Undelivered

On November 22, 1963, the 35th President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, was on his way to the Dallas Trade Mart to give a speech when he was assassinated in broad daylight. Because the words he was set to deliver were never spoken to the American public (via media coverage), the speech has become President Kennedy’s de facto final words. Though it was set against the backdrop of the escalating Cold War tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union—the Cuban Missile Crisis (the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war) had occurred less than a year before—its core theme is the inseparable link between learning and altruistic leadership.

However, what feels astonishingly relevant today—and what stopped me in my tracks when I first read it—are the thoughts JFK was going to offer on domestic extremism, misinformation, and the dangers of embracing rhetoric disconnected from reality. At the time, President Kennedy was referring to Edwin Walker, a former World War II general who had fomented riots at the University of Mississippi when that school integrated in 1962 and had described civil rights demonstrations as “Pro-Kennedy, pro-communist, and pro-socialist.” Walker had also accused Kennedy—famously a Catholic—of appointing “anti-Christians” to federal office. I’ll leave it up to the reader to make their own connections with the current state of political discourse.To translate the speech into a musical work, I landed on a simple concept. President Kennedy was never able to read these words to the room that was assembled to hear them, so what if the choir simply did the thing he was never able to: deliver the speech. Having arrived at that idea, I also wanted to add something to fill the silences–to make the work “hover” a bit during the breaths–but also to represent the listening audience as well; hence, the unseen percussion. Due to the speech’s focus on the future as a result of the past and present, I placed an anonymous poem which I felt was connected to JFK’s sentiments at its conclusion and set it to the school song the young Jack Kennedy would have heard sung many times during his student days at Harvard (in this case accompanied by church bells ringing far off somewhere in Cambridge).

-Joshua Shank