Posted March 6, 2025
When I first encountered Joel Thompson’s Seven Last Words of the Unarmed two years ago, I immediately thought, “This is a piece we need to perform.” Not only is it a beautiful, powerful, heartbreaking piece of important new American music, but among the seven men it memorializes is one of Dayton’s own, John Crawford III.
By setting to music the dying words of Kenneth Chamberlain Sr., Trayvon Martin, Amadou Diallo, Michael Brown Jr., Oscar Grant III, John Crawford III, and Eric Garner, Joel Thompson remembers them in a very different way than the way they are remembered in American history or politics. In Joel’s music we hear their humanity and their loneliness in the moments that their lives were taken from them by a world that somehow felt safer with them dead than alive. Exactly the same way that we hear Jesus’s humanity and loneliness in the final words he spoke as his life was taken by a world that somehow felt safer without him in it.
So it felt somehow wrong to program this work conventionally—with an overture before and a symphony after. Its emotional content is so powerful that it cries out for special treatment. After much thought, I conceived of the evening you’ll experience tonight: four beautiful pieces of music placed together to create an emotional journey from joy to sadness to pain to comfort.
How will you respond to this unusual kind of a concert? I don’t know. You might be moved. You might be angry. You might want to applaud each piece as you would normally. You might not. However your spirit moves you is fine. And after the music is over, if you don’t feel ready to just go home, please feel free to stay for a panel discussion on the experience led by Pastor Joshua Ward of Omega Baptist Church.
When I met with Pastor Ward and others to talk about the discussion, someone asked what I hoped the end-result of this evening would be. It was right after we’d performed Handel’s Messiah, and the first words that came to mind were from “The trumpet shall sound”: “We shall be changed.” Music has the power to change us, to change our hearts, to change the way we feel. That’s what I hope the music of Lili Boulanger, Joel Thompson, and Gabriel Fauré will do for all of us tonight.
– Neal Gittleman, Artistic Director and Conductor, Dayton Philharmonic