Duration: 62’
Instrumentation: Double chorus (2 solo sopranos, alto solo can be drawn from chorus), organ, harp, timpani, 3 percussionists
Performance Note:
This setting of (much of) the Missa pro defunctis is as much a surprise to me as to anybody: I’d never seriously thought about writing a Requiem mass and approached the process with some trepidation. However, two things pushed me over the edge.
The first was the death of my mom from pancreatic cancer in March 2020. Though not a Catholic, she had a strong interest in the liturgy of the Roman rites. She also possessed a great love for Christian hymnody. Both of those appreciations found their way into my Missa pro defunctis.
The other deciding factor was reading through a translation of the liturgy myself a few weeks after my mom died. Maybe it was the circumstances; maybe it was the occasion of encountering the texts without the intermediary of music by Mozart, Berlioz, Verdi, Faure, or Britten. Regardless, I was taken by the essential simplicity, humility, devotion, and beauty of the words. Far from being threatening or forbidding, I found them, even—especially!—the familiar stanzas of the “Dies irae,” to be profoundly touching and personal.
I composed most of the Missa pro defunctis between March and November 2020 (the “Libera me” was added in July 2021), its writing coinciding with the unfolding of the coronavirus pandemic that began upending life in the United States just days after my mom’s funeral. Though not intended as a response to current events, it’s hard not to read the larger piece as an epitaph (though by no means a hopeless one) for some dark days.