The past is still present.
1. We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident
We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident is a four movement composition commissioned by and for the American Composers Orchestra. 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. We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident highlights the idea of freedom and its manifestations in the physical, spiritual, intellectual, and imaginative for Black Americans throughout the history of the United States—how a “speculative knowledge of freedom would establish the vision of what might be, even if unrealizable within the prevailing terms of order” and that desire of ‘what might be’ was, and continues to be, actualized as resistance to the strictures of life within the country’s systemic inequalities and inequities. (Saidiya Hartman. Scenes of Subjection (25th-anniversary edition). Preface xxxi.) The work’s theme of freedom is an expansion of the focus of the Reconstruction opera, the second one in the 1619 cycle Till Paths Be Wrought Through Wilds, but is not directly related to the opera.
On March 11, 2026 at Carnegie Hall in New York City, Orchestra, the American Composers Orchestra will present the world premiere of the first two movements of my piece We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident at Carnegie Hall. “The Great Silence,” the first movement, 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.” “Stealing Away,” the second movement, is inspired by those places internal and external where one goes to understand the larger world and themselves in it. The work will feature video by Malik Isasis, partly funded by a 2025 NYSCA grant. The composition is a co-commission by The American Composers Orchestra and Carnegie Hall, and will be published by Boosey and Hawkes.
Header 📸: Oak Bluffs_1950s_Ouida Taylor from NMAAHC-2014_112_140_001