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Temple Square is always beautiful in the springtime. Gardeners work to prepare the ground for General Conference. © 2012 Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All rights reserved. | 1 / 2 |
This story appears here courtesy of TheChurchNews.com. It is not for use by other media.
By Amy Ortiz, Church News
Tucked beneath the pews of a local Church meetinghouse in the eastern Philippines, Mitzi Diaz-Chou sought refuge from Typhoon Haiyan, which struck the area on November 8, 2013, killing thousands and displacing many more.
“The glass windows shattered,” Diaz-Chou recalled, describing her experience hiding beneath the pews alongside other children. “It sounded like a bomb, and the wind began howling and whistling violently through the building. Everyone was crying.”
Diaz-Chou and her family were among the more than 10,000 Latter-day Saints and 4,000 others who sought shelter in some 200 Church meetinghouses across the region. When the storm passed, everything they knew was gone, Diaz-Chou explained. “Streets were filled with wreckage. … Homes were completely swallowed by the sea," she said, adding, “Everything felt still, broken and unfamiliar.”
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The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reports on the aid it provided to those impacted by Typhoon Haiyan, in a video published to YouTube on November 21, 2013 — just 13 days after the typhoon struck the eastern Philippines. Photo is a screenshot from YouTube, courtesy of Church News.All rights reserved.Even amid such devastation, Diaz-Chou recognized a “deep sense of unity among survivors,” she said. “That experience taught me the fragility of life, the power of faith and the resilience of the human spirit.”
Now a student at Brigham Young University–Hawaii and a member of the university’s Hoʻolōkahi Chamber Choir, Diaz-Chou discovered a similar sense of unity, performing alongside her fellow choir members at New York City’s Carnegie Hall on May 11.
Their performance premiered a 25-minute piece titled “Worldwide Requiem,” which was composed by Erica Glenn, BYU–Hawaii assistant professor and director of the university’s chamber choir, alongside her students. Through its seven movements, the performed requiem honored regions of the world that have recently experienced tragedy or disaster, including the Philippines, Eastern Europe, Tonga, the Middle East, Japan and Hawaii.
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Erica Glenn, assistant professor at Brigham Young University–Hawaii and director of the university’s chamber choir, conducts the choir and orchestra’s performance of the “Worldwide Requiem” at Carnegie Hall in New York City on May 11, 2025. Photo is a screenshot from Facebook, courtesy of Church News.All rights reserved.Like Diaz-Chou, several other choir members endured some of the tragedies featured in the piece. They performed, sharing their stories as survivors through song.
Said Diaz-Chou: “Preparing and performing the [requiem] felt like finally giving voice to something I had kept in my heart for a long time. It wasn’t just about singing notes on a page, it was about honoring the memory of those we lost and offering hope to others who carry pain that words can’t always express.”
A ‘Voice to the World’
In an interview with the Church News, Glenn — the choir’s director and composer of the piece — explained that inspiration to compose the requiem was fueled by her admiration for her students’ resilience. She said their interactions through the years have taught her about their diverse cultures, languages and musical traditions as well as the tragedies they have overcome.
“I wrote this requiem both to honor them and their lived experiences,” she said, “and to bring awareness to the rest of the world of some of the things that these students have lived through directly and overcome.”
Glenn continued by detailing the piece’s composition and the instrumental role her students played in the creation of it.
She said several of her students provided eyewitness accounts of the tragedies they had experienced and helped translate the requiem’s original Latin text into their native languages.
Diaz-Chou was one such student. Knowing Waray — the Austronesian language specific to the area Typhoon Haiyan struck the hardest — Diaz-Chou aided in translating the piece’s movement, “Pie Jesu,” which honored victims of the typhoon.
Additionally, she provided Glenn a four-page account of her experience, which the two of them turned into a poem and set to music for a vocal soloist to perform in English during the same movement.
“I was able to offer a piece of my story and my people’s voice to the world,” Diaz-Chou said. “The experience just really relives within me when I hear those words that the soloist sings.”
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Handmade leis sit at the foot of the stage at Carnegie Hall in New York City on May 11, 2025, representing each country featured in the “Worldwide Requiem.” Photo is a Facebook screenshot, courtesy of Church News. All rights reserved.Diaz-Chou added that contributing her eyewitness account to the requiem helped her share a story she once kept hidden. “It helped me realize that my experience, painful as it was, could be part of a greater message of peace and solidarity.”
Through the help of students such as Diaz-Chou, the choir was able to sing in a total of eight languages. Six of them were tied to the regions of the world the piece represented, and an additional two — English and Latin — were interspersed throughout the piece to help listeners understand each region’s story and retain references to the original text.
A ‘Light of Faith and Hope’
Describing the performance at Carnegie Hall in New York City, Glenn said it was a collaborative effort that required “many little pieces” to come together.
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Choir and orchestra members, including Brigham Young University–Hawaii students, perform “Worldwide Requiem” at Carnegie Hall in New York City on May 11, 2025. Photo courtesy of BYU–Hawaii Communications, courtesy of Church News. All rights reserved.She explained that in order for the choir to sing with a full orchestra, they would need to grow their group of singers from 54 members to at least 100. Thus, they invited others to join and received the support of choirs and individuals from states such as Utah and Arizona. These additional singers prepared individually until the choir met as a whole to practice in New York City alongside professional soloists and the New England Symphonic Ensemble.
“We were definitely an assortment,” Glenn said, noting that the group of performers had only eight hours to practice collectively in the span of two days.
However, she explained that the group quickly transformed from an assortment of performers into an “ohana,” or family, the moment they felt students’ spirits and heard their stories.