Oakland Symphony Reflections, Friday, February 20, 2026

Reflections & Notes on Oakland Symphony, February 20, 2026

Program: https://audienceaccess.co/show/OEB-15692

In the program is the Board president's message, along with Masetro Armstrong and artist in residency, Daniel Bernard Roumain, and guest composers: Chen Yi and Reena Esmail.

Discipline of Hope...

Tonight is about the journey. Courage through the discipline of hope.

Intentional programming

Resist and persist 2026-2027

First half

Chen Yi 5 note scale opens concert followed by

Reena Esmail (1983 Chicago) raga plus classical music

Soundbath of hope....

Oakland symphony presents Reena Esmail's "She will transform you". The poem is by Neelanjana Banerjee, sung by the Oakland Symphony Choir.

"Homeland why do you elude me

Tease me?

There my ancestors don't know me

Here my neighbors say go back home to me

Homeland when will you let me name you claim you

Let me name you

Let me claim you

I know how it feels to be lost in space."

Remember the show? African Americans

"But now it is no longer about me--

"For this newborn child," Banerjee writes,

"I have a plea: Homeland, let this sweet child be,

Never torture her like you've done to me

Let her always find her way

Surface street and highways underpass and bike paths

She will transform you.

It's the same story

From concept to community from skid row to safe haven

She will transform you

With each milestone

Let her dismantle your distance

Until one day she arrives here

Palm tree shadow desert dust in her eyes

And smiles... she's home

Homeland she will transform you" (https://www.reenaesmail.com/catalog/she-will-transform-you-satb-flute/).

I agree. There is no going back

We change and are changed by space and place

Even gentle imprints are indelible.

Beautiful!

After an intermission is Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 10, Adagio. The story is, his heart is broken, which is harder on a person who suffers from angina or heart trouble. Full of both love and despair, Gustav writes this work yet dies before its completion. The version performed was approved by his widow before her death.

Roumain's World Premiere, America, US, is a public conversation. Members of the Oakland community join the orchestra and have their say. I laugh as I think about Peeler, filmmaker's "US."  Tracy Silverman's violin sounds like a rock guitar. He is amazing soloist on this work! I am moved beyond measure. I am so happy to be here. 

What a thoughtful program Maestro Kendrick Armstrong has assembled. The sorrow of the first work . . . heartbreak. The temporal nature of forgiveness. Nothing lasts, not even love's promises. Plans for a tenth symphony. Sometimes the body is not up to what the mind conceives. We make plans, and the universe nods, the muses smile, and then the flesh is unable to hold desired wishes.

I wonder where disappointment lives in Samsara . . . the after this space. I wouldn't call it life because life is an Earth term. Carefully laid plans are promises. We plan, yet God is the best planner. Muslims say Inshallah for a reason. Others say God willing.

The moon is new. Ramadan eclipses a fire horse lunar new year-- God willing . . . .

So we move from Heartbreak into hope, represented by Reena Esmail's sound bath of hope: a child born in a land not her ancestral locus. (It's a place that)The land pushes back as it expands to receive.

I wonder about space, reception, assimilation, grasping, belonging. On the 250 anniversary of this nation why or how do African Ancestors navigate insistent persistent animosity that greets our presence in a land we have made home away from homeland?

"America, US" composed by Daniel Romain, Haitian American, embodies histories . . . yes, inherited histories complexities, a six-string electronic violin with foot pedals . . . a solo voice in a wilderness of potential opportunities . . . freed Black people believed in the promise of democracy while aware of its contradictions. After all, white men enslaved Black people. White men voted to free Black people. Some white men didn't agree, and if they survived the war, they kept silent until they grew stronger and more powerful.

We feel their disagreement now.

The silence is deadly. There is a narrative that lives in silence. Eventually, it speaks.

There is a narrative growing in the silence now. These counternarratives simmer on back burners while the pots bubble over and sauces scorch, burn, stick, smell.

Yes, a score can hold change. It can nurture as it provides space to imagine the unimaginable. Hope lives in despair. Hope is living in a heart injured beyond repair. Hope is an autonomic nervous system that moves when thought is frozen.

Hope keeps the body alive until it is operational.

The Creator knew in its wisdom that this flesh creation could not rely solely on its mind to save it. Minds do not console. Reason is a treadmill that does not know defeat. It just short-circuits.

If we don't pay the power company, our utilities stop working. It is the same with reason. . . . Life is not reasonable. Life is bigger than what is reasonable. Reasonable is good, but reasonable is not reliable, because reasonable has no consensus.

There is no universal agreement on reasonable. In love, where there is agreement, doubt exists. Its erasure is inevitable as a new doubt takes its place.

Heartbreak is inevitable. We just learn first aid and hope we mend, get up from surfaces that hold immobility, and move forward.

Living in the past is easier. The past is a place we know. Sometimes surprises are unwelcome. . . it (surprise) is more than a broken heart can process.

I think my heart is broken. I gave myself a month to get better . . . it is now a year and a month later. Grief lives with me. I set a place for it at the table.

I can't have it leaning over my shoulder knocking over flower pots. I don't eat the flowers, but their beauty comforts me. I fertilize the plants and talk to them.

Their response is to keep growing. I don't pick them anymore. Nothing grows back and the stems are long and barren. Now I just appreciate their fortitude.

Perhaps there's a lesson here?

Upcoming:

This Friday, March 27, 8 pm at the Paramount Theatre, the Oakland Symphony presents a Hammond Organ Concerto. Art is a place to rest, recover, rejuvenate. 

Black Heaven in Merced revised

Black Heaven in Merced, A Review

By Wanda Sabir

Heaven is a journey. It is a space of reflection, renewal, amends and forgiveness. If the creative spirit, I'll call it love is the kind of love that is present and available, then this is the space Kim McMillon imagines in her "Black Heaven: A Theatrical Conversation Across Eternity," which had a short run in Merced, CA, Feb. 28, 6:30 and March 1, 1:30 pm.

The topic is hot; however none of the celestial beings go there as the formally embodied are able to reflect on their past lives in earthly flesh bodies and forgive themselves their trespasses even if those in the audience still living with their choices' consequences, do not.

After all Heaven, Black or otherwise is an embodied space that looks and feels like home.

The songs, prayers and poetry, Kim's lovely and lyrical writing, Ben Nix-Bradley's original music, and Tyler Wickler's musical direction, lifted Black Heaven into a presence that welcomed as it warned, warmed as it sent prescient chills down spines.

The play opened on a planetary alignment which while not visible in the cloudy Merced sky that evening was certainly felt in the powerful assembly.

When we call the ancestors they come. Kim had a relationship with some of the deceased artists and with most of the living ones. Much of the dialogue is from interviews.

Black Heaven is an invocation and a blessing. The venue, Unity of Merced Church, was perfect. It was an easy pleasant two-hour drive from the Bay Area.

Heaven as setting is a space of belonging and tolerance. The audience sees this as even uninvited guests speak for a moment before silenced.

It is a space where spirits rise and fall like the tides. The chorus is not a lament but a joyous celebration. Perhaps this gathering is so peopled because Kim as orchestral arranger found within each one hope and betterment.

The playwright says,

"Her goal is to help people heal while our country is going through difficulties."

Human beings are flawed. None of us is perfect, so the moderators Booker T. Washington and commenter W. E. B. Du Bois even August Wilson, are as well.

The playwright says, "The reason I chose W. E. B. Du Bois that yes he is flawed, [because] he moved the needle."

We do the best we can with what presents itself--opportunites and challenges. Some choices are bad ones that can't be undone just like speech one cannot retract.

Black Heaven is an opportunity to sit or stand in the between and allow our experiences to both flood and release. There is nothing we can do with what is past or those who have passed on except do better, be better at this living thing. Make amends for wrong doing if you are alive and for ancestors who have passed on.

This is how we heal.

Betterment is a choice we can all make given this opportunity to be alive. Do we continue the drama or act as a balm? Do we correct the wrong or take refuge in privilege?

The director wrote in a text to me that the Sunday matinee at Unity of Merced was so packed that some people were standing.

"They laughed a lot. It was beautiful." McMillon said.

In Heaven, patrons were also invited to sing, and even stand to recite a concluding affirmation. It was a readers theater performance with plenty of soul.

The living artists are present in their dreams. The dead call them in. It is a lively, funny crew who have those assembled as witnesses in stitches as the topic at center in national debate stirs the dead even more.

Violence is not allowed, and who heard of hurting a spirit? It's not possible.

Kim McMillon, Ph.D., is a familiar whose creative work and relationships within and beyond the ancestral realm are evident here. The cast of characters both alive and dead are moderated by a living God and an Archangel Gabriel complete with horn.

The actors do the celestial cast well. Most dressed elegantly in black or a blended design tapestry. The consensus is any soul who lived its earthly time melanine-covered was indeed blessed despite racialized oppression, structural hindrances, and resultant suffering.

The playwright says, "In Black Heaven, figures such as Alexandre Dumas, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Lorraine Hansberry, and others revisit their earthly journeys with both pleasure and pain. They wrestle with the question of impact: whether their work moved the needle, whether their Blackness made a difference, whether their lives helped shift the world toward justice, beauty, or truth.

"The play culminates with the entire cast saying, 'I am Black and Beautiful,' because they realize that their lives in Black bodies are a gift from God, and that, whether in a Black or White Body, they treasure that gift because it opens them to their souls' evolution and healing.

"They understand that the soul treasures every incarnation that opens the door to deeper understanding and transformation. In seeking the soul's development, [most of us have likely inhabited Black and Brown bodies]. Those lives are still a part of our advancement as a soul, and may be in need of a healing."

Congratulations to the cast: Jordyn Allison, Michelle W. Allison, Carle Atwater, Ben Nix-Bradley, Dennis Brown, Karina Ezitis, David Hambley, Heike Hambley, Eboni Ardell Harris, Cheyenne Hernandez, Tim Hoskins, and Cheryl A. Lockett.

"I wrote Black Heaven specifically to heal people, to help them out of fear mode." Kim says. 

The former United States Poet Laureate, Juan Felipe Herrera, agreed. He told Kim at Merced Unity at the Sunday matinee, March 1, "'This play should be in every city.'"

This is certainly possible. Black Heaven is mobile. Contact the spirit medium a.k.a. director and playwright Kim McMillon and see when she can produce an encore performance near you: kimmac@pacbell.net