Just Mercy

“Just Mercy” was originally composed for solo piano in the years following the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, emerging as a quiet reflection on what remains after collective trauma rather than a direct response to the event itself. In 2020, the piano version was featured during National YoungArts Week in Miami as part of a collaborative concert uniting instrumentalists and writers, where a poem was read alongside the music, allowing sound and language to coexist in shared reflection. Six years later, on Valentine’s Day and the eighth anniversary of the massacre, this piece reemerged in a new form for concert band, not through commission or request, but through an internal and unprompted return to something that had never fully left. Expanded in instrumentation yet restrained in voice, the work preserves the inward stillness of the original while allowing collective breath and resonance to carry memory forward, standing as an act of remembrance that is unresolved, enduring, and quietly human.