24-year-old black composer’s work featured in Dallas Symphony Orchestra Concert honoring victims of racial violence

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    DALLAS (The Dallas Weekly) — If there is a thing we can all agree on is that nothing brings the Black community together like music and dance. The two are the soul of our culture and have been used for centuries to express joy, pain, mourning, love, and hope.

This Wednesday, Dallas Black Dance Theatre and Dallas Symphony Orchestra are coming together for a concert and performance in support of Project Unity. The event will honor those who lost their lives to racial violence and injustice- including DFW’s own Botham Jean and Atatiana Jefferson.

Pastor Richie Butler of St. Luke Community UMC founded Project Unity with the intent to unify Dallas by implementing community-building programs and help heal race relations between law enforcement and the citizens of Dallas. “The recent events have left us hurting as a community with deep wounds that have been re-opened,” said Pastor Richie Butler. “It is in these times that we look to each other to make real change that is more than words on a page. Project Unity’s mission is to bring the community together and listen to everyone. With the Dallas Symphony and Dallas Black Dance Theatre, we will gather to do just that.”

Dallas Black Dance Theatre will perform a deeply moving male trio, Evidence of Souls Not Seen, and an ensemble of DBDT dancers will perform an excerpt from Etudes and Elegy. Both ballets are a beautiful and heart-wrenching artistic expression of mourning the deaths of those we love.

Dallas Symphony Orchestra will be performing pieces by several Black composers. One such piece was commissioned by DSO and will be a featured highlight of the night. “Reflection on a Memorial” was written by 24-year-old Dallas native, Quinn Mason, who has been mentioned in the Texas Monthly as one of the most sought-after young composers in the country.

We caught up with Mason for a quick chat about his musical journey and how his work came to be commissioned by the same orchestra he’d admired as a youngster. “This is actually my second piece commissioned by them,” Mason informed me. This piece, however, was a bit of challenge, Mason said. “It was really meaningful to write a piece that expresses my point of view on a subject such as this. As an artist, I like to speak to the times that we’re living in and also speak widely to an audience.”

Mason, speaking on race relations (that is the point of this piece, right?), recalled the saying by George Santayana that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. He likened the current racial climate to Civil Rights of the 1960s. “The only difference,” Mason says, “is that people are taking an even stronger stance now than they were then, and we’re starting to see change happen a lot quicker. With that emerges a need for artistic voices to kind of have a commentary on what’s happening right now. That’s where my job comes in as a composer.”

With “Reflections on a Memorial,” Mason says he was able to put those feelings of grief and mourning into the music, while also fusing it with a symbolism hope that can’t be felt even years from now when his piece is being played.

The concert will also feature some prominent Dallas voices, who will be speaking on race relations in Dallas and how we can move forward. Among them are Dallas City Councilman Tennell Atkins; Pastor Richie Butler; Zenetta Drew, Executive Director of Dallas Black Dance Theatre; and Kim Noltemy, President and CEO of Dallas Symphony Orchestra.

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