The piece sat unfinished for close to two decades, according to NPR, without the momentum needed to bring it to life in a studio. Avelange composed it long before anyone could have predicted the destruction the fires would bring.
Watching firefighters battle the blazes gave Avelange the push he needed. What had been a shelved project suddenly felt tied directly to the disaster and the people responding to it. The anthem, once a personal effort with no clear finish line, became a tribute shaped by real events and the firefighters who lived through them.
A score written to honor firefighters in the abstract is finally becoming real, because of a fire nobody saw coming.