BRUCE BRUCEPURSE PURSE is an African-

American musician, composer, educator, and visual artist whose varied works are informed by Black history, identity, spirituality, and unity. Mr. Purse is MMG Board of Director's most recent acquisition, as well as a Symphonic Youth Program teacher involved in MMG since 1995. His original compositions have been performed by the full MMG orchestra several times over the years, including "Ode to Dr. Watts" and "50 Lashes 50 Bullets", a symphonic piece linking current police brutality in the Bronx to the shameful legacy of violence against Black people throughout North America.

Mr. Purse spoke on the panel of the African-American Music Traditions Encounters presentation that took place in the Black Box Theater at Lehman College on June 16th, 2013. In conversation with Dr. Richard Harper, who is a Jazz and Contemporary Music faculty member at The New School, Mr. Purse discussed "Dr. Watts Hymns," which are uniquely Black renderings of authorized Euro-Christian hymns intoned one line at a time by a leader among plantation field-hands, in a calland-response format that can still be heard in modern-day Black churches throughout the South. These hymns became an important vehicle for coded communication between enslaved people that contributed to liberation efforts, such as warning or giving directions to groups of runaways. Learning the lyrics of Dr.Watts Hymns was also a conduit for Black literacy at a time when teaching slaves to read was punishable by death in most states in the North, as well as the South. Mr. Purse and Dr. Harper even sang a live demonstration of Dr. Watts Hymns at the event in 2013; though neither planned on singing that night, their example expertly conveyed the profound pain of Black people who harnessed their voices as instruments of self-determination in a political context that only permitted AfricanAmericans to imagine freedom in death, among the stars.

In 2022, the Symphonic Youth Program Orchestra performed the Colombian song, "El Pescador" or "The Fisherman," by the prolific composer José Barros. Barros was known in Colombia as "El Compositor del Río" or "Composer of the River" due to his lifelong bond with The Magdalena River, located near his hometown of El Banco. Barros exhibits his love of the Magdalena River in the lyrics he wrote for "El Pescador". Roughly translated into English, the song begins with the words, "The tide is rising. To get to the shore, talk to the moon. The Fisherman has no fortune. He talks to the water. He talks to the shore. He talks to the moon." Barros' "El Pescador" pays homage to the indigenous traditions of respectful communication with the natural world, instead of pillaging its resources for profit as evidenced by the statement "The fisherman