With my Requiem, I aimed to compose a piece that was at once highly personal and also non-specific. It does not memorialize any one death, but is an expression of sorrow resulting from the understanding of the ephemeral nature of life, and of my deepest pain and fear about losing those dearest to me. It is about our fragility, and our tragic knowledge of this fragility. The text is a translation of the original Latin Requiem text, which I found necessary to re-imagine in my own secular language, reframing it in ways I could more fully connect to than the original or any existing translation. Hannah Lash
