Legacy: Songs of Unity

Commissioned by Shanpatrick Davis for the Davis Alumni Choir. Supported by New Music USA's Creator Development Fund 2023 - 2024. When my former high school choir director, Shanpatrick Davis, approached me asking to write a piece for him to conduct at Carnegie Hall with a choir of his alumni, I was absolutely thrilled. He commissioned it to be a celebration of his 25 years of teaching and so I sought to create a work that acted as a love letter to music and a representation of the power it has to bring people together. I chose the text from the first movement from a tradition we had at the end of the year in choir in which we always sang the same song to end the final spring concert which used the Psalm 133 text. I thought it would be perfect that the first song we sing with him would use the text of the very last song we sang. In the second movement I wanted to show a journey of someone who has lost their way in life finding it back again through music. I first approached the third movement as a celebration of the glorious unification of music and poetry but as I worked on it more, the meaning of the Purcell text changed for me. It became about unity among people and coming together as a community to face grief, trauma, and hardships: each of us walking hand in hand to support one another.