Founder of the critically acclaimed ensemble Imani Winds, flutist Valerie Coleman is also earning wide recognition for her composition. Working on a portable organ at an early age, Coleman composed three full-length symphonies by the time she was 14. She received two bachelor’s degrees—one in composition and one in flute performance—from Boston University and earned a master’s degree in flute performance from Mannes College of Music. She was the first African-American woman composer to receive a commission from the Philadelphia Orchestra, fulfilling the commission in 2019 with Umoja, Anthem for Unity. This composition led the Washington Post in 2020 to name her “One of the Top 35 Women Composers.”

Written in 2020 as the result of her second commission from the Philadelphia Orchestra, Valerie Coleman’s Seven O’Clock Shout honors workers on the front line during the COVID-19 pandemic. As Coleman explains, “To me, Seven O’Clock Shout is a declaration of our survival. It is something that allows us our agency to take back the kindness that is in our hearts and the emotions that cause us such turmoil...We cheer on the essential workers with a primal and fierce urgency to let them know that we stand with them and each other.” Seven O’Clock Shout premiered virtually on July 6, 2020. As Coleman describes on her website,

The work begins with a distant and solitary solo between two trumpets in fanfare fashion to commemorate the isolation forced upon humankind and the need to reach out to one another. The fanfare blossoms into a lushly dense landscape of nature, symbolizing both the caregiving acts of nurses and doctors as they try to save lives, while nature is transforming and healing herself during a time of self-isolation.