Mass shootings are a sad and almost uniquely American fact of life in the 21st century. When, on May 24, 2022, a shooter I will not name entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas and murdered 21 people, most of them small children (some of whom had celebrated their graduation earlier that morning) and injured 18 others, including his grandmother, it was the second time that such an event occurred in my lifetime. These tragically avoidable events bring with them unimaginable grief to the lives of those immediately affected by them, but they also bring a collective, communal grief felt, in this age of mass communication and social media, at a national, if not global level. Music plays an important role in helping people deal with such grief, and Uvalde was no exception. I was struck, however, by the dearth of appropriate music presented in the media that did not conform to a Christian worship tradition (even Samuel Barber’s ubiquitous Adagio for Strings has a Christian liturgical association through its choral arrangement as an “Agnus Dei”). The United States is a polyglot nation encompassing myriad spiritual traditions, not to mention nonreligious peoples. As a reaction to the Uvalde tragedy, I wanted to create a work that could provide some comfort without necessarily evoking a specific spiritual tradition or liturgy.

Cancionero de luto (“Mourning Songbook”) sets six texts in as many languages. Its aim is to fill the need for an ecumenical music of grief that also embraces so-called freethinkers, atheists and other non-spiritual traditions as well. I was also inspired by Sasha Sagan’s book, For Small Creatures Such as We, to structure the songbook as a sort of ritual liturgy, albeit a secular one. As a former Catholic, I responded by loosely molding my “Ceremony of the Spirit” (to use the title of one of the Basho haiku set in the first chorus) around the well known requiem structure. The nine movements in “Cancionero de luto” are structured into four large sections around a central interlude, giving the piece a palindromic arc form. Cancionero de luto is not a liturgy, however. Its individual pieces can be taken individually for any small or large ritual that a community or individual might need to work through their grief and the questions of mortality that are central to the human experience.

‍ ‍ ”Cancionero de Luto (Mourning Songbook)” ‍ ‍broadcast premiere ‍