‘Front-row seat to history’: The Baltimore Choral Arts Society mixes art with a call to action

BALTIMORE -- The Baltimore Choral Arts Society sings Amadou Diallo’s last words slowly and softly, as if they were a prayer or an invocation of a blessing.

“Mom I’m going,” the group sings, while the piano picks out a delicate melody. “Mom, I’m going to college.”

For all of the tragedy of what happened in real world after the 23-year-old said those words, there is something beautiful and almost holy in the way the choir’s voices swell in hope and triumph.

It is the message Diallo left on his mother’s answering machine in 1999, minutes before he was fatally shot 19 times by four New York City Police Officers after reaching into his pocket for what turned out to be his wallet.

And it is just one of the stories in music told by Joel Thompson’s “Seven Last Words of the Unarmed,” a work scored for a chorus, piano and string quartet that memorializes the lives of seven Black men killed by police officers. The Choral Arts Society is launching its 58th season Nov. 5 with a program titled “The Human Requiem,” which intertwines Thompson’s “Seven Last Words” with Johannes Brahms’ 1868 masterpiece “A German Requiem.”

But the Nov. 5 concert is intended to be much more than just a performance. It also is a call to action.

The music will be accompanied by video projections created by Camille Tassi, resulting in what music director Anthony Blake Clark describes as an immersive audio-visual experience.

Following the concert, a panel discussion will be held on policing and excessive force from the perspectives of a Baltimore police officer, a representative of Safe Streets (a Baltimore program that aims to reduce gun violence) and choir member Darius Sanders. Sanders, a Black educator and performer, will describe unprovoked stops and interrogations by the police starting when he was in high school in Wisconsin that led to him fearing for his life.

“This is an opportunity for people to talk to and understand one another,” said Sanders, now 27 and a Baltimore resident. “If you don’t, people will remain ignorant. And that is the most dangerous thing in the world.”

When Thompson began to create “Seven Last Words” in 2014, he thought of himself as a music educator, not a composer. He was grappling with his despair at the death of Eric Garner, and at a grand jury’s refusal to indict the New York police officer who wrestled Garner to the ground and held him face down until he died. The officer, Daniel Pantaleo, would eventually be fired several years later.

“It emotionally broke me,” Thompson said.

“It made me realize that if I ever were in the same situation as Eric Garner, my life would not even be worth an indictment. It got really dark for a while. I had to write it all down to exorcise myself of those emotions. I was trying to hold on to the last bits of my humanity.”

Thompson created a table on his computer. On the left side, he wrote down the last sayings of Jesus Christ. On the right side, he wrote down the actual last words of seven unarmed Black men: Diallo, Garner, Trayvon Martin, Kenneth Chamberlain, Oscar Grant, John Crawford and Michael Brown.

The scriptural texts and the men’s last utterances had unexpected resonances. For instance, the Biblical saying addressing the Virgin Mary, “Woman, behold thy son!” had parallels to Diallo’s voicemail to his mother.

Thompson then began to compose a score aimed at exploring those connections and expressing the humanity of the seven victims.

He finished the piece in January, 2015. If there had been no more killings, chances are that Thompson’s journal entry would have remained private, as he had intended. But three months later, Freddie Gray died while in the custody of the Baltimore Police Department, and Thompson was once again plunged into despair.

He rented a space in Georgia “and put out a call on Facebook and asked if anyone wanted to sight-read the work with me,” Thompson said.

“My brother was performing at the time in a string quartet, and he played the piano. I think we all felt there was something special in the room.”

One performer asked Thompson for permission to send “Seven Last Words” to a friend who taught music at the University of Michigan. One thing lead to another, and Thompson’s work received its world premiere in October, 2015, by the University of Michigan Men’s Glee Club — though only after Thompson and Glee Club conductor Eugene Rogers contacted family members of all seven victims and received permission to perform the piece.

Fast-forward eight years, and Thompson’s choral work has been performed by orchestras from Minneapolis to Chicago to Tallahassee. A video of a performance was shown at New York’s Carnegie Hall. And the man who never thought of himself as a composer is now writing his second opera commissioned by Houston Grand Opera.

Clark said he wanted to perform “Seven Last Words” following the May, 2020, death of George Floyd, but could not because performing venues were shuttered for 18 months by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“When George Floyd was murdered, we all suddenly had a front-row seat to history,” Clark said.

“Joel’s piece is so expertly crafted and so evocative that I think it will become known as the soundtrack to an inflection point in history,” he said. “Joel Thompson is one of the gems of new music today.”

The Choral Arts Society won’t perform “Seven Last Words” straight through. With Thompson’s blessing, Clark is intermingling the seven movements of Thompson’s piece with the seven movements of Brahms’ “German Requiem.”

Thompson described the Baltimore program as “an inspired pairing.” He has been listening to “The German Requiem” since middle school and said it was the piece of music he would want to have with him on a desert island.

Just as the composer found resonances between his choral work and scripture, Clark discovered a dialogue between the 19th-century German composer and the 21st-century American. Both mourn the senseless loss of life. Both describe the bond between mothers and sons. (Brahms’ fifth movement contains the soprano solo, “I will comfort you as a mother comforts her child.”)

“Both are writing about a world that can feel completely hopeless,” Clark said. “Look at what is going on in Ukraine and on the Gaza strip.”

Thompson’s piece requires listeners to sit with their pain and to battle within themselves to find a solution. Brahms’ work ends, Clark said, “with an incredible amount of peace.”

For Thompson and Clark, singing in a choir is no mere pastime. It is urgent, necessary, a political act, one way to heal a broken world.

“When we sing together, we drop our boundaries,” Clark said. “We put aside our differences so we can accomplish something together as a group. Brahms tells us that we can carry on if we extend love and grace to all humanity.

“We have to. Otherwise, we will cease to exist.”