CYO proudly premieres Dr. Dana Hall’s When Still inspired by Chris Coles’s Nine Lives Project. Coles’s Nine Lives honors the nine souls who lost their lives in the 2015 shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Dr. Hall’s new work extends Coles’s project to reflect on ten souls lost in a Buffalo, NY grocery store shooting. Both Hall and Coles invite us to come together through music to seek a more connected, more compassionate, more tolerant and more empathetic future.

This commission seeks to use music as a catalyst for important and difficult dialogue, to break free of preconceived ideas of what is possible in an orchestral setting and to provide students with a safe space to improvise and experiment musically. Dr. Hall’s 4-movement piece challenges us to ask questions about ongoing gun violence in communities like Buffalo, Cleveland, Charleston and Chicago. His second movement entitled Six Minutes in Buffalo directly speaks to the mass shooting that occurred on May 14, 2022 in a grocery store in Buffalo, NY that claimed 10 lives.

Dr. Hall’s work, like Chris Coles’s Nine Lives Project, invites us all to be a voice of reason amidst violence, chaos and hate. The final movement of Dr. Hall’s piece entitled Mother Emanuel: Home evokes hope that compassion, understanding, empathy, tolerance, peace and love will prevail.

CYO commissions contemporary voices to speak directly to current moments in time and to transform the orchestra into a laboratory for learning for musicians and audiences alike. Our intention is that this piece will inspire critical conversations and introduce young people to the idea of music as a means to build connections between people by showing empathy, respect and understanding.

It is our honor to work with Dana Hall, Chris Coles and Zaire Darden on this reimagined project for orchestra, and we are humbled to carry on the light of the nine lives lost in Charleston and the ten lives lost in Buffalo through music.