This piece explores grief; specifically, the grief I felt after losing Cornflower, my childhood cat and one of my best friends. Though Cornflower died after I had begun composing music, I did not feel ready to express our relationship through music for several years. Coming back to that task in 2025 after committing to write a piece for the Kenyon College Männerchor, I could reflect on some of the many emotions I had experienced during the grieving process: sorrow, pain, anger, guilt, and acceptance. Having lived with this grief for years, I had experienced these emotions as fluid, able to shift into another feeling entirely at a moment’s notice. 

I began thinking of grief itself as a container which holds many emotional states. Grief could be a kaleidoscope: when you look inside, you are able to see the shifting patterns in the glass. Compositionally, this manifested as a piece of many moods, musically blending ideas reminiscent of Andrea Daly’s Beloved, Andrea Ramsey’s Requiescat, and the music of John Dowland, Eric Whitacre, and Samuel Barber. Textually, we shift through poems by Langston Hughes, Christina Rossetti, excerpts of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, and additional lyrics written by me. As these many elements change and morph, one thing remains: the grief itself, the processing of a loss. With this music, I invite you to look through your own kaleidoscopes.