There was a lot of helplessness going around in late May of 2020. That’s when a world already largely frozen in place by a pandemic was confronted by footage of a Black man being suffocated under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer.
Composer Rollo Dilworth, a music professor at Philadelphia’s Temple University, was among those struggling with how to respond to George Floyd’s murder on a south Minneapolis sidewalk. As a fellow Black man, could he find a way to channel his complex and turbulent emotions into music?
The College of New Jersey then contacted Dilworth and asked him to compose a piece for choir and wind ensemble, a setting of something that award-winning poet Claudia Rankine had written in response to Floyd’s murder. Her piece, “Weather,” had been published in the New York Times.
“To be honest with you, I wasn’t quite sure that I was up to the task,” Dilworth said recently on a visit to Minnesota. “I consented later in the fall to set it to music because, as I continued to read the poem over and over, the words spoke to me and offered an opportunity to channel my own thoughts and emotional energy into an artful response to the world and all that was going on in it at that time.”
Now “Weather: Stand the Storm” will be performed for the first time in the city where the events that inspired it took place. On Saturday, One Voice Mixed Chorus will sing it at Ted Mann Concert Hall, combining its voices with those of the Dilworth-led Singing City Choir from Philadelphia, Elevation from Wilmington, Del., VocalEssence Singers of This Age and Brass Solidarity, an ensemble of instrumentalists very close to the source of the work.
Brass Solidarity arose from a group of brass-playing musicians seeking to articulate some sort of response to Floyd’s murder and the issues around it. So they began gathering at George Floyd Square on a weekly basis to play music and have been doing it ever since.
“Weather” is divided into six sections, each inspired by a different musical style. “The Meditation” is based on a spiritual, “Stand the Storm,” while “The Marginalization” is rooted in the blues. They’re followed by “The Memorial,” “The Meltdown,” “The March” and “The Mobilization.”
“For the march, I harkened all the way back to early music and J.S. Bach and I wrote a fugue,” Dilworth said. “Basically, a theme that’s introduced by one voice part and imitated by others at different pitch levels.
