Language of the Unheard

For Amplified Cello, Five Track Looper, and Interactive Media (Ableton Live)
Duration: 18 minutes

Language of the Unheard was inspired by the tumultuous events of 2020 spurred by racial disparity, systemic racism, police violence, and ongoing civil unrest. This unrest was (in part) the decades-long product of cited cases of lacking police accountability and recurrent overreach in the United States. The last decade has been a hotbed of profile cases promulgated as injustice by various civil rights organizations. These include the 2014 shooting deaths of 12 year old Tamir Rice and Michael Brown, as well as the unjustified death of Eric Garner, the 2015 deaths of Freddie Gray and Sandra Bland while in police custody, the 2016 death of Philando Castile in front of his family, the lessor know 2017 death of Justine Damond, and the 2018 death of Botham Jean in his own apartment. This unrest came to a boiling point in 2020 with the March 2020 no-knock raid of Breonna Taylor’s apartment in which she was shot five times in her sleep. After George Floyd’s death from asphyxia after an officer kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes, the country boiled over into an uproar.

This works takes its title, as a vantage point, from a speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in with he notes that “a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear?” He suggests that riots and similar protest responses come as a result of not hearing (or suppressing) the needs of people, and so long as these needs go unanswered, unrest will continue to proliferate. The fallout of summer 2020 was evidence of this. This collaboration between cellist Ben Capps and I (Henry Dorn) aims to shed light on this unheard voice. Media depictions of race-related civil protests around the United States often highlight destruction and turmoil. I was able to see first-hand the protests occurring in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray. Most demonstrations were peaceable until antagonists enticed protesters with racial epithets and other derogatory terms. The same has been true in most other demonstrations across the country.

Language of the Unheard uses the sounds and voices from live demonstrations from New York City in the summer of 2020 sourced by Ben. This is juxtaposed with interjections from President Donald Trump, who consistently downplayed the significance of police injustice and instead pushed a platform for “Law and Order” over civil disobedience. Our hope in this work is to show the exasperation of black, indigenous and people of color (BIPOC), as well as supporter, endeavoring against a system set against leveling the playing field. The work emotionally moves from points of anger and rage to placidity to hope and encouragement.