Product Description
A work for chorus (SATB) and piano. First performance March, 2023 by Schola Cantorum of Silicon Valley.
One morning in early 2022, after having somewhat unexpectedly lost my two aunts and one of my best friends in the world over the previous year or so, I woke up and this piece, along with some tears, poured out in about 15 minutes.
For Us the Living contains echoes of Brahms' German Requiem (Denn alles Fleisch ist wie Gras), Shawn Kirchner's Cornerstone, and Dolly Parton's Light of a Clear Blue Morning (another a song about loss). The words are partly based on a short poem I wrote after my father passed away. I ended to him, "Go to sleep, rest a while." So, perhaps obviously, the piece is like a lullaby. What I'm saying is that the purpose of mourning is first to comfort the survivors, and a call to take care of each other -- but also to not just wait for salvation, but to use the memory of our loved ones, to be inspired to pick ourselves up and make ourselves useful while we're on this Earth.
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