The Windham Philharmonic, in collaboration with Epsilon Spires, announces a concert for Indigenous Peoples’ Day 2025: an evening where music speaks as protest, as reckoning, as survival.
At its heart stands Raven Chacon’s Voiceless Mass, a Pulitzer Prize–winning work by the Diné composer that confronts the silences enforced by colonialism, by Christian churches built on stolen land, and by the machinery of extractive power that still dominates, and wishes to expand its domination. This music is not decorative: it is resistance against systems that consume land, bodies, and cultures while refusing to hear their voices.
Protest here is not abstract—it is embodied in our performers and in our community. Kirsten C. Kunkle, soprano (and remembered as TUNDI’s luminous and amusing Wellgunde), will raise her voice in her own Mvskoke music, joined by her daughter Stephanie, age 5. A mother and child singing together is an act of defiant and tender love in a world that we can see is too interested in severing bonds, even family bonds.
We gather, also, in celebration and remembrance of Alice Abrahams, beloved violinist with the Philharmonic who died this past year. Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Andante for Strings is our musical act of witness: grief transformed into collective sound, refusal to forget, and Alice’s personal relationship with the composers and musicians that included the Seegers, and RCS herself.
Julius Eastman’s Stay On It explodes with persistence and survival. Eastman, a Black, queer composer, created works in defiance of an art world structured by white supremacy, exclusion, and erasure. His voice—hypnotic, furious, joyful—is a refusal to be disappeared by systems that profit from extraction: of labor, of genius, of lives.
Haydn’s Symphony No. 46, “Farewell”, is a protest, bringing the disobedience of extended beauty to disrupt the assumptions of the privileged – which means OUR assumptions! In Haydn’s sad and unresolved ending we encounter defiance and refusal.
Together, these works form a concert of justice and injustice, protest and affirmation, absence and presence.
“This is not likely to be experienced as a concert program,” says Music Director Hugh Keelan. “It is a gathering: of voices silenced and unsilenced, of our community in grief and in joy, of the future rising from the children among us. It is a reckoning, and a chance to listen with our whole selves.”
This event takes place at Epsilon Spires, 190 Main St., Brattleboro. Tickets are available for $25, or sliding scale tickets starting at $15, from Epsilon Spires:
https://www.epsilonspires.org/event-info/the-windham-philharmonic-presents-voiceless-mass
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