When I began writing “A Simple Prayer”, I planned to write something fast and lively, like the Creston Sonata or the Ibert Concertina. Despite my intentions however, When I would sit down to write, I could not seem to come up with any fast and lively material that I liked; the ideas that were catching my interest seemed to be much slower and more lyrical. I held firm to my original plan, but the more I held onto how the piece should be, the less progress I actually made writing it. For weeks, I struggled to come up with ideas, and there were many days I cut more material than I wrote. Eventually, I decided to trust my intuition and follow the slower material. I restarted once again, let the music to flow like water, and finished it in its entirety over three days.

The title for “A Simple Prayer” came before any of musical ideas formed, and while it is not meant to be programatic, it somehow captured the emotional journey from despair to inner peace that one might experience while in fervent prayer. In many ways, the piece also captured my own journey during the writing process, and my own experiences with despair, anger, and (eventually) joy while creating it.