As I was driving home from the airport this afternoon, having taught organ lessons on Kauai, the traffic was absolutely wretched. I had decided to take Dillingham Boulevard (surface streets) instead of staying on the freeway, which I immediately found out was a bad decision! There are lanes closed off due to the ongoing construction of the fixed rail system and I just crawled home.

Contrast that to my early morning commute to the airport which takes less than 10 minutes!

What was very comforting, though, was that I heard Sharene Lum Taba, host of Classical Pacific on Hawaii Public Radio, play Gabriel Fauré’s “Requiem” on my commute home. She said that she has been playing Requiems every day this week, this being Holy Week.

The traffic going home was so bad that I was able to listen to the entire Requiem! Yes, it took that long!

You may not know that I saw and heard Sharene several times last week—not just on the radio—as she was the harpist in the Fauré “Requiem” in the performances by the Hawaii Vocal Arts Ensemble, and she sat right in front of the organ. So as I listened to the performance today on the radio by the Cambridge Singers conducted by John Rutter, I kept seeing Sharene in my mind.

She mentioned that yesterday, she played the “Requiem” by John Starr Alexander, my former colleague at Iolani School. In fact, this year marks 24 years since John composed the work while on one of his sabbaticals from the school. While I was the Chapel Organist at the school, I played several movements from the work, and remembered it with fondness.

I also played the entire work with the Windward Choral Society, under the direction of Susan McCreary Duprey. You can hear the performance on YouTube here:

Here’s what John wrote about the work: I composed my Requiem while on a sabbatical from ‘Iolani School in the fall of 1998. John McCreary, who taught at ‘Iolani School for 22 years and was the school’s organist for 27 years (and continued as accompanist of the Chorus of ‘Iolani School until his death at age 83), mentored me through the process of finding the correct texts for the Requiem, their proper order, teaching me which are mandatory and which are optional as a musical work, and where to find the best translations from the Latin for each. In so doing, John McCreary helped to ensure that the piece could be sung at a funeral Mass as appropriate service music. I shared my then-recent creation with Henry Leck, a prominent choral director from Butler University in Indiana. Henry was in town as the clinician for the 2000 Hawai’i High School All-State Honor Choir, which I helped to organize and run. He loved it so much that he asked me to teach it to the honor choir, and they performed it a few days later at their concerts at BYU-Hawai’i and Kawaiaha’o Church. My own students performed it at their 1999 spring concert. Henry Leck was so taken with my piece that he had it published as part of his choral series with Colla Voce Music, Inc., the first of several dozen pieces published by Colla Voce. My Requiem has since been performed all over the United States. Additionally, during several summers in the early 2000’s, Henry Leck served as the director of the 500-voice Tuscany International Children’s Choral Festival Choir; they performed an all-treble version of it at several venues in Italy, including at the Vatican. My inspiration for the small chamber orchestra accompaniment came from Requiem of English composer John Rutter. I like the sparse, soloistic quality of the instruments, each of which stands in for an entire section within a larger symphonic orchestra. In my opinion, the cello in my Requiem is the 5th voice, singing along with soprano, alto, tenor and bass. The Pie Jesu movement, placed squarely in the middle of the piece, was written several years later on the anniversary of the passing of a close friend, Kenny Cruz, to whom I have dedicated the entire work. For me, the Pie Jesu is the best thing I’ve ever written, choral or instrumental.

Thank goodness Hawaii Public Radio archives its programs! You can hear an interview with John, as well as hear the complete Requiem here: https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/classical-music-conversations/2023-04-04/john-starr-alexanders-requiem-airs-on-classical-pacific. Instrumentalists included Lynn Muramaru, flute and piccolo; David Masunaga, English horn; Teresa McCreary, cello; Wayne DeMello, bass trombone; John McCreary, organ; Nyle Hallman, harp, and the Iolani Chorus and Hokuloa Singers.

And if you want to hear yet another Requiem, Barry Wenger will conduct John Rutter’s Requiem at the Lutheran Church of Honolulu on Good Friday night!