"The monster never breathes," the poser Berlioz supposedly laid about the an, but I found the opposite to be true. When I played I felt alive and at oh the mae, as if exhaling the music. Tess and Edward visited the studio to hear the lengthening shape of my position and at the end of the performance my son said, "You were moving the same as I was breathing." Over the course of a year, I worked on the symphony during what hours I could steal, regeing it stantly from the desire to fess, seeking to craft a texture that would allow me to explain. I felt that if she could but hear my story in the music, Tess would surely uand and five. In my studio, I could take refuge at the keyboard. Lock the door and draw the curtains to feel safe and whole again. Lose myself, find myself, in the music.
By the springtime, I had secured a small orchestra—a wind ensemble from Duquesimpani from egie-Mellon, a few local musis—to perform the piece when it was pleted. After Edward had finished first grade in Juess took him for a two-week visit to her cousin Pennys to give me time alone in the house to finish my symphony—a work about a child trapped in his silence, how the sounds could never get out of his own imagination, living in two worlds, the internal life locked to all unication with outside reality.
After struggling for years to find the music for that stolen child, I finally fihe score lay spread out across the an, the scrawled notes oaves a marvel of mathematical beauty and precision. Two stories told at the same time—the inner life and the outer world in terpoint. My method was not to juxtapose each chord with its double, for that is not reality. Sometimes our thoughts and dreams are more real than the rest of our experience, and at other moments that which happens to us overshadows anything we might imagine. I had not been able to write fast enough to capture the sounds in my head, hat flowed from deep within, as if half of me had been posing, and the other half ag as amanuensis. I had yet to fully transcribe the musical shorthand and to assign all of the instrumentation—tasks that might take months of rehearsal to perfect—but the initial process of setting down the bones of the symphony had made me giddy and exhausted, as if in a waking dream. Its relentless logic, strao the ordinary rules of language, seemed to me what I had been hoping to write all along.
At five oclock that afternoon, hot and wrung-out, I went to the kit for a bottle of beer, and drank it on the stairs. My plan was a shower, another beer with dinner, and then back to work. In the bedroom closet, the empty spaces where her clothes had been reminded me of Tess, and I wished she had beeo share the sudden burst of creativity and aplishment. Moments after stepping into the hot shower, I heard a loud crash downstairs. Without turning off the water, I stepped out, ed a towel around my waist, and hurried to iigate. One of the windows in the living room had been broken, and glass lay all over the rug. A breeze flapped the curtains. Half naked and drippi, I stood there puzzled, until a sudden discordant hammering of the piano keys frightened me, as if a cat had walked across it, but the studio was empty and silent. I took a long look around.
The score was go oable where I had left it, not fallen to the floor, not anywhere. The windoed open, and I ran to look at the lawn. A solitary page fluttered across the grass, pushed along by a thin breeze, but there was not