About this Piece

The fanfare has a political background: to allow the orchestra to connect with the community and be a voice of the time. Usually, fanfares announce royalty or heads of states or that kind of people. But the event everyone is going through right now, the pandemic, is uncommon. We are going through some strange times; it almost seems sarcastic to write a fanfare for the times we are currently living in. I wanted to create a piece that brings people together, a piece that touches that within us, that thing that wants to survive, that gives us that regenerative, renewable hope. I want to bring the Black experience in, the turmoil, the upheaval, the complexity of race conversation.

There are some special features, like the use of keyboard percussion, to create the feeling of sparks of sounds, sparks of life. It is a virtuosic work.

I could not help but channel Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. It is such a part of our history in America. Through its simplicity, it [is] extremely elegant and memorable. Copland channeled the very foundation of what the very American spirit is.

You are going to hear dissonances; you are going to hear this machine-gun repetitive sound. But then you are going to hear something that is more [attuned] to the Caribbean nature. All these elements, as like in a melting pot in this country has to be put in there.

—Valerie Coleman, 2021