In 2003, Maestro William Henry Curry was in the process of assembling a program for the Indianapolis Symphony.
“A friend of a friend told me about a young African American musical genius who just finished an orchestral work,” remembers Curry, now the music director for the Durham Symphony Orchestra. Curry looked at the composition, Herman Whitfield III’s Scherzo No. 2 in E Minor, and immediately sensed that he was in the presence of an “intriguing and extremely original talent.” He selected the piece for his program. It received a standing ovation.
Curry became a mentor to Whitfield, who was only 20 at the time, and they remained in close contact for several years before eventually falling out of touch. In 2022, Curry received an email from Whitfield’s parents: the young composer had died in police custody, they informed him, while suffering from a mental health crisis. They had called for an ambulance but got law enforcement instead. Whitfield was unarmed.
Whitfield’s story, a tragically familiar archetype in contemporary American life, is one of many that animates Voices of the Unarmed: Justice, Love, Resilience, the Durham Symphony Orchestra’s Valentine’s Day program.
The free concert—which will take place at The Carolina Theatre on February 14, in the middle of Black History Month—is anchored by three works: Whitfield’s own Overture-Fanfare in D Major, which will have its world premiere; Joel Thompson’s “Seven Last Words of the Unarmed,” for orchestra and chorus; and Maestro Curry’s “Eulogy for a Dream.”
The latter two compositions set existing words to music, though to vastly different emotional ends. Thompson’s piece—at turns haunting, tender, and furious—draws from the last words spoken by seven unarmed Black men who were killed by police (with the exception of Trayvon Martin, who was shot by George Zimmerman, coordinator of his neighborhood watch). Curry’s composition, meanwhile, excerpts various writings and speeches by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and is uniformly rousing.
An important component of the Voices of the Unarmed program will take place without any musical accompaniment. The Symphony has planned a series of community conversations as a way to explore the ideas raised by the concert—which range from political exigencies like police reform to such weighty and difficult-to-define concepts as love and justice—in greater depth.
A planned forum with the composers and Whitfield’s parents, who will attend the performance as special guests, will bring together local organizations like the Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham, Restorative Justice Durham, and Durham Community Safety’s HEART Program, which provides the kind of non-police crisis response that might have saved the life of Herman Whitfield.
Preceding the concert, Curry and Thompson—visiting from Texas, where he is currently the Houston Grand Opera’s composer-in-residence—will meet with students and teachers in Durham Public Schools. A panel discussion at the end of the night will give audience members the opportunity to engage with the composers.
“This program,” Curry says, “is meant to be about listening”—to the music, yes, and also to the stories that inhabit it.
When the orchestra premieres Whitfield’s Overture-Fanfare in D Major, for example, it will be impossible to forget the fact that less than two months ago, an Indianapolis jury found the officers involved in Whitfield’s death not guilty on all charges. Even though the coroner’s office ruled Whitfield’s death a homicide, defense lawyers argued that health issues—the composer’s enlarged heart—not excessive police force, were at fault. Whitfield was heard on body camera footage saying “I can’t breathe” while officers held him in a prone restraint.
It is impossible, upon hearing Whitfield’s story, not to think of Eric Garner, whose death under similar circumstances in 2014—and the subsequent failure of a grand jury to indict the officer who placed Garner in a chokehold—led to nationwide protest.
In fact, it was Garner’s killing in 2014 that compelled Joel Thompson to compose “Seven Last Words of the Unarmed,” which will be performed after Whitfield’s Overture-Fanfare. Thompson says he wrote the piece as a kind of “journal entry”—a way to process and give musical form to “the sense of worthlessness that I felt in the wake of the lack of indictment in the Eric Garner case, the lack of justice in all of the cases.”
In composing the piece, Thompson reached back to Haydn’s “Seven Last Words of Christ” as a structural template. (He also borrowed an eighteenth-century French Burgundian motif—“The armed man should be feared”—to great effect.)
Each of Thompson’s movements corresponds to one of Haydn’s, except that the last words of Jesus have been replaced by the last words of, among others, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Amadou Diallo. Where Haydn’s Christ says, “I’m thirsty,” for example, Thompson conjures the anguished last words of Oscar Grant: “You shot me!”
“I feel like every Black artist that addresses the scourge of police brutality or the proximity of death in Black life always has in the back of their mind that this can be me.”
“I feel like every Black artist that addresses the scourge of police brutality or the proximity of death in Black life,” Thompson says, “always has in the back of their mind that this can be me.”
“To be on the same program as a fellow Black composer who was murdered,” he continues, “is that voice in the back of your head made real.”
Thompson nevertheless hopes that his composition, for all of its unflinching representations of tragedy, will bring healing and understanding. “Every time this piece is performed,” he says, “I learn something about myself, about my society, about my community. I see people, even if it’s for a brief second—their hearts open.”
“And I really hope,” Thompson says, “that the Durham community can see the life that was robbed when they bear witness to Whitfield’s creation.”
Ben Haas, director of the Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham, holds on to a similar kind of hope. He tells the INDY that “violence is a very distancing, traumatizing reality,” but that “in any community, even in one that’s being torn apart, there are people singing songs.”
Voices of the Unarmed concludes with Curry’s “Eulogy for a Dream,” which is right for the occasion. Like Dr. King’s speeches, from which its text is drawn, the piece manages immense gravity without sinking into despair. The music stirs and soars, as befits the Civil Rights icon.
The connection to Dr. King in “Eulogy for a Dream” is more than textual: the impetus for Curry’s composition actually came from Coretta Scott King, who suggested that he set her husband’s words to music when she and Curry met in 1985.
“We must be critical thinkers—and critical rememberers—about the problems of democracy.”
History looms large for Curry, who has been the Durham Symphony’s maestro since 2009; he counts Lincoln among his greatest heroes and is prone to quoting him in conversation.
“We must be critical thinkers—and critical rememberers—about the problems of democracy,” Curry says. “What can we learn from people that have been given these burdens that seem to be unendurable?”
Voices of the Unarmed reminds us that we disregard the past at our peril. Curry’s father was born a mere 50 years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
Curry remembers, at the age of ten, encountering two drinking fountains on a family trip to Virginia: one “white,” one “colored.” We can’t make sense of Herman Whitfield’s death without this history in mind.
“Eulogy for a Dream” ends with a line from Dr. King’s most famous speech. It articulates precisely what Curry and Thompson hope that Voices of the Unarmed might achieve: “We will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.”
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