While I was teaching at Rhodes College, the music department presented a series of concerts honoring the life of Burnet C. Tuthill, a composer whose influence and legacy at Rhodes was inestimable. During one of these concerts I had the idea for Valediction, conceiving it as a personal tribute to Tuthill. The final section begins with a single player declaiming a fragment from Tuthill's Prelude for Horn and Organ. Other players then join in a canonic ostinato over which a high-horn consort and a low-horn consort dreamily exchange reactions to what has come before. A four-voice fugue and a bubbling tune in the key of D provide the raw materials for the first two sections of the piece.