American Artscape Spotlight: Sacred Ground: A Commissioning Project to Commemorate the Tulsa Race Massacre
After the race riots June 1st, Tulsa, Okla. Photo courtesy of Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, American National Red Cross Collection
"This was a wonderful chance for me to do research about [the Tulsa Race Massacre] as well as do something creative in honor of the lives that were lost and the people who suffered.” — Anthony R. Green
For 18 hours on May 31-June 1, 1921, a white mob attacked residents, homes, and businesses in the predominantly Black Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The event remains one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history and one of the least-known—news reports were largely squelched despite the fact that hundreds of people were killed and thousands left homeless.
In 2021, to observe the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, the City of Tulsa asked a broad range of city leaders to think about ways to mark the anniversary. Bruce Sorrell, executive director of Chamber Music Tulsa, considered several ideas. In conversations with members of the organization’s board, they decided to commission Black composers and mark this centennial with new chamber music, both as an opportunity to bring the Tulsa community together and to ensure that neither this tragedy, nor the lessons learned from it, are ever forgotten. The project, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, also would provide a platform for Black composers whose compositions would help diversify the chamber music canon.
After a good bit of research, Chamber Music Tulsa settled on a group of four Black composers—one woman and three men, each with different compositional styles. (An unanticipated conflict unfortunately required the woman composer to cancel her participation in this project.) Recent conversations with the three remaining composers shed light on their thoughts about these important assignments, and about their works that will be presented in various venues in Tulsa beginning on May 31 and June 1, 2021, the centennial of this horrific event. Read our conversations with the composers in the new issue of American Artscape.
Visit the Chamber Music Tulsa website to watch the Thalea String Quartet perform Anthony R. Green's Sacred Ground: (... we can still feel the tremors... ).
