Lindsay Lafford lived in Hong Kong from 1935 to 1939 while he was the organist of St. John's Cathedral and the conductor of the Hong Kong Singers and the fledgling Philharmonic Society. Leaving the Crown Colony for the U.S. in the spring of 1939 to take up faculty appointments at Haverford and Swarthmore Colleges, and to serve as University Organist at Princeton, he thus by chance narrowly escaped the invasion and capture of Hong Kong by the Japanese at the outbreak of WW II.

While serving in the U.S. Navy during the war, Lafford learned that many of his Hong Kong colleagues, friends, and former students had been killed in defense of the Colony, or had died thereafter in captivity. So he set out to write a short orchestral piece to honor the memories of those who had fallen, working on it as opportunity offered, basing it on three Chinese melodies, and finishing it as his wartime service ended.

In 1947 Lafford, by then in St. Louis directing Washington University's chorus and orchestra, was preparing to conduct a performance of the Mozart Requiem with members of the St. Louis Symphony. The performance was to be in a church, and the minister insisted that there be a collection. The little In Memoriam piece seemed ideal for accompanying this offertory, so Lafford orchestrated it for the same instrumentation as that required by the Mozart work, and there conducted the first of the many performances the piece has received in various parts of the world.

The last time Lafford conducted it was in 1993 in, of all the appropriate places, Hong Kong. The Colony was commemorating the liberation of Hong Kong with a week-long festival, and the HK Sinfonietta, an all-Chinese orchestra, had included the In Memoriam in concerts beginning and ending the week, and invited the composer to fly out and conduct the performances. In the event the first concert had to be canceled because of a typhoon threat to the Colony, but the storm just brushed by, and the second concert was a great success.