Shadowlight

Commissioned in 2017 by the Dartmouth College Wind Ensemble as a memorial piece for Scott Smedinghoff, the title refers to the seeming duality of existence. There is light, there is darkness, but there is also light beyond the veil. Shadowlight refers to this idea, that though the person may be gone from our everyday, immediate access, they are not gone completely. There is still light beyond the veil that separates the living from the dead and that, though we mourn the passing, we celebrate the life and the joy of the person. So this piece has become in a sense a double-memorial, to the lives of those we lose too soon and to the memory of all that they have left behind in this world; that we can still see and grasp and know the daily evidence that they were here and that we are the better for it.