another 3-6-9 months, it's likely all allied POWs would have met the fate of the Chinese prisoners. To let the war go on longer was to stand by and let the Japanese kill POWs, mostly in very barbaric ways.6. A ground invasion of Japan would have been a bloodbath of the highest kind. US casualty estimates (based on fighting in places like Okinawa) assumed US casualties of 1.4-2 million (with about 400,000 dead) and Japanese deaths numbering around 5-10 million. The Japanese knew they couldn't win so their strategy for defending the home islands was to make the invasion as bloody as possible. Women were given bamboo spears and were being trained to charge machine guns. Children were given mines and told to run up and detonate the mine against a tank--they were turning their children into suicide bombers. Given US firepower, it's reasonable to assume that rather then sacrifice personnel, the US would first use artillery to pound the ground in their path. Or use strategic bombers to carpet-bomb the ground prior to an assault. And Russia invaded Japan at the end but could only seize Sakhlin Island before the war ended. A longer ground campaign would have seen them seize Hokkaido and annex it just like they did with Sakhalin Island. Japan would have been a burnt out shell by the time the invasion was over. Many more people killed, the island completely leveled, the North of Japan gone--taken by the Soviet Union for perpetuity, and much more ill-will and hatred aimed at Japan.I won't say that Japan was lucky to have had the atom bomb dropped on their cities. But I can say that all of the realistic alternatives to the atom bomb would have been far worse. Imagine if the allies had invaded Japan (while continuing conventional bombing by B-29s), conquered the nation only to discover that all 200,000 allied POWs had been executed prior to the invasion by the Japanese military?

It really comes down to how you articulate what is a political event in origin and what is an event that has had direct political ramifications. For the sake of this question I have included both and focused on major 20th/21st century compositions. Here are a few offerings that first come to mind (ordered chronologically):Quatuor pour la fin du temps (1941) by Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992)Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered World War II. He was captured by the German army in June 1940 and imprisoned in Stalag VIII-A, a prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz, Germany (now Zgorzelec, Poland). While in transit to the camp, Messiaen showed the clarinetist Henri Akoka, also a prisoner, the sketches for what would become Abîme des oiseaux. Two other professional musicians, violinist Jean le Boulaire and cellist Étienne Pasquier, were among his fellow prisoners, and after he managed to obtain some paper and a small pencil from a sympathetic guard (Carl-Albert Brüll, 1902-1989), Messiaen wrote a short trio for them; this piece developed into the Quatuor for the same trio with himself at the piano. The combination of instruments is unusual, but not without precedent: Walter Rabl had composed for it in 1896, as had Paul Hindemith in 1938.The quartet was premiered at the camp, outdoors and in the rain, on 15 January 1941. The musicians had decrepit instruments and an audience of about 400 fellow prisoners and guards. Messiaen later recalled: "Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension."Brüll provided paper and isolation for composing, and he also helped acquire the three other instruments. By forging papers with a stamp made from a potato, Brüll even helped the performers to be liberated shortly after the performance. After the war, Brüll made a special trip to visit Messiaen, but was sent away and told the composer would not see him.Ode to Napoleon (1942) by Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)The Ode to Napoleon for Reciter, String Quartet, and Piano was composed during the Second World War as a protest against tyranny. Lord Byron’s poem castigating Napoleon served the composer in expressing his own feelings concerning latter-day tyrants. For this purpose a reciter is used, declaiming in the manner of inflected speech – resembling the Sprechstimme of the composer’s Pierrot Lunaire, which is notated precisely by means of notes written above and below a single-line staff. Most of the principal musical figures are derived from these inflections, the Reciter often participating with the instrumentalists in the exposé of the musical ideas.A Survivor from Warsaw (1947) by Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)The initial inspiration for the work was a suggestion from the Russian émigrée dancer Corinne Chochem for a work to pay tribute to the Holocaust victims of the German Third Reich.[...] The narration depicts the story of a survivor from the Warsaw ghetto during the Second World War, from his time in a concentration camp. The narrator does not remember how he ended up living in the Warsaw sewers. One day, in the camp, the Nazi authorities held a roll call of a group of Jews. The group tried to assemble, but there was confusion, and the guards beat the old and ailing Jews who could not line up quickly enough. Those Jews left on the ground were presumed to be dead, and the guards asked for another count, to see how many would be deported to the death camps. The guards ask for a faster and faster head count, and the work culminates as the Jews begin to sing the prayer Shema Yisroel. In Schoenberg’s piece, the creed ends with Deuteronomy 6:7, which reads “and when thou liest down, and when thou riseth up."Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960) by Krzysztof Penderecki (1933- )Penderecki later said, "It existed only in my imagination, in a somewhat abstract way." When he heard an actual performance, "I was struck by the emotional charge of the work...I searched for associations and, in the end, I decided to dedicate it to the Hiroshima victims". The piece tends to leave an impression both solemn and catastrophic, earning its classification as a threnody. On 12 October 1964, Penderecki wrote, "Let the Threnody express my firm belief that the sacrifice of Hiroshima will never be forgotten and lost."Canti di vita e d'amore: sul ponte di Hiroshima (1962) by Luigi Nono (1924-1990)War Requiem (1962) by Benjamin Britten (1918-1976)The War Requiem [...] was commissioned to mark the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, which was built after the original fourteenth-century structure was destroyed in a World War II bombing raid.[...] Britten, a pacifist, was inspired by the commission, which gave him complete freedom in deciding what to compose. He chose to set the traditional Latin Mass for the Dead interwoven with nine poems about war by the English poet Wilfred Owen. Owen, who was born in 1893, was serving as the commander of a rifle company when he was killed in action on 4 November 1918 during the crossing of the Sambre-Oise Canal in France, just one week before the Armistice. Although he was virtually unknown at the time of his death, he has subsequently come to be revered as one of the great war poets.[...] Britten dedicated the work to Roger Burney, Piers Dunkerley, David Gill, and Michael Halliday. Burney and Halliday, who died in the war, were friends of Peter Pears and Britten, respectively. According to the Britten-Pears Foundation website, Dunkerley, "one of Britten's closest friends, took part in the 1944 Normandy landings. Unlike the other dedicatees, he survived the war but committed suicide in June 1959, two months before his wedding." None of the other dedicatees have known graves, but are commemorated on memorials to the missingRicorda cosi ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz (1965) by Luigi Nono (1924-1990)A floresta é jovem e cheja de vida (1966) by Luigi Nono (1924-1990)Al gran sole carico d'amore (1975) by Luigi Nono (1924-1990)The People United Will Never Be Defeated! (1975) by Frederic Rzewski (1938- )The song on which the variations is based is one of many that emerged from the Unidad Popular coalition in Chile between 1969 and 1973, prior to the overthrow of the Salvador Allende government. Rzewski composed the variations in September and October 1975, as a tribute to the struggle of the Chilean people against a newly imposed repressive regime; indeed the work contains allusions to other leftist struggles of the same and immediately preceding time, such as quotations from the Italian traditional socialist song "Bandiera Rossa" and the Bertolt Brecht-Hanns Eisler "Solidarity Song."Nixon in China (1987) by John Adams (1947- )As a child growing up in New Hampshire and having for a mother an old-school liberal Democrat, an active selfless party volunteer, I developed early on a fascination for American political life. The city of Concord, where I attended high school, was the nerve central of the presidential primary campaigns which rolled into town every four years, bringing with them the obligatory discharges of hot air, free canapés, and air-brushed, glad-handing candidates. I shook JFK’s hand the night before he won the New Hampshire primary in 1960, and the first vote I ever cast was for the maverick Eugene McCarthy, whose 1968 campaign ultimately signaled the resignation of Lyndon Johnson and the slow winding down of the Vietnam War. So it was somewhat of a natural fit when the topic of Richard Nixon, Mao Tse-tung, capitalism, and communism should be proposed to me as the subject for an opera. The idea was that of the stage director Peter Sellars, whom I’d met–in New Hampshire, fittingly enough–in the summer of 1983. I was slow to realize the brilliance of his idea, however. By 1983 Nixon had become the stuff of bad, predictable comedy routines, and it was difficult to untangle my own personal animosity–he’d tried to send me to Vietnam–from the larger historical picture. But when the poet Alice Goodman agreed to write a verse libretto in couplets, the project suddenly took on an wonderfully complex guise, part epic, part satire, part a parody of political posturing, and part serious examination of historical, philosophical, and even gender issues. All of this centered on six extraordinary personalities: the Nixons, Chairman Mao and Chiang Ch’ing (a.k.a. Madame Mao), Chou En-lai, and Henry Kissinger. Was this not something, both in the sense of story and characterization, that only grand opera could treat?Different Trains (1988) by Steve Reich (1936- )During World War II, Reich made train journeys between New York and Los Angeles to visit his parents, who had separated. Years later, he pondered the fact that, as a Jew, had he been in Europe instead of the United States at that time, he might have been travelling in Holocaust trains.The Death of Klinghoffer (1991) by John Adams (1947- )[...] The story was of the 1984 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro by Palestinian terrorists and their eventual murdering of one of the passengers, a retired, wheelchair-bound American Jew named Leon Klinghoffer.On the Transmigration of Souls (2002) by John Adams (1947- )In an interview Adams explained: "I want to avoid words like 'requiem' or 'memorial' when describing this piece because they too easily suggest conventions that this piece doesn't share. If pressed, I'd probably call the piece a 'memory space.' It's a place where you can go and be alone with your thoughts and emotions. The link to a particular historical event – in this case to 9/11 – is there if you want to contemplate it. But I hope that the piece will summon human experience that goes beyond this particular event."Doctor Atomic (2005) by John Adams (1947- )[...] The work focuses on the great stress and anxiety experienced by those at Los Alamos while the test of the first atomic bomb (the "Trinity" test) was being prepared.[...]The first act takes place about a month before the bomb is to be tested, and the second act is set in the early morning of July 16, 1945 (the day of the test). During the second act, time frequently slows down for the characters and then snaps back into reality. The opera ends in the final, prolonged moment before the bomb is detonated. Although the original commission for the opera suggested that U.S. physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the "father of the atomic bomb," be fashioned as a 20th-century Doctor Faustus, Adams and Sellars deliberately attempted to avoid this characterization. Alice Goodman worked for two years with Adams on the project before leaving, objecting to the characterization of Edward Teller, as dictated by the original commission.Katrina Ballads (2007) by Ted Hearne (1982- )WTC 9/11 (2010) by Steve Reich (1936- )[...] In January 2010, Reich decided to use voice recordings related to the September 11 attacks, specifically recordings from the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the New York City Fire Department (FDNY), as well as parts of interviews with friends and neighbors of Reich that lived in Manhattan at the time of the attacks. Reich's son, daughter-in law, and granddaughter were staying in Reich's apartment, four blocks from the World Trade Center, at the time of the attacks.