The American Spirit

Part of TŌN’s Fisher Center concert series

TŌN welcomes guest conductor Kellen Gray, artistic director of the Lafayette Symphony Orchestra in Indiana, and violinist Melissa White, a first-prize laureate in the Sphinx Competition and a founding member of the Grammy-winning Harlem Quartet, for a concert highlighting the music of four celebrated American composers. Aaron Copland’s rhythmically intricate 1933 “Short Symphony” will be performed alongside two works by Black composers of the same generation. The soulful Violin Concerto No. 1 by Florence Price dates to 1939, but was never performed in the composer’s lifetime, having only been found in 2009 and premiered in 2018. William Grant Still’s optimistic Fourth Symphony, “Autochthonous”, imagines America as a place of ingenuity and inclusivity. Also on the program is the meditative recent work Hymn for Everyone by Jessie Montgomery, Performance Today’s 2025 Classical Woman of the Year.