When faced with such a senseless, horrible tragedy, we turn to music to help us find some peace, to help us heal, to help us move on.

A Requiem is a Roman Catholic mass said to pray for the soul of departed person. Today, Requiems are still said (and sung) in a liturgical setting; however, the beauty of the words and the human obsession with death have caused many composers to write their own Requiems, regardless of their faith (or lack thereof). Particularly famous Requiems include those by Mozart, Berlioz, Brahms, Faure, and Verdi – and ironically, none of these is known to have much, if any, faith. After those, there are a number of “underdog” requiems that are known by choirs, but not by orchestras. Among these is the Requiem by Maurice Duruflé.

This serenely beautiful work takes the melodies of the Gregorian Chant Requiem and dresses them up with lavish accompaniment by organ and orchestra. The result is a work that expresses the sorrow we feel when a loved one dies, but also a sincere hope in an afterlife. Unlike the more famous Requiems I mentioned earlier, Duruflé’s does not paint a terrifying picture of the end of time, with God as a cruel judge; instead, we are left with a calm, peaceful vision of heaven, where tragedies might be finally explained.

I am a composer – one of the many things I do to keep myself busy.  For some people, composing comes easy; for others like me, we struggle.

So whenever I hear the music of Felix Mendelssohn, I am filled with two intense emotions. The first is one of great joy and love, because his music is just so amazingly beautiful it hurts. The second is one of jealousy and anger because, dammit, I want to write like that! His music is structurally perfect but never too predictable, emotionally passionate without being saccharine. I think he simply wrote the textbook on what good music is. I dare you to find one less-than-perfect moment in the first movement of his Violin Concerto:

In a time when composers wrote prolifically as a matter of course, Georg Philipp Telemann exceeded all other composers in the sheer amount of music he produced (over 3,000 pieces – and by “piece” I don’t mean a 3-minute ditty for keyboard, I mean a 20-minute cantata or suite for orchestra.) He was a self-taught musician who had a real talent for writing great music – but more importantly, a real mind for business. He did not die a poor penniless pauper (the way many of us imagine musicians die), but instead a successful business person whose work was the rage of 18th-century Europe. More than that, he was a forerunner in the idea that a composer’s work is his/her intellectual property, which helped shape the future of Art Music and publishing.

This short piece from an orchestral suite captures the sound of a Scottish Reel – or, at least what a 18th-century German thought a Scottish Reel would sound like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLxTZVAnPzc