Never was a knight... is for tenor and ensemble, and was composed for and is dedicated to tenor Joe Dan Harper, who also assembled the libretto from Book I of Cervantes's novel. In novels, the moments before one dies are often depicted as revelatory and less often as forgettable. Since each of us gets the opportunity to die only once (I’m using the metric of a death from which one does not return), precise details about pre-death moments have been left to the imagination and to recorded observation. The idea of an ethnography of pre-death is morbidly fascinating. It’s both gruesome and comforting to know that the truths surrounding death hold multitudes; each death is specific to that one person and also no different than any other death that has happened before it. It may be the most special unspecial thing we ever encounter - an ultimate truth - death, in the end (the end), is singular: a precious, simple acknowledgement of the finite. And it is all ours.
