It is very odd to write a piece in memory of someone who is still alive. But that is exactly what Martin asked me to do. He wanted his beloved Yodit to know how she would be remembered after she was gone. I started writing my piece and by next morning I had finished it. I was about to send over the manuscript to Martin when I discovered an e-mail from him. Yodit had died that night. And so my piece became a farewell to her, a piece of music to accompany her on her journey from this world and to echo in the hearts of the people she left behind.
It doesn’t really have a structure in a conventional way. But it does have a beginning, middle (the bulk of the piece) and end. The short beginning prepares the main theme which is only three notes (D–E–E, which are letters from her name), but the entire work is developed on these three notes. A Farewell to Yodit is entirely tonal but the only times when there is a resolved tonic is when the main theme first appears and at the very end of the piece. I imagined this piece as a series of arrivals at new doubts about the answers that have just been given. Picture asking the same question all over again and again in hope of eventually getting a different answer. The end uses the same material as the beginning, but this time not as a preparation for the main theme but as a move away from it, manifesting itself in slowly rising arpeggios that finally arrive at the tonic.