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Bryan, Coleman & Price

Rock My Soul Festival

Fri / Nov 11, 2022 - 8:00PM

From the Chicago Renaissance to Black Lives Matter.

No Longer Available

Masks are strongly recommended for all guests. Read more about our health and safety policies.

About this Performance

Jeri Lynne Johnson conducts a symphonic program that brings Price's historic fight for acceptance and acknowledgment into conversation with the modern day. To open, Valerie Coleman’s concertino for bassoon and orchestra, Opus Serena, dedicated to Serena Williams, receives its world premiere. In Sanctum, Courtney Bryan draws on the improvisational sounds of Holiness preachers, layering in the voices of Marlene Pinnock and activists from the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, evoking what the composer describes as the “solace found in the midst of persecution and tribulation.” The multi-talented lawyer-turned-singer and songwriter Danielle Ponder lends her shiver-inducing voice to the songs of Florence Price, as well as some of her own. Closing the concert is Price’s majestic Third Symphony. Written late in her career as Price began blending Modernist language with traditional African American music, it expresses a cross section of Black life in 1940s America while reflecting on its past. 

The Rock My Soul Festival is generously supported in part by Margaret Morgan and Wesley Phoa.

Programs, artists, dates, prices, and availability subject to change.