Elegy

Elegy for piano, clarinet, cello, and violin is commissioned by Ensemble p in response to Abel Meeropol’s composition Strange Fruit. Made famous by the iconic 1939 Billie Holiday recording, Strange Fruit is a musical and poetic protest of racial violence and particularly of lynching of African Americans in the United States during the early 20th century. Elegy seeks to honor the spirits of the victims of racial violence of that era as well as of the present moment through imagining the transition of the spirit from the body to the beyond. Elegy is in three sections: a lament, spirit journey, and the ascent.