Leading the performance is conductor Kedrick Armstrong, newly named music director of the Oakland Symphony — the ninth in that orchestra’s nearly century-long history — making his Minnesota Orchestra debut. Named by The Washington Post to its “22 for ’22” list of artists to watch, Armstrong has built his reputation advocating for the performance, publication and preservation of Black and other historically underrepresented voices in classical music.
Black composers across generations
The repertoire spans more than a century of Black musical achievement. The program opens with Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s rhythmic The Bamboula, inspired by Afro-Caribbean dance traditions. Coleridge-Taylor — the British composer of Sierra Leonean and English parentage once called the “African Mahler” — won international acclaim at a time when opportunities for Black composers were exceedingly rare.
The evening continues with Brittany Green’s soulful Testify!, the work of one of the most compelling emerging voices in contemporary concert music, and Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Worship: Concert Overture for Orchestra. Perkinson — composer, conductor and violinist, and a namesake of the elder Coleridge-Taylor — wrote music that moved fluidly across classical, jazz and sacred traditions, reflecting the breadth of Black cultural life.
Nkeiru Okoye’s stirring Voices Shouting Out channels not despair but hope, determination and communal healing — themes that resonate with the spirit of Juneteenth and the ongoing pursuit of justice and equality.
Soul and symphony on one stage
Two guest artists bring the evening to its emotional height. Chicago-based actress and singer-songwriter Melody Betts — who appeared as Aunt Em and Evillene in The Wiz on Broadway and made her Broadway debut in Waitress — lends her commanding voice to a set of R&B and soul classics.
The finale belongs to composer and pianist Brian Raphael Nabors, who takes the stage as soloist in his own Concerto for Hammond Organ. Built around the instrument long associated with gospel worship, jazz and the sanctified tradition, the concerto stages a dialogue between congregation and concert hall — a thrilling fusion of gospel, jazz and symphonic sound. Nabors’ music has been performed by the Boston, Atlanta, Detroit and Munich symphonies, among others, and by the Minnesota Orchestra.
A celebration beyond the stage
The Juneteenth gathering begins before the Orchestra plays. From 6:15 to 6:45 p.m. in the Target Atrium, the Minneapolis choir Known MPLS performs. In the lobby, the African American Heritage Museum and Gallery presents The Black Vote, an exhibition tracing the long struggle for political representation and voting rights. And on the main floor, Wendy’s House of Soul serves its Southern-rooted cooking before the concert and at intermission — a taste of the culinary traditions that have always traveled alongside the music. The program is presented with lead support from the McVay Foundation and with support from the Minnesota State Arts Board.
A changing community, an enduring question
That a major American orchestra now anchors its calendar with an annual Juneteenth concert is itself a marker of change. It is worth pausing to ask what that change is responding to — and what it still asks of all of us.
The Twin Cities are being remade. By 2040, according to projections from the Metropolitan Council, close to four in ten residents of the seven-county metro will be from Black, Asian or Latino communities, up from 28 percent in 2020. The Minnesota Compass projections cited by the region’s arts funders put the metro at 40 percent people of color by that same year. In Minneapolis today, Black residents make up roughly 18.5 percent of the population; statewide, some 476,000 Minnesotans are Black.
An institution that intends to remain relevant — and to merit the public support it receives — cannot treat that community as an occasion on the calendar. It must build relationship with it. That is not a matter of charity. It is a matter of survival, and of honesty about who Minnesota is becoming.
The imperative for change
This is not a new conversation in Minnesota’s arts community. It is a documented one.
In November 2017, the Racial Equity Funders Collaborative — a coalition formed in 2013 that included the Bush Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Saint Paul & Minnesota Community Foundations, Propel Nonprofits and the Jerome Foundation — issued a public letter titled The Imperative for Change. Its findings, drawn from the Helicon Collaborative study Not Just Money: Equity Issues in Cultural Philanthropy, were stark. Nationally, 2 percent of cultural institutions receive nearly 60 percent of all contributed revenue. In the Twin Cities, 23 arts organizations with budgets over $5 million captured 77 percent of all contributions and earned revenue — while 345 organizations with budgets under $1 million, the very groups most often rooted in communities of color, shared roughly 9 percent.
Twenty-three arts organizations with budgets over $5 million captured 77 percent of all contributions and earned revenue.
— The Imperative for Change, Racial Equity Funders Collaborative, 2017
The Minnesota Orchestra is, without question, one of those 23. So are the Guthrie, the Walker, Mia, the Ordway and the institutions that, together, command the resources of this region’s cultural life. Through the middle years of the last decade, leaders from those organizations and from community media and arts — this writer among them — convened repeatedly to examine that imbalance honestly: where outreach had failed, where partnership had been performative, and where genuine progress was taking root.
The funders’ own words were unsparing. People of color and Native peoples, they wrote, had too often been rendered invisible, omitted or ignored in the narrative of Minnesota’s arts community. Their conclusion was that the remedy could not stop at programming. It required changing how resources are distributed and how relationships are built — and, when possible, compensating for past neglect.
What partnership should look like
This is the lens through which McFarlane Media Interests, publisher of Insight News, has approached the Minnesota Orchestra and its peer institutions — not as supplicants seeking favor, but as partners proposing a different architecture for the relationship between large cultural organizations and the Black community they serve.
The premise is simple. A Juneteenth concert is a gift. But a gift offered one night a year is not yet a partnership. Partnership is year-round. It looks like sustained investment in Black-led media and Black storytelling, so that the community’s own institutions are strengthened rather than bypassed. It looks like shared decision-making, not consultation after the program is already set. It looks like the makeup of an institution’s staff, board, audience and vendors moving, over time, toward the makeup of the community whose public support it seeks. It looks like resources flowing toward the 345, and not only the 23.
A gift offered one night a year is not yet a partnership. Partnership is year-round.
These questions are not abstractions, and they are not raised from the outside. Insight News has put them directly to the Orchestra and to its peer institutions — candidly, and in good faith — because the relationship between this region’s largest cultural organizations and its Black community is the unfinished business that every Juneteenth concert quietly raises.
I engage that work as a practitioner of community journalism across five decades, one who has watched promises made and unmade. The measure of this moment is not the sincerity of any single concert. It is whether the relationship that concert gestures toward is allowed to mature.
Does this program move us in that direction?
By any honest reckoning, yes — it moves us forward.
A Black conductor makes his debut on the Orchestra Hall podium. The repertoire is built entirely on Black composers, from a turn-of-the-century pioneer to living artists. A community choir opens the night. A community museum mounts the exhibition. A Black-owned restaurant feeds the hall. These are not small things. They are the visible texture of an institution working, in earnest, to open its doors.
The test is what happens on June 19 and every day after — when the stage is reset and the question becomes whether the Orchestra’s relationship with Black Minnesota is a program or a partnership.
Success, framed by equity, is not measured by a single sold-out evening. It is measured by whether, a decade from now, the distribution of this region’s cultural resources looks more like the community than it did when The Imperative for Change was written. It is measured by whether the institutions that hold the most learn to share the most.
It is measured by whether the institutions that hold the most learn to share the most.
The Juneteenth concert demonstrates that music can be remembrance, resistance and celebration at once. The deeper work — the work this newspaper will keep watching — is to make partnership the same.
The Minnesota Orchestra’s Juneteenth concert takes place Thursday, June 18, at 7 p.m. at Orchestra Hall, 1111 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis. The program runs approximately two hours with intermission; doors open 90 minutes prior. Tickets and packages are available through the Orchestra’s website.
