Gas prices are up. So is the cost of housing, utilities, education, healthcare, and—with the exception of a carton of eggs—food. The United States has entered a war with Iran and nobody seems to know why.
Meanwhile, the year draws closer to a significant milestone—250 years since the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Since 2016, a Congress-appointed committee has been planning for the occasion through the initiative America250.
It’s a natural time for introspection. The Trump administration, though, has made clear the expectation—through executive orders like the “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” that target institutions including the Smithsonian—that a certain kind of history be told in a certain kind of way. The America250 website features calls for celebration and civic involvement alongside AI photos of Americans with unnervingly perfect teeth, and a list of prominently placed sponsors that include BP, Amazon, and Lockheed Martin.
This all makes it thorny for cultural institutions navigating how to engage with a significant historical event when education about history itself has become politicized. In the Triangle, two upcoming concerts are using the anniversary to bring together multidisciplinary North Carolina artists for musical reflections that contend with the American experiment and how we have, or haven’t, lived up to its ideals.
Next month, on May 6, the Durham Symphony Orchestra (DSO) commemorates America’s founding alongside its own 50th anniversary with season closer Letters to America. The concert will feature two new compositions: a world premiere by DSO Maestro William Henry Curry and North Carolina composer Brittany J. Green’s piece, “Letters to America,” which was co-commissioned by the orchestra and recently saw its world premiere at Carnegie Hall.
More immediately, this weekend at Raleigh’s Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, actor Mike Wiley will give a live reading of the Declaration of Independence. The April 10 event, Well, I Declare: America at 250, is an installation in PineCone’s Down Home concert series and will feature musical responses to the document from Dawn Landes, Rissi Palmer, Jacob Sharp (Mipso), and Django Haskins (The Old Ceremony).
Landes, who lives in Chapel Hill, put together the musical component of the program, which features a mix of traditional and original songs. Revisiting the Declaration, a document with a “punk rock sensibility” that most people haven’t read since childhood, she said, felt timely, especially in light of No Kings rallies.
“[The Declaration] is a list of complaints about the monarchy. We don’t want a king. We don’t want one person deciding what we can do without representation, and we want to be a democracy,” Landes said, adding that people often expect the document to be “more antiquated than it actually is.”
Alongside the Declaration, Wiley’s portion of the event, Landes said, is textured with the voices of “people who were left out of this document—women, anyone of color—we hear Frederick Douglass, we hear some Elizabeth Cady Stanton.”
“The right to protest is what this country was built on—this country gained its freedom through that right. The document itself is the very symbol of protest. You know, some folks see it as a Dear John letter to the king and parliament of England. But it’s so much more than a Dear John letter. It is the rock of protest.”
mike wiley, actor and playwright
Both Landes and Wiley do ongoing work based on history. Landes released The Liberated Women’s Songbook in 2023, an album that draws on a rich catalog of folk songs related to women’s activism. Wiley, meanwhile, has made a career of staging educational documentary dramas that bring to life figures like Emmett Till, Booker T. Spicely, and Jackie Robinson.
“The right to protest is what this country was built on—this country gained its freedom through that right,” said Wiley. “The document itself is the very symbol of protest. You know, some folks see it as a Dear John letter to the king and parliament of England. But it’s so much more than a Dear John letter. It is the rock of protest.”
David Brower, executive director at PineCone, said that he hopes the event can “dig down and get to shared values that we’ve been working our way through for the past 250 years as a culture.”
The North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources echoes a nuanced approach on its website, with a call to examine how the “founding ideas were lived out, challenged, and reimagined by the people of North Carolina.” Its website features an extensive calendar of events and exhibits around the state through July.
For Durham Symphony Orchestra vice president Jesse Rosen, the Letters to America concert reflects the orchestra’s shift toward becoming “increasingly community centered.”
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“It’s been that way from the beginning, but I think becoming more involved with issues of civic consequence is something that we’re really interested in,” Rosen told the INDY. “There’s a lot of room to play great music really well and do work that resonates and connects with things that matter to people in Durham.”
Last year, the symphony held a moving program centered on the deaths of unarmed Black men by police. This year, in conjunction with the May 6 concert, it has an open call for letters that capture the “varied experiences of Black Womanhood,” per the website, with two letter-writing workshops hosted by North Carolina poet laureate Jaki Shelton Green.
With this, the event looks at the past, but also at our shared present and how it might look if Black women, specifically, had had their voices heard and valued from the beginning.
“I’ve been calling in more than just reflections, but also asking America if she were starting from scratch today, what would she build? What would she stand for? Who would she include?” Shelton Green writes in a letter-writing guide. “I started reflecting on how America has broken my heart, but also where I can still see the light. I reflected on what I still have hope for and what I’m willing to give.”
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