It’s none of my business, and I was never even close to this person, and I have no evidence that what she is doing with her life now isn’t just as meaningful, and goodness knows I’m not making music like I once did, and am also pretty boring, but. I feel weirdly disappointed that a person I went to college with is no longer composing and is, as far as I can tell from social media, mostly occupied with being a suburban mom and wife of some kind of finance man. Again, absolutely something I have no business being disappointed by, and a valid life choice. When we were in college, she wrote a requiem for unaccompanied chamber choir. It used traditional latin requiem mass texts and these very spare, crystalline harmonies, until it closed with a setting of Dylan Thomas’ “And Death Shall Have No Dominion.” Lux aeterna ended so so gently and there was a silent moment and then the choir switched to english and in came all this rich gorgeous dissonance and I remember just being dissolved by it.