On Saturday, the percussionist and conductor Steven Schick looked through the wire-mesh fence that separates San Diego, California, from Tijuana, Mexico, and said, “Con la música nunca se puede dividirnos”: “With music, we cannot be divided.” He was addressing a group of Mexican percussion players, who were about to participate in a singular cross-border performance of John Luther Adams’s hour-long percussion work “Inuksuit.” I was standing on the Mexican side, where the wall is adorned with brightly colored graffiti and studded with messages, some sentimental and some political. On the reverse, a gray, institutional look prevails. We were on the far western edge of the U.S.-Mexico border. The land slopes down to the Pacific Ocean, and the wall descends with it, disappearing into the waves.
Read the article at The New Yorker.