Music When Soft Voices Die

When I chose this text I was not sure how it might fit in with celebrating 20 years of The Texas Voices. But as I began to write the piece, a wonderful former student from my days of directing choirs at W.T. White High School in Dallas became very ill. For many years, she had also been a high school choral director. As her illness progressed, the text became very meaningful to me. In fact she died about the same day that I finished it and so the piece was in a sense written for Sharon. Music When Soft Voices Die was written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1821, in which he compared love to other beautiful experiences such as listening to music and even smelling "sweet violets". And even after the "beloved" is "gone", the love that they shared will "slumber" on in the memory. As I attended the Spring concert of her choir, the memory of Sharon was living on in the voices of her students.