Travis Laplante- Letter to an Angel. Performed by Laura Cocks, Tejas Tirthapura, Gulli Björnsson скачать в хорошем качестве

Travis Laplante- Letter to an Angel. Performed by Laura Cocks, Tejas Tirthapura, Gulli Björnsson

Letter to an Angel Composed by Travis Laplante Laura Cocks- flute Tejas Tirthapura- viola Gulli Bjornsson- guitar recorded live on September 3rd, 2025 at Taplin Auditorium, Princeton, NJ Some words about the composition: A very important part of my life took place when I was nine years old. During this time I was considered a pretty normal kid without an unusual amount of problems and I was generally happy in life. One day for no apparent reason my reality became drastically altered, as if someone snapped their fingers and any possibility of joy was vacuumed out of the air of my life. ` I began coming home from school (3rd grade) and would cry for many hours, waking up in the night, wailing without relief. The best way I can describe the feeling is it was like finding out that every person whom I love had just been murdered, and I was finding out this news over and over and over again during every minute of life. The misery and despair were crippling. When I look back on that time there was no daylight, only night. Every morning I would dread opening my eyes because I would be thrown back into the horror of what was now my life. Pretty soon I was crying in the bathroom at school and before long I could no longer make it through class without sobbing uncontrollably. Not long after that I had to start staying home from school. The internal light going out was incredibly fast and complete…This all happened in a matter of a few weeks. My mother was very worried and confused because I couldn’t explain what was happening to me. She eventually decided that I should seek psychiatric care and made an appointment for me to be evaluated. Then came a morning that I will never forget. On this particular morning, as I reluctantly opened my eyes, I could see the sunlight coming through my bedroom window and the dust particles floating in the air like crystals. There was a stillness in the room and a presence of unending gentleness and clarity in the air. It was immediately and undeniably clear to me that the reality I had existed in the day before was no longer present, as if the substance of complete despair had been blown out of the window with the wind. I returned to school and it was as if the period of unstoppable horror was erased. My mother could see that I was better (which was also confusing to her, as I couldn’t really put words as to why I was now better…but that didn’t matter, she was relieved) and canceled my doctor’s appointment. I still don’t have a story for what/why/how everything changed for me that morning, but what I did know was that I was in the presence of a miracle and began to believe in intelligence beyond the physical world. I also had the sense that perhaps one aspect of this intelligence was offering me some sense of guardianship. When composing Letter to an Angel, I was going through some serious health difficulties and in an emotional state of grief from losing my beloved grandfather. I remembered other periods of difficulty in my life, such as what I experienced when I was nine, and the remedies that have been given in different forms – from the mundane to the miraculous. I was aware of everything from the common process of getting a cold and then getting well, to feeling heartbreak and allowing time to heal, as well as more dramatic forms of healing like what I experienced in the above story. I found myself internally calling out through this music to this unseen intelligence that I felt in my bedroom that morning in an attempt to express gratitude and to share the beauty of life that I have been able to experience since that time. It was through composing Letter to an Angel that I was also able to come out the other side of this more recent difficult time with greater appreciation for each day. It is my hope that Letter to an Angel will provide an opportunity for players of the piece to reflect in their own way on any form of remedies (large or small) that they have experienced, and to bring gratitude and passion from/for their own lives into the music. Travis Laplante www.travislaplante.com