My Young Life has an End, A Death Rite, for piano

ISMN: 979-0-2211-2228-5

The work is divided into two large parts: ?The Ritual of the Dead" and ?The World Beyond". In The Ritual of the Dead, archaic sounds (such as a deep, large drum and sharp, shrill flute sounds) frame two larger sections: the agitated, restless episode of the deadly fever, and then the actual death scene, which is arranged as a cycle of variations on the song My young life has an end, which J. P. Sweelinck handed down through his work of variations. This is followed by the passage into the world beyond: the unanimous song of the soul leaving the earthly world and the first encounter with the light. The second part was inspired by ideas about a soul's journey after death, as described in near-death experiences and in the texts of various spiritual traditions, with Dante's Divine Comedy as a Christian source and the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a Buddhist source being particularly important. The Book of the Dead admonishes us to see through even the most terrifying demons as our own projections and not to be deterred on the path to the light. After the inferno of these monsters has been passed through, the music brightens up as we walk through the purgatory and attempts to foreshadow the bliss of the paradisiacal world.