5
Prairie WINTER 2022
PETER
MURPHY
Music department takes its place in the sun as it premieres
a first-of-its-kind composition.
Early on in Weather, a musical composition by Rollo A. Dilworth, there's what might be taken for distant thunder.
Soon, a sonic storm, created by the TCNJ Wind Ensemble, is lashing the Mayo Concert Hall. Martial rhythms stomp,
briefly, and then give way to massed voices alternately wafting and chopping at the air over the next 18 minutes.
Midway, dressed all in black like the other musicians packed onstage, Kyla Eloi '24 steps forward to lead the
audience in a recitation of names — George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin —
as the singers on stage cry "Say their names."
"The violence of again," author Claudia Rankine called it in Weather, the poem Dilworth's composition is based on,
which she wrote less than a month after a Minneapolis policeman knelt on Floyd's neck, killing him.
The living, breathing
Weather
