With Malice Toward None (2020) by J. Kimo Williams. Apollo

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Play, download and edit the free video With Malice Toward None (2020) by J. Kimo Williams. Apollo Chamber Players + Tracy Silverman, electric violin.

With this composition, I wanted to speak to the current social and cultural climate we now face. I also feel a commonality with Beethoven, who took his audiences on artistic journeys with thematic descriptions. Beethoven’s hope that his musical expression could affect change was my inspiration for this piece, which is dedicated to the late Civil Rights leader John Lewis. Its premise is described by the following words written by social activist and artist Carol Williams:
A speech by a politician is not expected to be the equivalent of poetry, or to cast
a lasting memory in popular culture; especially not one given 155 years ago. But that is precisely what the phrase, “with malice toward none, and charity for all,” has become. It is the definition of politics seamlessly intersecting with art.
So should it be any different from having music intersect with politics? Not for Beethoven, as most students of his music are already aware. Today, there is still a critical need for “socially responsible pieces of music” that can address our human failures with as much hope as it does despair.
We are together here in 2020, facing challenges old and new, internal and external. And we have reached a new low point when a People, born more American than African, have to again demand that the value of their lives be recognized. It is obvious that their lives did not matter when they were kidnapped and brought here 400 years ago to provide free labor to a country that became the richest on Earth. Their lives did not matter during the war to set them free, when they were regarded as contraband or fugitives. Their lives did not matter when they were refused basic human dignity without enduring a century of struggle. And now their lives do not “matter” enough to allow them to choose that very word for themselves. And so continues the malice. To provide “Charity for all” would have cost nothing more than to have given them respect and equal opportunity.
But today, we celebrate those who remind us that we can speak up every time we think, breathe, talk, act, move, and live. We can use the language of music or the music of speech; we can do it from a podium at the US Capitol dome, or from a podium at a concert hall. Today, Beethoven would liberate style, modes, genres, and stereotypes with one angry eye. He would shout---not even hearing his own voice or the voices

of his opposition---that it is our world to change, and that we do not need to ask permission from above. He would write us an anthem we could all stand for. And using those words of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address of 1865, we could have another chance to make them True: “With malice toward none.”
- KIMO AND CAROL WILLIAMS
With Malice Toward None was composed for Apollo Chamber Players and Tracy Silverman, generously underwritten by DONALD AND RHONDA SWEENEY.

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