Detroit Symphony set to celebrate black composers and lost neighborhoods
Written by Site Hub on March 5, 2020
Whatever your music tastes, it’s important to support the music arts, especially when they highlight the best and brightest of the black community and draw attention to the losses to that community so many have known through the years.
A composition commissioned by one of our native New Yorkers is planned for release to the public on March 6 and 7 through the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Nkeiru Okoye, a New Yorker who has a Nigerian father and African-American mother, commissioned a 22-minute ensemble piece called “Black Bottom” to highlight “joys, sorrows and interrelated stories” related to the Black Bottom neighborhood and Paradise Valley district within it that were sadly destroyed in the 1960s. They were lost in part to highway construction, but they were also targeted as “urban blight” instead of renovated and revitalized, which resulted in the relocation of many residents to housing projects.
Okoye is a composer and musician with a Bachelor of Music (Composition) from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. She also has a Music Theory and Composition PhD from Rutgers University. She is the Detroit Symphony’s Composer in Residence and “Black Bottom” is her premiere for the 2020 Classical Roots Festival.
