My heart is filled with sorrow. Another mass shooting, albeit mobile, in Texas which has chosen by its horrific gun laws to be the center of gun violence in our nation. More lives terribly changed by the insane lack of gun control in Texas, Second Amendment be damned for ever. More empty homes, more lives changed by the wounds that have ripped flesh and psyche, emotional wounds that will never scab over. The selfishness of the gun lobby and gun enthusiasts attack the very soul our nation for nothing more than money, for profit. Our nation has lost its soul and I don’t know if it will ever be regained from the forces of evil that have it in their grasp.
The song below was composed the night following the insane shooting death of Philando Castille, a man of peace gunned down by a police officer in St Paul for merely being a man of color. I expect that kind of behavior from the police of the deep South. I never expected that kind of behavior from what I once considered a more civilized place, or so I thought, like Minnesota. Of course, I have been proven wrong time and time again in the ensuing years.
The music is not pleasant. The beginning is harshly dissonant, an aural description of bullets ripping human flesh and the horror that is perpetuated not only on the victim but on the victim’s family. The middle section is a hymn for the those who have died so violently by gunfire. There is a section of what composers would describe as development, in which the melody of the hymn is assaulted by the dissonant melody of the first theme, only to have hymn overcome the dissonance. However, the music ends ominously with the cluster chord that began the song.
Here is my prayer for the victims of another catastrophic weekend in current American history.
