Northampton choral group Pioneer Valley Cappella’s next show, “Last Words,” will call attention to the deaths of unarmed Black men through its central work, Joel Thompson’s “Seven Last Words of the Unarmed.”

Thompson, an Atlanta-based composer, didn’t even intend for “Seven Last Words” to be performed when he first wrote it — rather, it was a “sonic diary entry,” as he said in a program note, written in 2014 to process his own grief and anger about a grand jury’s failure to indict the officer who killed Eric Garner.

“To me, the message was clear: if I were to be killed in some interaction with authority figures, my loved ones should not expect justice. There could be a video recording of my futile attempts to describe my distress — ‘I can’t breathe’ — with the arm of the law around my neck and the life fading from my eyes, and still, my death wouldn’t matter,” he wrote.

Each section of the work is centered around the last words of an unarmed Black man killed by police or other authority figures: “Officers, why do you have your guns out?” (Kenneth Chamberlain); “What are you following me for?” (Trayvon Martin); “Mom, I’m going to college” (Amadou Diallo); “I don’t have a gun! Stop shooting!” (Michael Brown); “You shot me. You shot me!” (Oscar Grant III); “It’s not real” (John Crawford); and “I can’t breathe!” (Eric Garner).

The music is arranged to evoke the setting and circumstances of each killing: for example, in the Amadou Diallo section, “The undulating pattern in the piano simultaneously yields a sense of calm with its simple harmonic underpinning and unease with its odd 5/4 meter,” according to the program note.

Beyond that, Thompson also used a 15th-century French song, “L’homme armé” (“The Armed Man”), throughout the work. The first and last line of its only surviving verse is “L’homme armé doibt on doubter” — “The armed man should be feared.”

“I heard a performance on YouTube, and it’s just an incredibly compelling and visceral piece of music,” said Pioneer Valley Cappella music director Geoffrey Hudson. “I wanted to do it right away.”

The University of Michigan Men’s Glee Club gave the piece its world premiere nearly a decade ago, in the fall of 2015, and some of the audience responses were negative – a few people “stormed out of the auditorium in plain view of the choir, destroying their programs as they left,” according to a program note, and the dean of the college’s School of Music, Theatre & Dance received angry letters as well. In 2020, however, in the wake of the police killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery, the work got more attention: in a statement at the time, Eugene Rogers, who directed the work’s premiere, said, “Right now, people are looking for comfort, and they’re also looking for constructive, concrete ways to process these events and move forward.”

Since then, the piece has been performed in Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Tallahassee, and it will be performed in Northampton next weekend.

Pioneer Valley Cappella, an audition-required chorus of local singers, has performed for more than 30 years. Their repertoire includes religious and secular works, but this is arguably the most socially conscious piece they’ve sung. 

It’s also worth mentioning that the group is almost entirely white.

“It makes us all think,” Hudson said. “It brings up issues that you don’t get when you’re singing a piece from the 18th century, which is more distant, about the joy of music. This causes discomfort, and it makes you think a lot.”

In fact, one group member dropped out during rehearsals, saying that the piece was too emotionally difficult for her to perform.

“As white people singing it, I hear us as bringing witness to this and calling attention to this problem,” he said. “The problem persists long past the piece.”

Booker Bush, the group’s sole Black member and a former member of the Northampton Policing Review Commission, said, “I’m really glad we’re performing it, but it’s a beautifully unsettling piece. It’s hard, as a Black man, to perform it ... There’s a whole other element, though, about, how do you bring this to audiences? And, in the same way that our organization is all white, usually everyone in the audience is all white, but there are a few people of color in the audiences, and that’s changing.”

“I like making eye contact with the people I’m singing to,” he added, “and it’s hard, frequently, performing and not having other people of color to make eye contact with.” With this piece, he said his goal will be to understand how people are experiencing it: “It’s pretty fraught with emotion very quickly.” 

In his program notes for a previous performance in Dayton, Ohio, Thompson pointed out that works like Haydn’s “Seven Last Words of Christ,” from which “Seven Last Words of the Unarmed” takes its structure, are not “trying to demonize the Roman soldiers that orchestrated the crucifixion, but they are designed to stir within the listener an empathy towards the suffering of Jesus.”

Hudson hopes that what people take away from the performance is “a beautiful and meaningful musical experience.”

“I want them to come away with some gnawing questions that they’re asking themselves about how we got where we are and what we can do about it,” he said. 

Hudson added, “[Thompson has] written a piece that fully inhabits that concert hall world and yet also brings in things that we don’t generally hear there, and I think that combination makes the piece very powerful.”

Another work on the program is “Heavenly Hurt: Songs of Love and Loss,” written by Smith College alumna Alice Parker, who wrote the piece in her 90s. The piece sets seven poems by Emily Dickinson to music.

“The craftsmanship is impeccable,” Hudson said. “There’s not a wasted gesture anywhere, and she captures Emily Dickinson’s poetry in breathtaking ways.”

The program also includes three Shaker melodies, which stand somewhat in contrast to the Thompson work. Hudson said they reflect “the other side of the American experience — they’re very utopian, almost idealistic.” There’s also an adaptation of the Kaddish (mourning) prayer by 16th-century Italian Jewish composer Salomone Rossi, and two choruses by Elizabethan composer William Byrd.

When asked if performing “Seven Last Words of the Unarmed” in the current political climate gave Hudson concerns about safety, he said no, in large part because it will be performed in the Pioneer Valley.

Still, he noted, “If it’s not safe, then we absolutely have to do it, because it won’t get safer if we don’t speak up.”

“Last Words” will be performed on Friday, May 2, at 7:30 p.m., at Edwards Church in Northampton. Admission is free. For more information, visit pioneervalleycappella.net.

Carolyn Brown can be reached at cbrown@gazettenet.com.