We Three Kings
- Instrumentation
- Cello, Violin, Piano
- Composed
- 2020
- Publisher
- allEMusicPress (composer's imprint; score and parts from allEmusicPress@gmail.com)
Purchase or download
About this piece
On June 15, 1920, a mob in Duluth, Minnesota, took Isaac McGhie, Elmer Jackson and Elias Clayton, young Black circus workers falsely accused of rape, from the city jail and hanged them from a lamppost [1]. The Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial commissioned this trio for the hundredth anniversary [2], and Laurie Bastian, Josh Aerie and Sam Black gave the premiere on March 8, 2020, at Mitchell Auditorium on the St. Scholastica campus [3]. Perrault told MPR News that the trio is "not to be enjoyed", and described working from a postcard of the lynching [1]. The movements, Dusk, E Pluribus Unum and Dawn, each open with a quotation [4]. The music borrows a theme from William Grant Still's Second Symphony, slowed down, with fragments of Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child, Amazing Grace and America the Beautiful [3]. In the middle movement the cellist puts the bow under the string, hair against the body of the instrument, and rotates it for what the score calls a "wood cracking" sound, while the left hand pounds the D string [4].