J.J. Wright ’14MSM, ’17DMA was a graduate student working on a composition assignment in Notre Dame’s sacred music program when he and his wife suffered a jarring tragedy, the loss of their unborn child, on All Saints’ Day — November 1, 2014. Five years to the day later, Wright and an ensemble of fellow musicians released the final result of that composition project, Vespers for the Immaculate Conception, a meditation on the darkness of that moment in the light of the mystery of the preborn Mother of God. “I tend to think of inspiration as a positive thing,” Wright told The Endless Conversation. “But at that time I didn’t see it as inspiration. I saw it as, ‘What the hell is going on?’”