No Longer Mourn For Me

No Longer Mourn For Me was written amid the 2020 pandemic. I sat down to write it late one night, around 10ish and essentially did not stop until I hit the double bar line. The piece was finished at night, but it took a long while before it saw the light of day. It received workshopping from the Concordia Choir in Moorhead, MN, but its premiere did not come until early 2022. The dedication is to my late friend, Grant Eggers. He was one of my best friends in my college years but lost his life in late 2021 after a long battle with depression. When I first wrote the piece, I got the feeling that it would go on to have significant meaning. One doesn't often write about death and expect a cheery message to be taken by their listeners. But on the whole, this piece is as much about love as it is about death. The text is Shakespearean in origin, from his Sonnet 71. He wrote this about his lover at the time (Current literature suggests this lover was a young man). His poetry can be hard to decipher for the modern listener, but suffice it to say the meaning of this text is this. "When I die, don't cry for me. Let your love die as I have, or else the world will do nothing but remind you of me. It is better to forget love once lost." Though the message is somber, it is also strangely comforting. The poet tries to be there for someone, even though they may be dead and buried. The whole piece is meant to be a back-and-forth between death and love and the strange intermingling of the two