I know the exact day that Coming 'Round came into being: June 26, 2015, the day the Supreme Court handed down the verdict in Obergefell v. Hodges, legalizing same-sex marriage across the country. I was at work in the law office I clerked for when Elizabeth, one of the attorneys (and a close friend of mine to this day), came into my office and ecstatically told me the news. As a gay man, you can imagine how emotional this moment was for me personally, not to mention the LGBTQ+ community as a whole. I don't think our firm got much work done that afternoon; we were all too busy celebrating and reading/discussing the opinion.

What does a carillonneur, overwhelmed with emotion, do when they get off work? Head up in the tower, of course! I drove to the UT Austin campus that evening and rushed to grab some music on my way up to the playing cabin (selections included Lady Gaga's "Born This Way," Aretha Franklin's "Respect," and "Celebration!" from John Courter's fourth suite, among other things), grateful for the opportunity to celebrate in such a special way. I made sure to Tweet out the reason behind this impromptu concert on the carillon guild's Twitter account and, surprisingly for a campus with a historically blasé attitude towards the carillon, had a decent audience.

When I was almost finished playing, I decided to do something unusual for me: improvise a meditation to close the performance. If you know me at all, I never improvise because I am absolutely rotten at it! Maybe joyful delirium had taken ahold of me. Regardless, I whipped out my phone to record what came of it (and be able to berate myself for such an awful racket later) and sat down. In a moment of what I can only refer to as inspiration from Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself, I had a melody ready to go; it just came to me and I ran with it. I finished after a few minutes and went home to process my thoughts on that day.

Listening back to the recording back home, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed bits and pieces of what I had played. That never happened when I was just doodling around! The first 16 measures are just about exactly the same as what I played in the improvisation, while the rest of the piece is taken from snippets at various points in the recording. I wrote out the first 30 or so measures, and then made quick scribbles on the page with ideas, but I didn't take the time to notate it properly—it was mostly a scribbled melody with chord symbols above it and a rhythmic pattern for the accompaniment below. Mostly finished, but definitely in need of polishing. I titled it Coming 'Round after someone's comment I had seen on Facebook earlier that day, about how the country seemed to be coming around in terms of its attitude towards the LGBTQ+ community.

For one reason or another, it got shoved in a notebook and forgotten as the summer went on and I moved from Austin to Chicago to start law school. Cut to March of 2020, during the first few weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I was working from home for the foreseeable future. What better way to procrastinate than to dig through old boxes in the name of decluttering? I stumbled upon the notebook that had the manuscript in it, buried under a pile of miscellaneous junk. It took me a second to remember what the piece was, but you can imagine just how happy I was to have rediscovered it. I immediately got to work cleaning up the copy and getting it entered into Sibelius so that I wouldn't lose it again. I made a few small changes but am pleased with the end result.

It is intended to be simple but comforting, in a way. Something that's easy to listen to with familiar harmonies and a lulling rhythm. My biggest revisions were at the end of the piece. The last measure ends with the leading tone, as opposed to the tonic in my original, perhaps symbolizing that, while Obergefell was a landmark stride for the LGBTQ+ community, we still have more work to be done?

I am grateful to the GCNA for publishing a work that is so personal and close to my heart. I hope y'all enjoy it.

—Austin Ferguson

Regarding the explanatory note below the title on the first page, the work was written in June 2015, not June 2014. Please mark your score accordingly. The GCNA apologizes for this error.