viola, piano

2024

Recorded by Sergio Muñoz Leiva and Matthew Jaskot in June of 2025 in Worcester, MA

Premiere Performance: November 6, 2024 by Sergio Muñoz Leiva and Matthew Jaskot

About the Piece

Still, You Bloom in My Heart is an arrangement of one of my art-songs, You are a Resonance, which sets excerpts of text from Sufi mystic Bawa Muhaiyaddeen’s Spontaneous Song, as translated by Coleman Barks (found below). In this piece, I reflect on a mother rocking and singing a lullaby to her stillborn child as light from the sunrise pours through a hospital window, a fleeting moment of peace in an otherwise intense time of grieving.

I hold you in my heart.

I rock and sing you to sleep.

You are the meaning,

That blooms in the heart.

In this world of flowers

In the next world

Baby of pure light

In a cradle here, inside of me

You sleep without sleeping
You cry without crying
Smile without smiling

I sing them to peacefulness,

You are an ocean, an explanation,

A resonance.

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