Joyce Solomon Moorman’s A Tone Poem for Victims of Racism and Hatred

This February, the Daily Classical Music Post celebrates Black composers and musicians whose music has been suppressed and ignored. All of these musicians should be added to the music history and music theory curriculum.

https://youtu.be/4W7QIosbSdM

Joyce Solomon Moorman (born 1946) has composed works for orchestra, chamber groups, choirs, vocal and instrumental soloists, and also has written an opera, Elegies for the Fallen, which commemorates the Soweto Massacre. She has won numerous awards, and from 1997 to 2000 she served on the Advisory Music Panel for the New York State Council on the Arts.

A Tone Poem for Victims of Racism and Hatred (1998) was commissioned by Vienna Modern Masters. Moorman said that she got the idea for the work following Abner Louima’s torture at the hands of the police in New York in 1997: “The work was written with the hope that it might give emotional release to someone who had suffered a physical attack because of racism or other forms of hatred.” It is a powerful work, alternating between dissonant passages and beautiful melodic lines.


My classical music post for today is Joyce Solomon Moorman’s A Tone Poem for Victims of Racism and Hatred.

 


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