When RoseWind Duo’s Clifford Leaman and Scott Herring commissioned me for Silver Linings, we could not have anticipated that we would be in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic when I composed the piece. In the early summer of 2020, when the three of us met virtually to discuss possible topics, we had all been in lockdown for several months; the causes and effects of the lockdown were at the forefront of our discussion. In themidst of daily tragedies, I had been seeing news stories using the word...