I've spent my entire career scoring Hollywood films and TV shows
the sudden loss of my mother to cancer, inspired me to compose a requiem just for her.
A requiem is a mass for the dead.
So it's an ancient Catholic burial rite
and it's a recipe,
a series of prayers that basically sends a person's soul
from the living world to the cosmic eternal world.
A recording is intense.
It's talking about death and fire and hell and damnation and trying to
save the soul of the person that's departed.
And I did it for my mother.
We got sort of blindsided by this invitation
from the music of sacrificial in Vatican City.
And I was the first American composer ever invited.
So the invitation included a live broadcast on Italian TV and
you know, satellite TV throughout Europe
for my mother is Steven Edwards.
I was doing a tribute to my mom.
This is something I'm gonna do one time in my entire life.
I wanted to do something on a massive scale. I was thinking it can't be big enough.
So I had a 60 voice, children's choir, 200 voice, adult choir, sopranos out tools,
tenors.
Basses, 50 orchestra,
you know, double woodwinds, flute, elbow clarinet, bassoon three French horns,
three trombones, two trumpets, tuba strings, a lot of percussion.
I was gonna do this right. I was gonna absolutely leave nothing
to the imagination.
So many musicians and so many singers.
Once we're in this live broadcast,
there's so many possibilities for things to go wrong.
The requiem is an ancient Catholic burial rite
starts from rest in peace and it goes through 12 different prayers
and in the 18 hundreds rec rooms became major concert works.
Mozart wrote a famous requiem Brahms verity and even contemporary composers,
John Rudder wrote a beautiful requiems.
I mean, there's literally dozens of examples. So my chance came
because of
loss because of my mother's death.
I was gonna do this right and do it on a very, very grand scale.
It's a very lofty idea, but you have to start somewhere.
And so it's like being an author trying to write a book, you start with a,
a melodic idea or something and you flesh it out and it's
a series of literally thousands and thousands and thousands of decisions.
So the first decision was it's gonna be in Latin,
even though Latin is a dead language.
It's the language
that was spoken in Rome on the streets, Christ was living.
So it's the language of the people back then.
As soon as I made that decision, then I had to go
and wrestle with this text since I don't speak the language,
I had to go sit down with each movement and
try to figure out something that went musically with it.
Record arm eternal is the first movement. Um
Eternal rest, grant unto them. O Lord
and let perpetual light shine upon them. So
this is basically the introduction of the kids
and the kids start singing right here
and basically, it's this tune
and the kids start singing right here. The text has inherently written in it.
This idea of redemption and hope and rest for the souls.
To me that was Children asking for that and sometimes
the grown ups get to sing together with their Children.
And that melding and that blending is the innocence with the,
the hopelessness of being a grown up and seeing the world as it really is.
All those films. I've done all that deadline work.
I did all the experimentation I've done with all the musical forms,
writing for different instruments, writing for singers.
It's all coming together for me to have this opportunity
to honor her.
Uh
Her name is Rosie Severino Edwards.
She was
a child of Sicilian immigrants, but born in Hillsdale,
Michigan lived her whole life in Michigan.
She was truly a child of the fifties. She was super glamorous,
very beautiful, a true Bobby Soxer glamour girl.
When she went to college,
she got her master's degree in teaching basically in music.
So immediately upon graduation,
she started directing choirs at schools elementary school
um in the Detroit area and Ann Arbor area while she was doing that,
she was the dig prettiest teacher girl.
She won a contest for Miss Aeronautical Hillsdale or something.
I mean, she was, she was a glamour girl, but she was a music glamour girl.
She had a master's and also I think in flute performance too.
So she was a fine flute player
and a pretty good piano player and a really good choral director.
T,
and she was just a natural musician
when I watched her do it. It didn't look difficult like she was working very hard
as one of four kids in a household with a music teacher.
Part of the deal was you took music lessons.
She wasn't our primary teacher. We went to a teacher once a week.
But the other six days we, we had her,
my younger brother played and my older sister played
and my older brother played drums for a while.
So the house sounded like a conservatory.
Her sister,
Sarah and Rosie were both accomplished piano players and
flutists and both taught music their whole lives.
And her eldest brother,
Joe was a Juilliard trained classical piano player who I wanted to be just like.
And when I was a little kid,
my mother showed me a record that he
actually wrote the music for called Little Sandy Slave
Foot.
But it's this fun little 19 fifties, Kitschy Christmas song on Columbia Records.
It was like a real record release. His name was Sandy Sla,
but also sad
for
me
to
4 ft tall, his feet were 3 ft three to me.
It was, you know, living in Michigan, it was like being on the moon. I mean, it was,
how did somebody that I know
have his name on a record?
That sounds really fascinating.
And how would I ever do that?
I had this obsession.
It wasn't something I wanted to do, it was something I sort of had to do.
And she never ever wavered from the point.
She started me taking lessons when I was seven
until the day she died in her support of my music.
She was the constant presence in my life.
I came here
because I got to shut off my cell phone,
leave the kids at home,
help pe people calling me and I could escape to this place and nobody would bother me.
I had the piece of text in Latin
and I'd have the English translation and it, and it took me somewhere.
Sometimes it was a very plain thing or a very sort of,
uh, you know, uninspired thing.
And then sometimes I would write those two or three things,
throw the two or three things out
and come up with something
that I thought was interesting.
I got to be the director this time,
you know, just whatever I felt like writing based on what the text provided for me.
If somebody was paying me to do it.
Like somebody pays me to do a movie. Then I'm, I'm beholden to them.
Everything there is whether you like it or hate it. It is
the expression that I felt. It is the emotion that I felt as an artist.
Nobody was telling me what to do. This was the most personal thing
I'd ever had the privilege of doing.
I
just feel really connected to her when that piece of music is playing
or when I look at the score
and remember I was also scoring films during the day. So this was my night gig.
So during the day, I was scoring, you know, action films, caper, movies,
um dog movies, karate movies, horror flicks, documentary films, commercials,
infomercials, writing songs, arranging songs, you know,
all the work that was coming was still coming in.
So I got a call from a producer saying we need a hip hop song called that Mother
is a hoe
and we need it for a movie. It has to have that specific lyric.
So this guy called Alo Black who's become a huge star.
Uh We co wrote this rap track called
That
is a hoe.
So that was what I was doing during the day and at night,
I'd go lock myself in the studio after my
kids went to bed and start writing this piece that
I got to write first phrase.
So let's go find a pizzicato
string sound.
Then I get this call from a call conductor that Rosie had introduced me to.
Hi, Steve. It's Candice.
Listen,
I wanted to talk to you because I just
got invited to conduct on the festival Pro Musica Aarti
Sacra.
It's a huge international festival considered one of the finest in the world.
So, here is what I'm thinking.
Let's do the international premiere over there.
Uh, from what I understand it's gonna be televised. Um,
Vatican Radio, right? TV. All kinds of things.
So, uh why don't you give me a call? Let's chat. All right. Chow.
So now I have something to write for.
I had like a set deadline. I had to have the music ready.
I had to have everything written. I had to have it orchestrated, copied.
There's a lot of processes that I have to go through from sitting at the piano,
writing down single melodies to making the piece play in,
in the synthesizer stuff that I used to making a full complete concert score
with everybody's part to sending the demos to the choir so they can rehearse
to her contract in the orchestra. She had a lot of stuff to do too.
So we started inviting choirs and the concert came together really quickly.
So the logistics were
quite major. Everybody's got to get to Italy, including 60 Children
and, you know, 100 and 50 adults.
And
so, you know, we have to hire an orchestra there. So we had to figure that out.
So it was a tremendous amount of rehearsing
and teaching them the parts.
And then of course, we had to bring the orchestra in and rehearse them.
So now it became a movement by movement,
um conversation where I was feeding her movements
one at a time and she'd go through them
and then she'd learn them and then she would be able to teach them to the singers.
And she did residencies where she would actually fly to the cities
and con and conduct the singers and teach them the music.
Ok.
Y'all, it's very tall move
and
ready
and
ho ho
ho
ho.
Why?
Yeah.
Yay,
yay,
yay.
Ok. This is not Sesame Street,
right?
Yyyyy
jaws dropped.
Soft pallet is up and you have to roll enough air
to fill up that space if you ever hear yourself going.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
That means you're singing from here. You're not singing from here.
All right. Remember, what did we teach ourselves? Last time
we own our sound, right?
Candace is a very fluent musician, a really excellent singer.
I mean, she sings, she sounds like a professional singer. She could sing
in professional status anywhere, any city in the world. I just got back.
I was actually, what's today,
Friday? Ok. Sorry.
Um,
I, I was in Prague a week ago.
I was in Prague conducting. Um, uh, putting, uh, the Prague Philharmonic,
putting down the requiem tracks
when you've got these players
that are just going crazy on this stuff.
And you've got 100 and 78 of you up there like this
folks, we will
raise the roof,
we will absolutely raise the roof.
But you are now going into a world of professional choral
sound and we need to get this going right now.
So,
um
I would like to go to the requiem. Please requiem
a
turn
on.
Here we go at nine.
Let's just start right at nine. Ok.
Ready.
Right.
Please stop
me.
Ok.
Uh, girls that approach was not good.
Right.
Candace has always had a lot of drive and a lot
of creativity which sometimes was not easy to live with.
She is absolutely demanding perfection.
First altos, raise your hand, please.
You can't sing this way.
You have to sing this way. You have to fill up this entire space. It is.
Oh,
it's with an aspiration of air. That's the one place you can't breathe.
Candice is much more demanding than Rosie was.
But what she gets on the other side of it is
she gets the respect and she gets a great performance singing.
This music is not enough
singing it well, is not enough. You have to feel it.
You have to perform it.
We sort of have to teach them everything, part by part,
bit by bit because a lot of these singers weren't pros, they were
amateur singers that were singing because they love singing.
They have the artistic right? To tell you you're not going to sing
the pressure's on because
we're the American choir coming in there and we don't wanna make everybody look bad.
So here we got 79 Don
ready.
Yeah.
And now let's just sing the right notes and it'll be great.
Alright.
These folks were
pretty rough around the edges and they
had been rehearsing with their choir director
and when Candice came in she had to sort of whip them into shape.
I was thinking,
I'm gonna have to depend on her even more than I ever thought because she's gonna have
to turn these people from small town little
church corner singers to professional world stage musicians.
23
Candice used to conduct this chorus. And interestingly,
the Lords chorus is what led me to Candice because they went,
travel to Naples where my mother was at a convention.
They made a big deal that Lords singers are coming. And so
Rosie went to the concert and she met up with Candace and they became friends
and Rosie said, oh, by the way,
my son writes music and then Candace's eyes is kind of rolled and said, oh, no,
not another one.
She handed her a CD of my
A
Ria mass. And then Candice got hired to be a conductor in residence at Carnegie Hall.
And that was the first thing she programmed.
This group is to me it seems like this is
sort of the heart of the troubled voices for Rome.
Does that make sense? And
one of you counts for two of everybody else, maybe three of everybody else,
everybody
else.
So, um
and the piece begins and ends with treble voices.
So there's an immense amount of responsibility we're putting on your shoulders.
Yeah, guys, you can't get out early.
So let me just have them in. Please Simon play with us
the minute 80
ready
at 12, ready at,
I just came from the University of Miami.
I've had four years of the accompaniment classes.
So I had to accompany singers and violinists, but nothing so big as what we're doing.
Now
for me to deliver the music how he wants it. I think about my mother.
That's definitely how I
feel the music, the most
ma
mercy
to portray those feelings. I really had to put
a lot of effort into it.
Through the piano
we've opened with movements that are
uh
I would, they're pretty lyrical well
when the
D
A comes and I was talking to the Lords girls uh yesterday a little bit about this.
Now we get to talk about this whole,
this whole other side of the requiem, this the wrath of God.
The D A zero was the hardest movement to write because
the problem is
with the famous requiems, the, the sort of iconic ones that came before me.
The Diaz IES
tend to be the most famous.
So the DC A has interesting uses in films. There's a quote from DC
A in Star Wars from John Williams score. Dimitri Tiomkin used it in his score for.
It's a wonderful life in the sequence at the end when he is um going after the angel,
when he's looking down over the river,
Mike Oldfield's score from the exorcist quotes. Uh D
so D A series is sort of this,
even though people don't necessarily know it and
they don't necessarily know how to name it.
It's, it's really part of our world. We hear it all the time
and the D AC
A is,
it's got so much interesting history. It was apparently written by a Pope.
The original chant melody was written by a Pope and the
melody was spoke or sung to him by a bird.
It's like if that's not cosmic, I don't know what it is.
So
the DS D Ray from Mozart's re
Room is iconic. Everybody knows that it was an Amadeus.
Every, everybody knows this piece
and the Ds D Ray from the very rec
room same deal. It's been used in movie trailers for 50 years.
So these pieces were ring around in my head and I was trying to
sort of write my own original one and it just
wasn't happening.
And the iconic tune is very familiar.
So my problem was trying to come up with something original and I just couldn't do it.
Classic sixth century
chant melody goes like this
and then it goes on and on.
It was so frustrating. I would sit there at the piano
writing all these different
licks and different,
like ideas scratching out stuff. And I just hated everything.
So, all I would do is I would just punt, I would just say, ok, forget it.
And I go to another move
I
see.
So the other moves that I just sort of once I put myself to it and once
I sat with the prayers and once I got to become best friends with the Latin text,
they fell out. But the Ds cr A
just didn't. So I kept waiting and I would get these
angry voicemails from Candace, Steve. It's Candace.
I need to know when we're going to get some music for the DS
A.
They had to have the music so they could rehearse.
It's going to take a long time to teach
it with the various groups and go through everything.
I'm just getting very concerned at this point
that we're going to have enough time
to make sure that it's prepared properly where the
men come in, pick up 55
and it just wasn't happening. So
I finally just sort of gave up and
stopped trying to worry about writing that movement.
Then one afternoon it finally hit me.
Now, I have something
that's
great.
Stay loose.
Candace is
the engine that drives this whole piece of music. She's a Roman.
She's a, she's like a musical tornado, the Dynamo,
um, Maestra,
what just, what she brings out of the singers, you know,
this piece of music would be sitting in a drawer somewhere if it wasn't for her,
the singers have a tremendous hill decline because they have
to get used to doing it with the orchestra.
A lot of them never heard the orchestra.
Right.
That's short.
90% of singing is mental
preparation.
Who are you
as a singer? And what does that sound like before it ever comes out of your mouth?
You know, singing and having cameras on them and having, you know,
being under literally under the spotlight
and in the recording studio it's, you know,
under a microscope because every time there's a wrong
or a wrong entrance or a wrong exit,
we have to stop and start over.
Let's do that again.
Instead of sounding fuller. It sounded,
I
where we just were,
how many of you sang,
right? It just goes, goes, goes, goes, goes and you've got to be ready for it again.
Same people, same place. I know that this is very tedious.
I know that some of you right now are bored stiff.
But what I know for sure
is that if this is a memorized from note to note, to note,
this thing will not fly as it should fly.
Candace was having to feed them every phrase,
every note and things were going wrong and
they couldn't get through more than 12 bars of a section without her stopping.
So I was pretty darn concerned. This is the make or break.
If you just take off on your own, we're gonna be in trouble.
It's not going to be good enough.
This is a European audience folks and the verdict is going to be out for a while
and they know what's facing them.
So it's like a great athletic team. You know, they're up to the challenge.
They have to have,
you know, all the fundamentals, right?
They have to have, they have to be psyched up for the, uh,
for the big game and they have to, you know,
run all the drills and know the playbook and, you know,
you can use all the parallels you want,
but they know the task at hand. So
it doesn't matter if the singer is 15 years old or 80 years old.
You know, they're all one team now.
So the choirs all fund raised and got the money
through their churches or through individuals or paid for it themselves.
And, you know, remember the kids were coming.
So the kids that came with at least one parent each.
So there was probably 300 people plus on this trip.
And we figured out there was over a million
dollars spent in just logistics to get the orchestra,
the people there, the flights, the food, the hotels.
So it was a major deal.
I had 20 family members personally that came over my brothers and
my sister came and all their family and all the kids came.
So it was a major league European trip.
And while we're in Rome,
we only get one chance to rehearse,
one chance to record
and one chance to perform.
Everybody.
We are here.
Hallelujah.
Travel is done. The time switch has been swapped.
There were two major things that brought you together.
First thing was me.
Thank you.
And then the other factor is this piece of music
that it's our great privilege to present to Europe
on Saturday.
When people come together for a common cause, it's not always easy
and everybody is not always happy.
But this is what I tell you.
Extraordinary people
have extraordinary problems.
Yes.
But guess what,
we serve an extraordinary God.
So the bigger your problems are, the greater the victory will be
the orchestra recorded in Prague,
the
same orchestras here with us.
So they flew in
and then the choir is, you know, it's a big
Amalgam of choirs from five or six different states
that a word
Magdalen amalgam amalgam. Never heard that.
Make it up. No, it's real. It's a word. It's a musical thing.
A
musical thing.
I have a special place in my heart for Rome because
it was the last trip I took with my folks.
We went all of us together, the whole family.
My two brothers and my sister and the spouses spent about a week going and
doing a tour of all these famous facilities and including the one we're playing in.
They were so proud of their family and wanted them to be here. And
uh we did a number of really fun things together and because they wanted it to be
a memory that they would share for years to come
in. Those last months, I was in Detroit at the time. And so I came over frequently
to, to be with, with Marty and Rosalie. And
uh
I would bring her communion. I anointed her before she died.
They were all extremely faithful to both of them,
these events with the music
because it was Rosa Lee who passed first. Obviously,
I believe
that her prayer and her love,
her mother ring
basically prepared the way
also for, for Marty's passing
and that
it was the music, the music, the music, you know,
and somehow the relationship because the others would look to Stephen.
It was as if
that relationship, that Stephen had of faith
of talent in music
that help them work through
the loss of their parents.
It's blowing my mind
that people are looking at their music on a
note that you don't change for five counts.
You're singing Hosanna
in Rome,
in one of the most beautiful places I've ever stood in, in my life
and I've been dragging you along and dragging
you along and you're not getting the point
kids right where you come in again.
Amazing when I screamed. Look up and you got your heads out of the book.
The sound of this choir doubled.
You are putting your head down to see the music.
You move your eyes only.
I want to congratulate you on a good first rehearsal.
OK. Don't take
my screaming at you
as a negative thing. Did you break a baton?
If I didn't care,
I wouldn't scream.
Right if it wasn't brilliant
or
back.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
That all of your pleas appropriate where you were
yesterday
in the Basilica.
I'm a huge Ennio Morricone fan. He's one of the top film composers and he did c
about Paradiso go to bad and the ugly all the
Spaghetti Westerns and he's one of my absolute heroes.
He really
single-handedly got me interested in writing for film.
The fact that I'm in his studio
and in the place where he recorded all this stuff is really,
really great and it's one of the greatest studios in Europe. So
that's a really famous place. A lot of great recordings have been done here.
This is the music and the clique. OK. Got it. That's fine.
What's your name? Gabriel.
OK. You're gonna be on.
OK.
Nice to meet
you.
You wanna do the Dazzler
Minute?
Yeah, I'm here. Let's go
again
this way.
OK. That's enough. I don't want you to know. I don't want you to learn about this.
OK?
You ready to go? Yeah, let's do it.
Loading
music, of course. Has its own language
and it depends on the listener.
Uh
And it'll say different things to so many different people.
Oh, a
mess. You can be.
I actually
would like another take at 54.
I want another one because I vocally
I think you did a good job
emotionally.
I don't think you were there.
II I was just scanning the crowd.
Um and you are singing this day,
this day of wrath shall consume
the world in
ashes,
the great notes and the great rhythms and the great orchestra is not enough.
The emotion has to be attached to the music.
Stevens writing.
That's, that's the real key that gives the emotion of today
with the
text meaning and the form from all these years back.
Uh
uh No, we gotta do it again. Stop, stop, stop,
you know, they hadn't really rehearsed all that much.
And so this was a chance to start and stop and really focus on, you know,
24 12 hours at a time.
No, right in there. Stop
right in there. You were like,
so we did these extensive recording sessions with the Parker
tracks from pride
again,
this is a hard punch.
This is not easy. So don't talk. Let's just keep doing it until we get a clean one.
That was worse than it was the time before.
No,
no, we can't use that.
Just cut us off. I if it's not useful to stop it,
I am still hearing an alto. That is wrong.
You did it once and guess who picked it up?
There is an element
of hope
of the future of that one who's been lost. Uh I don't know if you know this but
um
uh
I, I,
I lost my son four years
39
and so
work.
It's alright. But
no,
that's right.
I suppose the work has special meaning.
Uh
That's it.
Are we in the can
that
folks? Congratulations.
I can't thank you enough
for everything,
but mostly
you going
mostly for sharing your gifts and your talents,
all of those emotions, all of those feelings who this requiem is for you,
a requiem for his mother.
It's a wreck way for my brother
that that is what you share to a new
and international audience.
Give it to them with love and affection.
Just that
once we're in this live broadcast with a TV crew there, we can't stop,
we can't go back.
The only time we rehearsed together was that morning, literally,
we had one rehearsal, one read through
the pressure's on because
when we recorded in the studio,
we could stop and start and stop and start all we wanted.
But there's so many moving parts to this thing.
So I was a little freaked out.
I was a little nervous. I was a little apprehensive.
They're just sitting up there on the stage totally exposed
and there's so many possibilities for things to go wrong.
I remember
Children singing
and then a single flute came
and the single flute
led the Children.
And I just said, hi mom.
She was there
and
I was listening to this music and I'd hear
the children's voices start up and they were sort of to my right,
I was seeing the music,
I was seeing mom right there
and
I
was so connected to her at that moment.
Yeah.
The first movement went great. The choir and orchestra sounded amazing.
I was justifiably nervous during this move to Currie.
It's an exciting piece. It really rocks,
it's really fast. So if that train comes off the tracks, you're in big trouble.
What I was going through when, when my mother was dying and when she died
was a feeling of helplessness.
I couldn't do anything about her illness and I couldn't fix it.
And so it, I guess for me in the record
when I, I almost relished and look forward to the
quote unquote, angry,
um, fire and brimstone parts because it, it, it allowed me a chance to really express
my anger
and my sadness for being, for her being taken away so soon
I was mad.
I felt like the LA and I felt, I felt a lot of guilt too
because I remember when mom went in, she told us on a Friday,
hey, I'm going in just for some routine,
um, surgery
and
it wasn't routine.
The surgeon
basically made a mistake when he did the surgery and cut her in large intestine.
But I remember this.
Not remember you walked in the hospital and I said,
I put my face wrapped to mom and I said,
Mom Steve's here and she's trying to kiss
like she, because she always liked him more. You know,
she did.
I'm good with that
and she's, and she's pursing her lips kissing because she heard his voice.
I was sitting with my mom just sort of holding her hand and I could feel her hand.
It was sort of surreal.
If you hold someone's hand,
you feel the warmth and they feel your warmth and I
could feel it going cold like she was literally slipping away.
One of the things a hospice nurse said was that
a lot of times when people are fading and their life is ending, the last thing
that goes is your hearing.
So I just sort of instinctively went downstairs and the
Steinway piano that I grew up on was directly below
and there was a baby monitor
on the piano that fed up to her room. So I just sat down and started playing.
Yeah, I knew exactly what she wanted to hear.
Chopin Beethoven. Brahms Mozart, Scott Joplin, George Gershwin.
And I played all our favorites and all the stuff that I knew she loved.
So I didn't have to ask for a playlist.
The gift of music that this woman had given me my entire life.
I was giving back to her as she was literally dying in front of us.
So I sat there for a good hour, hour and a half just playing.
Nobody said anything. I think everybody was kind of like, OK,
the musicians talking to the musician here,
we're connecting on a cosmic level
and I came back upstairs and
my brother Jim and I are sitting there just with her and like, you know,
holding her hand and we could tell her life was ending in front of us.
This really is the moment of truth.
The next movement is the dias
ere
the movement I had the hardest time writing.
Now it's going to present Candace the choir and
the orchestra with their biggest challenge of the night.
Her breathing became really labored and she started to
take her last breath.
Her breathing started, she'd breathe in again and exhale
and
stop. I'm like, come on, mom breathe.
There was just this little bit of life left in her
and then my father came running
and I'm holding one hand,
you're holding the other
and dad jumped right on her
and held her for last breath,
party.
And then it hit me like
nothing has ever hit me in my entire life. Steve is
on the side of the bed and he just
yelled out this,
this noise I've never heard.
I just lost it.
Yeah.
Right.
It was so sad. It was just so heartbreakingly sad.
And that
sadness that I felt when she died,
I got to inject into the rec room. I got to make it be
the, the, the juice the
what, what I put into the piece of music.
There is a form
that
even in loss, it gives a sense of a reason for being, it's the thing I got to do that.
That was the most personal piece of music
in my life.
It was actually a gift I gave away without really knowing. I was doing it
because I think it, it heals people,
people are empowered by it. People are
inspired by it. And that's like, that's the whole reason I do it. He was really angry
and he was really
suffering in many ways.
But I think
creating this
gave him
and out.
It's the present I laid on top of her grave literally and will continue to
in honor of her.
Just the message that it leaves you with the
parade
is may the angels lead you to paradise and
may you rest in with Lazarus forever. It's like
sending her off and wishing her well,
it has the element of a reason for
the lost one.
In my case, my son, a reason
for this to happen
and
for us to go on
when people read about it,
they know that it's the composer who wrote it for his mother,
even though they don't know who I am, which is the whole idea.
So people are sort of incorporating it into their lives, which has been
pretty amazing. And the clearest part is that it's really not about my loss anymore.
It was just the creation of it was, but then after that it's about giving it to others.
Mhm.
So, if we talk about my Children,
they know about this piece of music, they don't really understand what it's about.
They know I wrote it for their
na,
but they don't really think about
and I don't expect them to at this age to think about the context of what it is.
But I'm thinking when they're older,
they'll probably embrace it more.
I hope it's the piece of music that they have of
mine that they listen to after I'm not here anymore.
And so
I'm hoping that it's something that
they'll remember me by.
It was,
it was unbelievable. Proposed to me on the stage. I did not,
it was a magical moment. I gotta
tell
you. Yeah.
Are you proud of your dad?
Yeah.
The time
Requiem
for my mother is available on DVD with video extras and on CD to order. Visit Requiem
for my mother dot com.