The music that's in all of us

And suddenly the music burst through the borders.

This was in May of 1999, in a city in the Netherlands called Alkmaar. Laura Hassler, an American woman who had been living in the Netherlands for many years by then -- who was a choir director and, in essence, the "town musician," the organizer of public music events -- had put together a concert for the town's annual honoring of the dead of World War II.

But the bloody war in Kosovo was then raging: Thousands had died; nearly a million refugees were streaming across Europe. Its horror dominated the daily news and Laura couldn't ignore it. She couldn't simply focus on the war dead of half a century ago, not when the hell of war