Art has always been a form of resistance.
HERE IS OUR GOFUNDME PAGE. PLEASE DONATE TO OUR CAUSE!

Why?
In 2017, I began composing Harlem Voices to honor the Black performers and visionaries of the Harlem Renaissance. That work evolved into a two-part musical journey exploring systemic racism, racial profiling, LGBTQ+ identity, and Black resilience. These works--Harlem Voices and Harlem Voices: Revisited—are not simply entertainment. They are acts of cultural preservation and liberation.

This year, thanks to a California Humanities “Humanities for All” grant (funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities), we launched the Harlem Voices Revue—a five-performance series staged in rural Lake County, California. We brought two successful preview shows to life with the fiscal sponsorship of the Middletown Art Center, demonstrating that powerful Black narratives can thrive even in communities far from urban cultural centers.

Then, with no warning, everything changed.

When the NEH Goes Silent
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) funding—on which our California Humanities $25,000 matching grant depended—was indefinitely suspended by the Trump administration on April 2, 2025. The federal government is moving to defund the National Endowment for the Humanities entirely. Our grant, the backbone of this project, evaporated overnight. Though we’ve used part of it already, the remaining funds promised to us will likely never arrive.

And yet—we have three more shows to produce. Contracts have been signed. Musicians, soloists, technicians, and the Soper-Reese Theatre are all expecting us to deliver.

Do we cancel?

NO. WE DO NOT CANCEL!

Why This Matters
This project matters because it reflects the lived history of Black Americans and the continuous struggle to be heard, seen, and respected. It matters because it uplifts a rural county not often associated with dynamic, professional musical theater. It matters because we are showing what can happen when a community comes together for something larger than themselves.

Most of all, it matters because we cannot allow the erasure of Black voices and the arts to go unchallenged. So, we’re moving forward—without government support, but with the full force of our community and allies behind us.

Where We Are Now
We need to raise $18,000 to cover the costs of the final three performances on May 30, May 31, and June 1 at the Soper-Reese Theatre in Lakeport, CA. This includes payments to our artists, venue costs, lighting and sound, marketing, and essential production needs. The first two performances were an overwhelming success. Audiences wept, stood, cheered, and told us again and again how necessary these stories are. We cannot let this final act go untold.

How You Can Help
We’ve launched a crowdfunding strategy to meet this goal. We are also reaching out to donors, grant organizations, local businesses, and community leaders.
You can:

• Donate - even $5 helps.
• Share our campaign on social media.
  
• Become a sponsor or help us connect to potential funders.
• Attend a performance and bring others with you.

If you’ve ever believed in the power of music, the importance of truth-telling, or the necessity of keeping Black history alive—this is your chance to act.

The Bigger Picture
The NEH’s defunding is not just a blow to one project. It’s a direct attack on freedom of expression and cultural memory. It impacts thousands of artists, educators, historians, and communities who rely on the arts not just to survive, but to thrive.

In the face of censorship and suppression, we must raise our voices louder than ever.

This is not just about Harlem Voices. This is about all of us.

Please stand with us.

Given the news about the anti-lynching law passed recently, and the fact that some legislators voted against it, I thought it would be appropriate for me to post this excerpt from the service I led this past Sunday (2/23/20) at the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian Universalists.

The BFUU devoted their service that morning to the music of liberation by African Americans. They were kind enough to feature selections from my musical "Harlem Voices" that was completed in August of 2019. Members of their choir (under the direction of Dr. Susan Mashiyama) and special guest musicians performed the selections. I am grateful to the many people at the BFUU congregation who so enthusiastically embraced my music. I am truly honored and humbled by their deep commitment to bringing "Harlem Voices" to life.

Today I decided to make a change in my direction towards optimizing the Harlem Voices musical for performance. I, obviously, have tons of content to share but the main problem I need to address is focusing that content towards successful partnerships with other artists and performance groups. In the past I was content to compose a piece of music, then let it sit until I could convince a group I play cello with to perform it. However, these days I can rely on sophisticated software to reproduce the sound quality of orchestral instruments with such fidelity that most people cannot tell they are not listening to a live performance/recording.

Instead of concentrating on producing better content (more recordings, adding closed captioning to movies, or more extensive linking to the jazzicalmusic site) I need to market the musical to a saturated market. How can I get my very fine new musical into the hands of people who don't know me? How do I package my material so that it can serve those people the best? How do they find new musicals? Do they care about performing new musicals? These are the kinds of questions I need to answer.

Although I am not very thrilled about marketing my works, the collaborative nature of Harlem Voices demands that I do so. The larger question of how to successfully market the music I compose is difficult. I am fond of saying that no one will run down to the music store to purchase my new string quartet. I have used that quip as a shorthand way to illustrate my dilemma. It is brutally sad, and accurate... so brutal, in fact, that I have been in denial about it. Now it is time to re-invent myself as a "classical" composer who does not do my work from behind a guitar or in front of a band.

Today I had a breakthrough in my thinking about how to combine my digital content into a cohesive, unified system. I realized that I need to create a vehicle that will allow me to both sell some content and advertise/share other content. The trick will be to point all the pieces towards a "funnel" that will sort the various requests for information about my work and direct those requests appropriately. 

Something as simple as providing captioning for YouTube (as seen below) movies of music that has lyrics can make a big difference in terms of accessibility to that music. It took a little while to do this today in YouTube but I am very happy with the results. I also set up Google Analytics to help me track activities at the Harlem Voices website and the website devoted to the Lewis-McKinley Symbolic Language (LMSL), a language (including software) I invented 20 years ago that describes the evolution of systems over time.

These two, disparate websites are an example of my dilemma: the Harlem Voices site needs to invite people to collaborate with me in producing the show (and purchasing products from it), while the LMSL is a highly abstract, intellectual work that I wish to share in order to advance a theoretical contribution to the fields of logic, cybernetic systems, software development, systems management and design, and visualization technology.

It will be interesting to see what develops!

I have been a fan of Weebly for at least 5 years. I love the interface and the value I have received from using their product. Just when I need them the most they are crashing. I don't know why, but it now seems impossible to create a new account. Worse, although I can change content of sites I am hosting on the platform, it is not possible to add to them. For example, I attempted to add a blog page to the Harlem Voices website but that functionality was totally broken. My cohorts in class were so frustrated at their attempts to create new accounts that they quite in frustration. After wasting way too long trying to find workarounds I finally decided to at the "Harlem Voices Blog" category to this site instead of embedding it into the Harlem Voices website, where it belongs. This is so frustrating!