Elegiac Blue ("Say Their Names")

Elegiac Blue ("Say Their Names") is a solo piano meditation on grief, loss, perseverance, and progress. The first notes of the piece were written during the summer of 2020 as a response to the deaths among far too many others of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. I had recently finished another piano prelude ("Outcry"), which expressed the far more easily accessed emotion of rage. Beyond the first gesture, Elegiac Blue remained stalled until May of 2023, though I attempted to revisit it several times before that. Between the piece's inception and completion, the already too long list of names of those individuals who's lives were lost due to racism, homophobia, transphobia, gun-fetishism, science-denial, religious fundamentalism, and political malaise and ineptitude has grown even longer, and grows longer still every day. I think that my challenge when I set out to write the piece in the first place is that the magnitude of the task I had set myself was far beyond my talents as a composer, not to mention the fact that I was unsure whether or not my voice belonged in the discussion at all. The solution to my writers block came from the Blues. Though the Blues had its origins in songs of loss and pain, the form, particularly in the hands of jazz musicians, has come to be one that expresses joy as often as not. As an improviser, I find that the blues is a phenomenally versatile vehicle for emotional catharsis, regardless of the emotion. That was the key. In writing another piece a Concerto for Piano and Big Band I began writing a slow section that used extended blues harmonies with chord voicings and rhythmic conceits drawn for the more modernist "classical" side of my musical brain. Those harmonic conceits and associate melodic ideas were out of place for the concerto, but struck a powerful emotional chord in me: I knew that they belonged here. This piece, though conceived originally from a place of pain, is also a celebration of life, a promise of action, and a plea for progress. It's a small gesture in a much bigger conversation, and likely won't be my final offering to that discussion, but Elegiac Blue has finally given those initial six notes that I wrote in June of 2020 a purpose and a direction. It has given me a profound catharsis, and will, I hope, resonate with those that hear and perform the piece. Listen. Remember. Act. Say their names.