 orchestra its mission is to use classical music as a platform to engage audiences and dialogue surrounding social and racial justice. Each year we focus on a theme within the Black Lives Matter movement and past seasons have centered on police brutality, the intersection of racialized and gendered injustice impacted by women of color, the school-to-prison pipeline, and in 2018 will actually be focusing on immigration. So first you may ask what an activist orchestra does and first and foremost we perform. So we've staged full symphonic concerts which have employed musicians up to 100 singers and instrumentalists but also intimate house concerts with just two to three musicians and everything in between like what you're going to enjoy this afternoon. We also present our work to students, educators, artists, art professionals, and activists in settings such as the Harvard Graduate Music Forum, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Carnegie Hall's Wild Music Institute. So what does an activist orchestra look like? Well what you see on stage is actually pretty representative of what our ensemble typically looks like. We are intentionally quite diverse. We feel strongly that having black, white, racial, Asian musicians on stage not only does this demonstrate all the different people who stand in solidarity with these issues but it's a testament to the ways that injustice affects all of us and that it will take all of us in order to dismantle it. What does an activist orchestra sound like? So we are deeply committed to programming works by composers of color, largely because they are underrepresented in the classical music industry but more importantly because this is great music and these are artists whose voices deserve to be heard. And a perfect example is a piece that you're about to hear this evening called Renegades, Renegades. It's a poem by Robert Hayden which was set by composer Wendell Logan. It will be conducted by David Bloom with a violinist Irene Fitzgerald, cellist Luke Krafka, clarinetist Christina Toyschler, flattest Roberta Michele, percussionist Ray Soriano, pianist Kyle Walker, and we're about to welcome to our stage a tenor Robert Anthony Mack.