Now It Belongs To You Too: Sharing Private Grief With Seventy Strangers

When this started, I was alone.

That's a tough thing to say when the catalyzing event was so profoundly public. The winds blew into every corner of my life in ways that I never thought possible. Whether it was clearing the massive tree branches from the ancient oak that hugs my house. Or working with our staff to find a way to make Little Jumbo into a community gathering place. Or lending a hand to friends who lost everything, digging through mud just trying to catch a glimpse of a surviving memory. Or playing music for the World Central Kitchen as they fed badly needed meals to our community. Or standing in line at New Bridge Baptist Church's tanker truck to fill our water jugs. Or even just standing with a solemn crowd on the banks of the receding river and counting the obscene number of plastic pipes sticking out of every form of tree, bank, and rock.

And yet, this storm still left me feeling tremendously alone. As if, inside of the mounds of suffering surrounding our entire region, we were each on our own.

That is the part I keep returning to, and that is how this symphony came to be.

I wrote it alone.

A private thing, made in seclusion, holding something I was not sure I wanted to say out loud to anyone. Ever.

And then I did the strangest thing a person can do with a private grief. I handed it to seventy strangers.

That is what writing a symphony actually is, once you strip the romance away from it. You take the most interior thing you have, and you break it into seventy pieces, and you give each piece to someone who has spent their whole life mastering one instrument. You write down, as precisely as you can, the weight you want, the color, the silence. And then you let go completely, because you have no other choice. I cannot play most of the instruments in that room. In many ways I am the least essential musician present.

There is a humility in that I did not expect. And beneath the humility, something stranger: a kind of faith. You have to believe the feeling will survive the handoff. You have to trust that the ideas the universe saw fit to grant you, that take possession of your soul and root themselves in your being, can be written down, picked up by someone you have never met, and still arrive whole on the other side.

I have come to believe it survives because of what a score really is: an empty room with the proportions of a feeling. I draw the walls, someone else walks in and builds a life. I did not hand those musicians a description of my grief, a thing they would have to read, interpret, reconstruct and then deliver in some sort of performance. I handed them the room itself, and invited them to fill it with their breath.

And when seventy people walk into the same room at the same time and agree to live there together, something happens that I could never have made happen alone.

When the Blue Ridge Orchestra premiered it, I sat in the hall and heard it come back to me so much larger than I had made it. I mean that plainly, not as a figure of speech. Seventy people breathing together, moving as one body, produced something with more life in it than the marks I had put on a page. One hundred forty hands that had also lived through the storm, that had carried their own version of the grief, made this music for four hundred people who had lived through it too, who had heard the same cries and witnessed the same loss with their own eyes. Everyone in that room lived through the experience, together.

The private grief did not shrink in the sharing. It grew. It needed the others in order to become fully itself. I had written the loneliest thing I knew. I had poured every ounce of my being into it, this thing that had to exist. And then, as it turned out, the only way to finish it was to fill a room with people.

We think our deepest feelings are ours alone. Sealed off. Untranslatable, ours and no one else's. And then we set them down in front of someone, and discover they were never only ours to begin with.

I gave this away freely, and the players took it up freely and gave it a body. No one in that room was extracting anything from anyone. That matters to me more than I can easily explain, because we live in a time that takes nearly everything we have, including our griefs, and hands them back to us packaged and priced and optimized for our attention. To make a thing and simply give it, and to have it received in the same spirit it was offered, is close to the only uncorrupted act I have left. Art moves as a gift, or it does not really move at all.

And here is the turn I did not see coming when I began. The further I went into my own specific, private, un-shareable grief, the more people came to me afterward and said they recognized it as their own. Not in spite of how particular it was. Because of it. You do not reach everyone by aiming at everyone. You reach them by going all the way down as deep as you can possibly go, searching for one true thing, and trusting that the bottom of your own heart opens onto the bottom of theirs.

So here it is. The second movement. The Despair. The heart of the piece. The first thing I wrote. The melody that started it all. The thing I made alone in a room and then gave away. Watch it, if you would like to. Now it belongs to you too.

https://sinfoniettahelene.com

The rest of the work follows soon, so the whole arc can be heard from beginning to end. But this is the center. This is where all of it started. This is the room I built, and you are welcome in it.

With gratitude,
Jay Sanders