Choral Concert: “Last Words”

Pioneer Valley Cappella, led by music director Geoffrey Hudson, performs “Last Words”: two contrasting masterworks of contemporary choral music along with smaller works from the Renaissance and Shaker traditions. The central work on the program is Joel Thompson’s Seven Last Words of the Unarmed, composed in 2015. Thompson sets to music the last words of unarmed Black men just before they were killed by police officers. The musical impact is stunning and heart-breaking. Thompson composed the piece as a “sonic diary entry, expressing [his] fear, anger, and grief in the wake” of a grand jury’s decision not to indict the police officer who killed Eric Garner, even though the killing was recorded on video. Thompson’s masterpiece is paired with Alice Parker’s Heavenly Hurt: Songs of Love and Loss, a setting of seven poems by Emily Dickinson. Composed in her 90's, Parker describes the piece as “a kind of Requiem". PVC is joined by Geoffrey Hayes, Karl Knapp, and tenor soloist Hanif Lawrence.