COMMUNITY CALL: YOUR STORIES

The Great Silence and Stealing Away are the first two movements in a new four movement composition, We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident, by composer Joseph C Phillips Jr. The composition is the first in a series of orchestral, choral, and chamber works which, while tied to the various themes of his eight-opera 1619 cycle, will also represent distinct, independent addendums and companions to the operas. The composition, commissioned by and for the American Composers Orchestra, highlights the physical, spiritual, intellectual, and imaginative ideas of freedom for Black Americans and how the desire of ‘what could be’ is actualized as resistance to the strictures of Black life within the country’s systemic inequalities and inequities.

The Great Silence, the first movement, reflects the physical aspect of freedom. It is inspired by Black-owned leisure spaces of the late 19th century through the 1970s, and how Black Americans would gather within nature to “not only be healed of the detrimental effects of city life” but “would also experience a soothing balm for the wounds of life under segregation” (Andrew W Kahrl, “AHistory of African Americans on the Water and by the Shore: Whitewashed and Recovered”).

Stealing Away, the second movement, is inspired by spiritual aspects of freedom, and those places internal and external where one goes to understand the larger world and themselves in it. During slavery, Blacks would gather among themselves, in clandestine meetings and hush arbors, to regain a measure of the autonomy, freedom, and humanity denied them in their daily existence—where people could sustain faith in a better life in freedom “when there’s nothing in the world that would allow or encourage you to think that it is reasonable or possible?” (Elias Rodriques, “How SaidiyaHartman Changed the Study of Black Life”). Today, organized religion offers the most convenient way to express those spiritual urges; Stealing Away, however, will also reflect secular formulations of hope, whether through neighborhood, political, or social organizations