On February 14, 2025, the Yale Concert Band performed the world premiere of my composition, “The Cancer-Free Party,” commissioned in partnership with Sing Me a Story to celebrate siblings a girl named Lola and her older brother Hamish, who suffers from a rare and aggressive cancer.

The circumstances of the performance were a bit tricky. The Band’s stalwart director, Tom Duffy, was sick with the flu. Regardless, the Band welcomed its guest conductors (and its guest composer) with open arms and committed themselves to sensitive, uplifting performances of Holst, Elgar, Grainger, and… Weiss!

Composing “The Cancer-Free Party”

How do you continue to go about your life when you know your brother, or your son, or you yourself, are suffering like this?

In early October of 2024, Sing Me a Story (SMAS) reached out to me. They were collaborating on a special project with Thomas Duffy, the Director of University Bands at Yale, and seeking a composer. SMAS helps children in need create storybooks about anything they want, enlisting young composers to bring the stories to life in music.

I felt an immediate attachment to the story of Lola, a vivacious seven-year-old who wanted to become a panda hugger—or a pediatric oncologist—and her brother Hamish, 12, an energetic athlete and bright kid facing disease, chemotherapy, and clinical trials. I especially felt a connection with Lola, since I, too, am a younger sibling who cares for and partially defines myself in relation to my older brother and his conditions.

How do you continue to go about your life when you know your brother, or your son, or you yourself, are suffering like this?

And, if you are me, how do you write about it, not even personally knowing the subjects of the story?

It’s a normal part of my process to perseverate about a new project. Something like this and I’m definitely pacing around the neighborhood muttering things to myself like a totally normal person. There was a lot to be sensitive to and just several weeks to the deadline.

A shift in my thinking came when I caught myself thinking the piece had to be perfect, that I had to get the tone just right. But that’s impossible, I realized. Music is a reflection of life, and these people’s lives are anything but perfect.

So I tapped into my own family’s two-and-a-half decades of wisdom. The unglamorous truth about living with severe illness in the family is that you have to choose to nurture love and joy when it feels naive, exhausting, or even a bit pathetic or pitiful to do so. I don’t mean putting rainbows and glitter on everything, or worse, rationalizing every bit of suffering with a redemptive arc, although sometimes that happens. I mean that you have to hold on tight to each other and commit to the time you have, as heartbreaking as every second may be.

In that idea, there was music that I think was probably always somewhere in me, waiting to be kindled. I had the mystical, elusive spark that artists wish for, and in under two weeks, the entire piece was drafted.

Preparing for the Performance

Making art together can create meaning in a situation where it would be easy to throw one’s hands up and hate everything.

I met with Thomas Duffy, the director of the Band, to review my score. His mother, he told me, researched with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the pioneering researcher who introduced the famous “five stages of grief.” Where the contemporary pop understanding of the stages falls short, she explained, is not just in the misconception that the stages are somehow ordered or linear. There is an underrepresented sixth stage, finding purpose.

My piece, explained Prof. Duffy, was an expressive avenue for two important stages of grief. Acceptance, for the family, and at the same time, for the Band, uniting in a shared purpose. Taken together, making art together can create meaning in a situation where it would be easy to throw one’s hands up and hate everything.

In rehearsals, the kindness and classiness of the Band felt, well, wonderful. You never can know for sure if performers will like your music or seethe at you with resentment, but I could tell these players were instantly committed to the deeper purpose of this collaboration. I cackled as Duffy led the saxes and horns in giving their most beastly, rowdy impressions of an elephant’s call. “THAT, THAT’s the one,” I proclaimed, to laughter.

It is always magic when the music does exactly what you mean it to do. “It was the best day ever!” I would narrate, and the band swelled into a restatement of the primary theme, an insistent major-key assertion of joy.

Two days from the performance, I got a call from Stephanie, the tireless Operations Manager of the Band. A severe flu had befallen Tom Duffy. But, as we quickly agreed, the show must go on. After all, seventeen members of Lola and Hamish’s family were coming. She said Rory, a french horn player and a good friend of mine, offered to conduct. It would be his conducting debut, but he’s a killer musician and we both believed he was capable.

I feel so much gratitude for Rory and the Band. Everyone worked hard to get things right—and Rory, especially, was practicing his strokes up to the last minute—and, well, they got it very right.

The Performance

When you must stand in one place, waiting for it to be your time, you find your own way to keep moving.

Rory and I met and hurriedly reviewed the logistics of how we would present this thing. I would give a brief speech before the performance about the context of the work, we would perform, and then I would ask the family to stand and be recognized by the audience and the Band.

When I first met the family, forty minutes before the show, I felt self-conscious. I had poured my creative energies into a seven-minute ode to them, and they barely knew who I was. I barely knew who they were, either. Any attempt to pantomime their lives was going to involve some level of projection, best-guesses, and approximation. Yet here I was, smilingly shaking hands with the parents and grinning at the kids I had done my best to imagine.

They did a lot of looking upwards, at me, of course (yup, I am tall), but primarily at Woolsey Hall’s impossibly-high vaulted ceilings. Already a lot to take in.

All that was left to do at this point was to stand and wait backstage. Rory asked Mark, an experienced guest conductor, if he was waving his hands clearly enough—“Couldn’t be clearer,” was the reply. Kito, the Woolsey stage manager, was sprinting from stage left to stage right, turning on microphones and opening doors. I shuffled nervously through the program notes. When you must stand in one place, waiting for it to be your time, you find your own way to keep moving.

During the musical number preceding mine, Mark said he was impressed that the Yale Concert Band was taking on more collaborations and special projects since his own time as a member many years ago. He complimented my piece for achieving a delicate balance. “It must have been stressful to write?” he asked. I smiled and nodded.

Kito opened the door, with a winsome “go get ‘em” smile. I inhaled and strode out. I couldn’t be more ready, of course, to express joy in a backdrop of grief. This was the newest chapter of the story I have told and retold my whole artistic life.

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