"Presidents Day Concert: Honoring the Museum's 30th Anniversary" Program

The full recording of this Presidents Day Concert may additionally be viewed on the Museum's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgHimwmgLJ0. -- Stephen Fagin, Curator

In a 2018 oral history with The Sixth Floor Museum, composer Jesus Martinez discussed how he initially approached this commissioned piece. He said, "I was thinking about it and doing a lot of research. I came to the thought that, well, you know, I'm thirty-one. Most of my generation knows a little bit about JFK obviously through school and their own research. But I wanted to recreate it. I wanted to recreate the assassination in a way." From the start, Martinez recognized that many of the people who would hear "The Sixth Floor" were not alive at the time of the assassination. He said, "What I would like young students or young children to take away from it is that, you know, music is very, very, very much an important part of our lives. It tells a story through a different outlet, through a different cue. And I think if the students can feel half of what I felt, I think that would be really, really important." -- Stephen Fagin, Curator