1. Requiem Aeternam
2. I Gaze At The Heavens
3. I Am The Resurrection
4. Pie Jesu
5. Agnus Dei
6. Commital
7. In Paradisum

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Total playing time: 47'45"

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The Requiem was first performed in Stanford Memorial Church on November 4, 2005 by the Chapel Choir and Orchestra of the Catholic Community at Stanford, as part of the Greenfield Liturgical Arts Series.

See also a Stanford Report article on the piece.

The live-recording CD of the premiere will become available in February 2006.

Here are the complete notes published in the premiere program:

This Requiem started as little more than a self-imposed homework assignment in 1998. After setting numerous songs and psalms to music, I was yearning to challenge myself to a more ambitious journey: a fuller-length work of broader orchestral proportions. The most common question from friends and relatives over the years has been undoubtedly “Why a requiem?” I used to quip that if I had written a woodwind quintet, nobody would have inquired about my genre choice, yet I proceeded to explain the genesis of this work: essentially a composition exercise leaps and bounds beyond what I had written previously. To more insistent inquiries I would add that writing slow music was easier than composing in faster tempi, and that a requiem would be a perfect excuse to indulge in the former.

I was wrong on both counts.

While writing slow music surely required fewer notes, I quickly realized that the specter of boredom loomed behind every page turn. I hope I have managed to dispel it.

The Requiem gradually took on a much greater meaning than I initially imparted to it, deeply rooting itself in my very life experience.

Certainly my own father, who died shortly after I arrived at Stanford as a clueless graduate student in 1992, was very present to me when I started on this after-hours project. I fondly dedicate this piece to his memory.

Many other events shaped this work over the years. A turning point occurred in the fall of 1998. I had just finished the opening “Requiem Aeternam,” a movement setting the classical text of the Missa Pro Defunctis. When I turned on my television after work one night, I was utterly devastated by an unfathomable tragedy: the news of 21-year-old Matthew Shepard gay-bashed, beaten to death and forsaken on a Wyoming fence on a cold starry night, literally suspended between heaven and earth. Matthew was found on the next morning and rushed to the hospital, too late to save his life. The night he died I found myself mourning at the keyboard and attempting to make sense of the senseless. I don’t know who or what guided my fingers; when I opened the psalter tucked away on my piano and stumbled upon Psalms 123 and 62, back to back, I knew the Requiem was about to take an irreversible turn. “I Gaze At The Heavens” was written in one sitting that night, and, many years later, still conjures up images I will never forget.

It became clear in that instant there could be no room for a wrathful God in this Requiem. No “Dies Irae,” no “Confutatis,” no “Tuba Mirum” heralding judgment day. All theology aside, some texts are too heavy to bear, simply because they have been carved in blood and hatred on banners at political rallies. Over the months to follow, the rest of the piece became more soaked with my own spirituality: seeing, in the very midst of our broken lives, in the war-mongering drums and the bludgeoning pistol-whippings, in the tragedy of heartbreaks and feeding tubes on hospital beds — seeing, in it all, another world. The struggle to see permeates this piece: from the clashing entrance of the soprano solo in “I Am The Resurrection” to the opening bars of “In Paradisum,” the victory of love over death always seems fragile, and the vision ever elusive.

Several years later, when a young homeless man I knew from the soup kitchen at which I volunteered was found stabbed to death in a San Francisco public bathroom, I shouted another cry in what became the “Pie Jesu.” By then, the Requiem had become a canvas for my own soul to express — and draw — life.

In all its chromatic twists, the Requiem would have been unauthentic to my French roots without plainchant. Fragments from the Missa Angelorum appear in several movements, and the final “In Paradisum” is a thinly veiled and surely clumsy attempt at paying my respects to Duruflé. The weaving of centuries-old chant into a contemporary, chromatic harmonic structure fascinates me, maybe because this other form of clashing bears a unique seed of hope: that the ancient and the modern are not incompatible, if only our eyes are open enough to see it. Alas, too often in our world and our churches, we are terrified to let go of our part and only proceed to sing it louder.

I humbly look back at this Requiem today, convinced I would write a completely different piece in 2005. Maybe this is why my friends were so intrigued that I would choose to write a mass for the dead at a young age: they must have known better than I did that the story it longs to tell never stops being told until our last day. It would be a different requiem today, yet, in hindsight, and beyond its musical imperfections, I see in this piece bits and pieces of my own passion play — and eagerly await tomorrow.

H.K.
Holy Saturday 2005