The Last Music

I have subscribed to NPR's Song of the Day daily e-mail. Today's featured song is "The '59 Sound", from the group The Gaslight Anthem. I haven't figured out how to listen to the song on my iPhone yet, and all NPR sites are blocked at my office, so I have to content myself with the description:

[I]t's really a song about the last music each of us gets to hear in our lives.

That, of course, sent my mind whirling on a high-speed merry-go-round.

In the Blossom Festival Chorus rehearsals this week and next, we're preparing Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" for a July 5 performance. The closing song in that work is "Oh Lawd, I'm on my way". That was the last song John heard in his life. We had performed the work together a couple of years earlier while singing with the Oratorio Society of Washington. As we rode in the ambulance to Hospice of Washington, ten minutes before his death, I was singing it to him, trying to get his mind off the incredible, horrific pain he was experiencing. In retrospect, eleven years later, I can only hope it helped somewhat.

What would I like to hear as the last piece of music in my life? There's so much to choose from! Maybe the Russian Easter movement of the Rachmaninoff piano duet that PianoLady and I played together 40 years ago. Maybe the final movement of the Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony. The Bach Double Violin Concert in D minor. Or the jazz transcription of Ravel's Aprés Un Rêve that Regina Carter performs on her Paganini: After a Dream album. It's a difficult choice, and probably something over which I will have no control. But the question makes you stop and think, doesn't it?

What would you like to be the last music you hear?