Monument was written during a period of renewed public reckoning with the role of monuments in American civic life. Many of these objects were erected long after the Civil War, often through campaigns led by organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and were intended to lend dignity, beauty, and permanence to a distorted account of the past.

The piece was inspired by the removal of Confederate monuments from sites of local and national significance following decades of advocacy, intensified by the Black Lives Matter movement. Monument reflects on that progress and on the persistence, courage, and collective effort required to bring it about.

The work is not intended to commemorate the structures themselves, but the people who challenged what those structures represented. It considers the act of removal as both a physical and symbolic transformation: an acknowledgment that public memory is not fixed, and that confronting the failures of the past is necessary to building a more honest, empathetic, and inclusive society. In that sense, the piece becomes a monument of its own—to the courage required to insist upon change.

Monument was premiered on February 23, 2018, by the USC Thornton Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Donald Crockett.

—SC