I built the symphony backwards.

It is hard to believe it has been nearly a year since the Blue Ridge Orchestra premiered my first major symphonic work, Sinfonietta Helene, a piece that was born from one of the hardest times my community has known.

There is a through-line in my work and philosophy. I strive to create spaces for others to inhabit. Places where people can bring themselves just to be present. Whether they be patrons in a thoughtfully designed bar, the community of an audience listening to a band, a moment of collective improvisation, or the composition of music that invites you to bring your own experience and emotions and deposit them through your own interpretation.

This is not a unique endeavor. People have felt this for as long as they have engaged in the act of creation. The poet does not author the poem, something moves through them and they are awake enough to catch it. This is how I treat music. My personal experience has always been that of trying to open my spirit enough to catch the fundamental vibrations that form the background of the universe. The deepest originality is the one thing that the maker can never quite explain. Inspiration arrives by an untraceable route: a silent whisper, the hint of a phrase, a scant glimpse of color, or a single melody.

As I have often told the story, Sinfonietta Helene emerged from a single melody. Something that appeared as if it had always existed while I sat at my piano. I was searching. I was listening. I was feeling. It was simply there, whole, the way grief is felt before it is realized. I just happened to be barely awake enough to catch it.

Before the work was complete, I began to call this movement "The Despair".

It is the second movement, but it is the heart of the entire piece. The first movement documents where it came from, the third professes genuine hope for the future, but it is this second movement that truly embodies what it meant to live through this experience. It was born from the center and everything else formed around it.

For most of us, the memories may have begun to sepia tint and weather as the course of time carries them further into the past, but the emotional echoes still remain. Everyone processes their experiences differently. For many, it was diving in to help. For some it was to create and find beauty amongst the mud and the debris. For me it was both, but the second has lingered long after the first.

As soon as my fingers found the notes, I knew what it wanted to be. But more importantly, I knew both what it could and could not convey. Music is not a code for a feeling you could have just stated plainly if you had tried harder. It is not a decorated version of a thought. It gives you the shape of the feeling directly, the rise and fall and weight of it, the actual motion of the thing, in a way words can only imitate. Grief has a morphology. It has contours, swells, and most importantly, a place where it breaks. Language walks around the outside and describes the walls, but it cannot create the space inside the walls. The space that invites you to bring your own experience with grief and despair and share them, or not.

I think this is how the deepest things in a life actually work, and I think we tell ourselves the opposite. We like to believe we approach the hard things gradually, that we build up to them, that we earn our way to the center by starting at the safe edges. We don't. The most profound experiences and feelings land first, and whole, and then we spend years, sometimes the rest of our lives, adapting and constructing a world to encompass that which has already arrived.

With gratitude,
Jay Sanders
Mindtonic Music