Originally published 2019-09-04.
While there might not be an obvious audience for the musicians in Wisconsin, they’re always performing for the people who might need music the most.
The Black String Triage Ensemble is a group of classical musicians that play music at Milwaukee crime scenes after the law enforcement teams have left.
From 11 to 75 years old, the musicians hope that by performing music at the sites of gun violence and shootings, they’ll help ease the pain of nearby community members who might have been affected by the incident.
As Black String Triage Ensemble founder Dayvin Hallmon told WISN: “It’s not necessarily so much for the family of the victims; that healing trajectory is a much longer arc of time.”
“But for everyone else in the neighborhood—people who live next door, down the street, maybe there’s somebody who owns a store—everybody that’s in that space is somehow devastated in some way by this impact,” Hallmon added. “So there has to be something that sweeps that away, sweeps those ashes away, so they don’t carry them home.”
Photo by WISN
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A performance intended for the surrounding neighbourhood
Hallmon's explanation distinguishes the ensemble's immediate audience from the much longer experience of a bereaved family. That detail matters: the musicians are offering a presence in a place affected by violence, not claiming that one performance resolves grief. The location makes listening part of a shared public response.
An offering should leave room for different reactions
Music that comforts one person may not be what another needs at that moment. The most thoughtful reading of the project keeps the community's response central rather than assuming a uniform healing effect. Its value can include attention, witness and an opportunity to pause together. Those are meaningful possibilities without making a clinical promise or asking the performance to replace practical support.
How the ensemble works
Hallmon, who plays seven instruments and has been a church musician since he was about nine, founded the ensemble in May 2019. The idea came to him on a visit to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC: “Something said to me: ‘Address the life condition.’” In its first summer the group had seven African-American and Latino members, aged from 11 to their seventies, and played at more than a dozen crime scenes. Members are on call on weekends that Hallmon sets aside, and he does not ask the police for details: “I don’t need to know.” The set follows the stages of grief, with a spiritual for denial, classical music for anger, jazz for bargaining, and blues and soul for depression and acceptance, ending with a song for faith; all of it is by African-American composers such as Duke Ellington and Curtis Mayfield. After one performance, the mother of the person who had been shot came out in her bathrobe as the musicians were packing up and told Hallmon: “I will sleep better tonight knowing you are here.” By December 2022 the ensemble was still on call most weekends during the summer.
Sources: CNN, 17 August 2019: These Milwaukee musicians gather to play at the city’s crime scenes Shepherd Express, 14 December 2022: String musicians on call for social justice
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