Music as Solace
One room.
A chair.
A table with typewriter.
A night stand with phonograph.
Atop the bed…
A young man sits dispirited,
His body curled like a clef on the sagging bed
As the radiator ticks like a metronome
And the city’s rising complexity hums in dissonant fifths.
Manhattan’s congestion is a cacophony,
A scherzo of sirens, horns and subway groans.
But in his room,
He presses play,
summoning Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celest.
Its opening gentle as breath on glass.
The Violas enter first,
Joined by Violins, Cellos and Double bass,
A velvet guardian wrapping its arms around his ribs
Like the memory of someone who once stayed,
Brief as it was.
Then the strings vibrate like a downpour on a ghostly roof,
Each harmonious merger like fond footsteps he wishes would return.
He listens not for entertainment, but for pulse.
Each kettledrum accentuates a heartbeat.
Each crescendo a gasp that reminds him he is still here,
Even as the Allegro continues like a storm,
His chest rising with the tempo as if chasing something he lost in childhood.
A friend.
Her laugh.
His reason.
The room swells with sound,
Walls bending like reeds in wind,
And for a moment,
He is not alone,
Content.
He is orchestra,
he is conductor,
he is the score written in the ink of longing.
Then comes the Adagio,
Slow,
deliberate,
Like the turning of a page in a book he’s read a thousand times
but never understood.
The melody drips like candle wax on his lap,
Warm,
Golden,
Forgiving.
And finally, the precipitous moment when his tears and sweat cascade to the floor,
Echoing into a coda,
A whispering echo,
A hush of breath,
A cessation of sound,
Its silence held like a tear-laden hand in the dark.
His face finds peace,
As if the music has caressed his cheek.
Tears fall,
Not from sorrow,
But from the miracle of being seen,
Being engaged by tonal bliss.
Tomorrow…
He would take these musical moments
And carry them as willing partners
In his continued search for purpose.
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His body curled like a clef on the sagging bed
As the radiator ticks like a metronome
And the city’s rising complexity hums in dissonant fifths."
What wonderful lines that tell it really like it was! And then you wax emotional, riding the music with words all the way to joyful tears. Brilliant!
I always preferred silence. But two of my graduate study roommates were, like you, into classic music. With every piercing sound and loud crescendo, I struggled with my engineering problems finding my brain could not be emotional and computational at the same time.
Later while at something like 26, I bought an expensive Sony clock radio to listen to pop music occasionally catching and instrumental like Green Onions are the very long, In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida by Iron Butterfly.
Otherwise I won't be listening to music in my car, pop music on AM
Ron