Premiered at the Oregon Bach Festival Composers Symposium 2018

Lyrics by the composer:

This flesh of mine is caught between one world and the other.

A crimson thread ties me to this turbulent plane.

Impaled, the ecstasy of Avila is denied me, as I am

Buffeted by the tides of this boundary.

They crash over me, like the funerary drums of my homeland

Whose rhythms call spirits to rise.

I came to this land not quite a stranger,

Still I knew not its myriad laws.

I longed for this earth to be mixed into my skin,

But could not help having grown from different soil.

As they shoveled the earth over you,

I could not disguise my envy.

The shrieking crows circle overhead,

Is this your attempt at a sign?

You sold your soul to prolong your breath,

What good’s a halfling’s heart like mine?

No one to play my elegy,

As I decay from a wound unseen.

My voice croaks out a broken song,

The only score to this sullen scene.

This piece is an elegy to my late grandfather, Nana Kofi Asante, who passed in February of 2016. I never had a real relationship with him as I left Ghana at only 10 months old and did not get a chance to return until his death. Returning to Ghana was a whirlwind of conflicting emotions: feeling like too much of an obroni, a white person, to be Ghanaian due to my mixed heritage, but also feeling a weighty obligation as a Ghanaian to compensate for the years of education in Akan culture and customs I had missed out on. I was thrust from conversation to conversation by family members, many of whom I had only just met, stuttering my way through stock Twi phrases, thinking myself a fool, all while trying to navigate the confusing, terrible feeling of mourning someone whom I never knew. This was a man whom I was too afraid to speak to on the phone due to the language barrier, and on a subconscious level, due to my feelings of being too alien to him. I feared his rejection. The real mourning began in earnest months later, when flashbulb memories of the funeral became triggered in me daily, and I began a year-long battle with crippling anxiety surrounding death. Nana’s death was the fulfillment of my worst fear: never getting to have a final, adult conversation with my grandfather, and the suddenness, the finality of his death was what troubled me for a long time. I began obsessively contemplating my own mortality, how it could happen in an instant. Mörike comes to mind: “So far from dying, ah, how easily one dies!”

In the process of my recovery I became heavily interested in heavy metal, particularly the music of veteran J-metal band DIR EN GREY, whom I consider to be the defining artists of their genre, and who remain an enduring inspiration to me as a vocalist and composer. I credit much of my recovery to this genre as it embodies the repression, the anger, and self-hatred I have felt due to this great loss. It has also greatly informed my ideas of musical texture and harmony and has made me explore the absolute limits of the tenor voice, including my own. As a result, this song represents a synthesis of these many components of metal music into a singular work for the first time.