Music minus you

All Souls. The living ones too.

My husband and I went on a walk this past weekend. It was a gorgeous, clear day, but as we walked noticed that the light had taken on a weird quality - like, bright and dark at the same time. It took me a while to have the courage to mention it, and when I did, he seemed relieved; we were each worried that something was going wrong with us personally. Secure for the moment that no one was having a stroke or a psychotic break, we wondered aloud if the stress of living at this particular time was getting to us, or if this was related to our aging in some way. We headed home, grabbed some lunch, got online…and saw everybody’s eclipse pictures.

Yep, we missed it. Took a walk right underneath the ring of fire and didn’t notice the major solar system event at all.

Seems fine.

*headdesk*

Seriously, though, there was something tender and human in that ridiculous moment. It made me think about the way fear can keep us from asking a simple question or seeing a simple answer. It also made me think about how preoccupation and worry can keep you from seeing what’s right in front of your face.

I mean, we knew about the eclipse, we read the news. That was the problem. The news was the subject of our discussions as we walked. Anxiety over the precarity of, well, everything, flowed out of our hearts through our words, and we couldn’t get ahead of it. It seemed to darken the very air around us.

We forgot about the sun, which was right there the whole time.

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We’re two weeks out from some great celebrations of memory, Día de los Muertos and All Souls’ Day. I love watching each year as friends in different places around the world assemble pictures and snacks, build altars, get in the car with flowers and balloons and lawn chairs, and spend some time hanging out with the people who’ve gone before them.

I’m drawn to the idea that no one is really gone as long as they are remembered. It’s less gratifying to think about how a living person can die to us through our forgetting about them.

We shout through ideologies and systems, which we must do in trying to understand how we have come to this moment or any other. But we so often fail to see the humans suffering right in front of us. We can look right at other human beings and not see them. What has made us blind, and how, hardly matters in the end. The sun is right there the whole time, whether you are looking for it or not.

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Three years ago, when the pandemic was new, I recorded myself playing the piano part to a Strauss song to a poem about All Souls’ Day. It’s a sweet, conventional poem about a lost love, who might be an actual dead person but is probably just a college boo. The singer wishes they could have just one more moment, or one more memory, with the beloved. With its aching melodic arcs and lush harmonies, Allerseelen is a justifiably popular song - well, classical music popular, anyway. People in my world love singing and playing it. Me too.

I made the video because I was very sad. Every musician I knew was unable to be in the same room with anyone else playing music. It felt like not having food or going without touch. It was so lonely and frightening, not knowing how long the situation would last, wondering if we’d ever be able to resume our practice together.

I hoped that somebody somewhere might sing along with me, even if I never heard it. Every moment with every musician has been precious since then, but I want to reconnect with the feeling of sending music out into the void, hoping it might join with someone else’s voice out there somewhere. I wanted to reconnect with that hope being enough, with a time when my desire for communion was so strong that I wanted it more than I wanted my own participation and pleasure in it.

Sometimes we send love out into the world because we know the world needs it.

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Here’s the video.

The German words mean “that I may have you again” - in other words, come back to my memory so we can be together.

This works really well as a song for a person that you know and miss. It can also work as a song for someone you’ve forgotten to think of, forgotten to look at, forgotten to love. We all do this when we’re afraid.

Mostly, this video serves as a reminder for me that I’ve only got part of the story in isolation. I need you. Or maybe you need me. Can we be there for each other, even if we can’t meet up in real time?

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If you’re a musician reading this, please consider making and sharing a video as well. You can share here, but even better to share on your own socials. I would love to hear your beautiful, incomplete story in search of collaborators out in the dark.

What music might you send out to a partner you might never meet, see, hear, embrace, or understand?

Praying for peace.