Tag Archives: Grief

Video of Requiem up on my YouTube channel

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I now have Requiem up on my YouTube channel.

I wrote this piece to commemorate my lost babies. Sadly, the idea formed in my head sometime in 2018 after my first loss, which really devastated me. It maybe was the most destabilizing experience of my life when I lost my baby at about 11 weeks. Thankfully, I had some very thoughtful friends who ministered to me during that difficult time.

I didn’t expect to have another baby to mourn before completing the piece, but in January of 2021, I lost another baby at about 11 weeks as well. This time, I was determined to finish the project and did so in a short amount of time afterwards.

Jason Bergman had scheduled the performance for October 12, 2021. I was looking forward to attending it. I went to a rehearsal the week prior to see that they were executing my ideas like I had imagined. The fantastic musicians – Jason Bergman, Monte Belknap, and Michelle Kesler – interpreted my ideas in a lovely way and I was excited about hearing the premiere on the following Tuesday evening.

On Friday night, my midwife detected something off about my baby, and I went to get an ultrasound scan the next day. Baby wasn’t doing well, and the fluids were low, so it was hard to get a good scan.

Monday night, which happened to be my birthday, my midwife came by again, and could no longer detect a heartbeat. I expected that I’d lose this baby quickly, like the other babies, and worried not only about the heartbreak, but also about attending the premiere, so long awaited.

But I went and listened to the premiere with my husband, and this piece really moved me. Baby ended up being born several weeks later, and although he had already passed away, his birth was glorious, and everything was as good as it could be. Again, I had the lovely support of friends around me.

When I was a teen, I had the opportunity to perform Mozart’s Requiem with my school chamber choir. That music is sublime. Mozart wrote it as his last piece of music, and he didn’t finish it before he died, so a student finished it “in his style,” and we can only hope it was much like the man himself would have written it.

The music from Mozart’s Requiem has stayed with me all these years, and whereas I don’t claim his genius, I have been inspired by his music throughout my life, in particular the Requiem. Another fantastic piece of music with the same name is by Gabriel Fauré. I recommend these pieces anytime you want to feel lifted spiritually, or need to grieve a loved one.

It is my hope that my piece will serve to help another person grieve and mourn his or her loved ones as well.

Putting a bit of yourself in the music

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Listening to Schostakovich’s Symphony 7 makes you think he’s writing about the war, and the threat of the KGB, but abstractly enough that it’s hard to pin him on it. It is one of the most emotionally charged pieces I have listened to, in particular that has no lyrics.

When I wrote the trombone quartet I will take care of you, I had put a lot of thought into the music drama that I based the songs on that turned into movements. They had characters, they had feelings, and there were problems they were trying to solve.

As I’m working on a piece today, I’m writing in what I feel like the desperate crying of grief after losing a loved one. I can only hope that those who hear it will recognize it, as I believe this can be cathartic. Most people get hit by grief or loss at some point in their lives, and music can be very soothing.

A bad day is better than no day

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I’m reading James Clear’s Atomic Habits. He talks about the importance of showing up, even when you don’t feel like it. You do it because it is a part of your identity, that you are a person that doesn’t miss (his example is workouts, but I’m applying it to writing music).

It’s been a day full of working on house chores, and I am looking at my list of things to do. I have a task called “Write music.” It does not quantify how much, because I know that these days come sometimes, when I feel like I don’t have much time, and maybe not a ton of ideas to write in the amount of time I can scrounge up anyway.

But I write in three phrases, and I consider it a non-zero day, a day which despite not yielding lots of new notes, has still been a day when I showed up to my computer. I opened my software notation program, and I wrote in some new notes. I put in a key change.

Next time I know I’ll need to add in more variations on the theme. It should be fun. But as I explained a few days ago, the piece came with a huge wave of grief attached to it, and it is kind of heavy working on it. I’ll go play some Bruch or Telemann or Hummel or maybe just Christmas tunes to brighten my spirit.

Poetry attacks in the night

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Have you ever been just about to go to sleep, but then you get the first two lines of your next song? It’s almost physical, the words just come to you.

You grab your notebook that you keep for such occasions and a pencil and try to keep up as the words just keep flowing to you.

You know the title of the song, and you have a draft of the lyrics, when you start thinking of a melodic line to start out with. But it doesn’t stop there. You get the next four lines, and you don’t have staff paper or a computer with you so you just write down pitches, ideas that is a kind of shorthand that will help you know what you’re thinking when you get to the computer after the weekend.

You write in the chorus, the repeats, and through it all, you weep because you know the song has several depths and you have a hunch it will work well both for an instrumental solo or possibly a song if you choose to make it that way sometime. No, you weep because it’s your grief pouring out of you at the same time as the song is taking shape.

Well, I had one of those experiences Saturday. I haven’t had a lot of time to write down the music in my software yet, but my notes have been extremely helpful, for when I had a few moments to start on it.

The grief kept attacking me Sunday, and I could hear new rhythms that needed to be included. Because I like to take sabbath, I just wrote in a shorthand note to be able to retain the idea until later.