Make Music Chicago's Lift Every Voice

Musicians Rising for Racial Justice

Eleven Chicago string quartets join Make Music Day celebrations across the country for performances of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings and George Walker’s Lyric for Strings. Quartets from Boston to St. Louis will perform these two works simultaneously at 11:30am and 5:00pm CST. In Chicago, each quartet will perform at a different location around the city in the morning before coming together for a collective performance in the evening at Wrigley Square.

Two American Pulitzer Prize winning composers — one white and one black — Barber and Walker both used their artistic platform to tap into the broad range of emotions shared by humanity. By uniting these two works, Lift Every Voice seeks to memorialize victims of hate crimes while acknowledging that we are more united in our common humanity than we are differentiated by our race, ethnicity, gender, class or religion.