BBC Symphony Orchestra & Chorus 2025-26 Barbican Season Making America: Requiem for America

Mohican/Munsee-Lenape composer Brent Michael Davids’s Requiem pairs Indigenous letters with founding-era genocidal texts to lay bare, state by state, the dark foundations of the United States of America. A contralto narrator embodying the Earth guides us along a deeply moving musical arc, from the colonial “Doctrine of Discovery” to a final Threnoedia.

Conducted by Teddy Abrams, Davids’s monumental work features the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, an ensemble of Native American singers and Davids himself, on Native American flute. This landmark world premiere is more than a concert - it’s a reckoning, a remembrance, and a call to truth through music.

Requiem for America is commissioned by White Snake Projects and The Lenape Center