Portland composer Damien Geter’s bold, thought-provoking musical response to violence against African Americans in the United States receives it’s east-coast premiere at the Kennedy Center. Commissioned by the Portland based Resonance Ensemble, Geter’s An African American Requiem infuses the traditional Latin requiem with spirituals, modern declarations relating to racial violence against African Americans, as well as a setting of Ida B. Wells’s speech “Lynching is Color Line Murder” and the famous last words of Eric Garner, “I can’t breathe.”