Background

I had the idea for this piece sitting in our small Anglican congregation’s Ash Wednesday service on March 5, 2025: a short work for Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday’s commemoration of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and Easter Sunday’s celebration of his resurrection.

Development

I started working out more of the melody for the piece over the week after Ash Wednesday, and set myself a deadline of releasing it by Holy Saturday, 2025. Inspired by the different versions of Fratres Arvo Pärt has written over the years, I thought it would be a good challenge to do the same and produce several different orchestrations—an especially good challenge on that tight timeline.

I knew from the start I wanted a solo piano version of the piece, and that was the first version I wrote. Moving on from there, I considered a variety of other instrumentations—and I might someday write those, too!—but landed on just two:

• a version for violin, viola, cello, and contrabass—not the classical string quartet

• a version for chamber orchestra:

  • flute
  • oboe
  • clarinet
  • bassoon
  • harp
  • tubular bells
  • strings section

Production

I wrote the work using Dorico, as I nearly always do.

I recorded the piano version on our beautiful Yamaha upright piano in our living room with the collection of microphones we have—none of them designed for this, but they got the job done!

I created the string and chamber orchestra versions in Logic Pro using samples from Spitfire Audio’s BBC Symphony Orchestra.

My friend and former colleague Bryan Levay mixed and mastered the EP.

Theme

There is a deep-seated tension in Holy Saturday. For Jesus’ disciples, it was not a day of joy but of confusion, sorrow, dismay. For a Christian, living after the fact, it is a quiet day at the end of Lent, a day that stands between the solemn remembrance of our Lord’s death and our joyous, even raucous celebration of his resurrection. It is a quiet day. But it is also a day of anticipation: We know what is coming. What is coming is resurrection. What is coming is the ringing of bells and voices shouting “Alleluia!” as the church acclaims its risen Lord.

Jesus’ disciples knew none of that. They had no hope because they did not understand what their Lord had said to them. They were in darkness, and they had not, as far as they understood it, seen a great light. They had seen: death.

In writing this piece, I tried to convey that sense through the texture of the music. The motif I chose for this is the steady ticking away of a clock. An anachronism, to be sure. They had no such clock. But it conveys well the sense for us. The steady thrum thrum thrum of the instruments conveying the steady tick tick tick of a clock: one second, after another, after another, in a day that seems it will go on and on and on, and what comes next we know not. And I have written it as a steady pedal tone: no motion whatsoever. Dynamics, yes; but no motion in that steady thrumming in the cellos or the contrabass or the piano: so it serves as a marker of time passing, but without a sense of progress.

It simply sits. It stays. It waits. It waits. It waits, it knows not what for. Because that is what they waited for: They knew not.

And yet: this is a work addressed to an audience that is not confused disciples on the day between the days, but to Christians. It cannot be only stasis. It cannot be only darkness and despair. It must also hint at hope.

So it must somehow convey both the creeping dread they experienced: Are we next? Will we die crucified as well? And even if not, where do we go from here? But also, the listener’s own sense of what is coming the day after Holy Saturday: those bells ringing, those shouted alleluias, the feast after.

Now, there are more and less direct versions of this. The approach I have taken here is relatively direct, in part because this project is one I undertook on a relatively short time frame, which grew directly out of a thought that I had sitting in our Ash Wednesday service a few weeks ago. But for all its relative directness, it is not a simple piece. The melodic and harmonic motion cannot, and so do not, convey purely grief and darkness or hopeful expectancy and coming light. They mingle.

I wrote the piece in G Minor, and stay there with little motion. The pedal tone in the work is simply a G, both sustained and pulsing: whether by sostenuto pedal in the piano version of the work, or with a mix of pizzicato and flautando strings in the version for a small string ensemble, or leaning on the tubular bells and doubling pizzicato low strings with a harp to do the same in the chamber orchestra version. Then the melody runs mostly in the minor key, with little deviations here and there throughout the first part that mostly serve to make things feel stranger, rather than particularly more hopeful, and it moves around somewhat but always comes very strongly back “home” to that G Minor chord. But the deviations from G Minor are not into adjacent keys but rather into the pitches from G Major, so they hint that things are not quite what they seem.

When the piece ends with an implied C Major and then a clear G Major chord (for the nerds: from IV⁶ to I), it has the very appropriate effect of a plagal cadence: the sound of the “Amen” at the end of a hymn… but with the motion clearly lifting, because of the voicing I chose. Easter Sunday is coming.