Music: Day 35

[S] And nothing more (35,883 / 1,000,000)

Imagine, if you will, a hushed concert hall. People of all kinds are dressed in their idea of their fanciest attire. A gentle energy ripples through the room as people shift and settle in their seats with anticipation. The lights dim, and the thick, red velvet curtain which conceals the stage begins to part. The stage is empty save for a single piano, sitting resolute in the center of a beam of light. The quiet murmuring in the crowd ebbs — the sound of heels clicking on the stage precedes the pianist as she enters from stage left. A woman in an elegant dress strides across the stage to the piano and sits without a glance at the audience. She settles into the bench and shifts and stretches her body in seemingly arbitrary ways, but in a way which reveals her familiarity with the piano bench. The silence builds in the audience as her hands approach the keys. The silence reaches its climax the moment before her fingers strike the first notes.

The music tears through the hall, obliterating the silence that the thousand or so attendees worked so hard to create. They don’t mind, this is what they paid good money for. The pianist is technically skilled — never missing a note, nor falling out of tempo. At the same time, she doesn’t allow the framework of her music to cage her. She understands the music, and what it is trying to tell the world. She can coax it out of its shell, and reveal it in all its splendor to the audience. More than a few people weep during the performance.

The dim light in the concert hall retreats further into itself, until nothing is visible save for the piano and its pianist sitting in the center of a beam of light. The beam of light fades as well, eventually, but the music continues. The hall is enveloped in utter blackness now, but the notes of the piano continue to sweep through the listeners like a scythe through blades of grass.

A particularly assiduous C-sharp is played, and it finds itself in utter darkness. It flails about in the void for a while, before it notices the other notes that are flowing all around and past it. It brings the C-sharp some small comfort, though it doesn’t know why, to be surrounded by things like itself — it makes the darkness ever-so-slightly less daunting. Floating through the nothingness, the C-sharp bumps into an F and a G-sharp, and it begins to enjoy this whole existence thing. The harmony created from their proximity is enough to distract the C-sharp for a while.

At some point, little C-sharp loses its friends. Their sound wanes, then fades entirely. Their absence reminds C-sharp that it is twisting around in a featureless void, with no direction or purpose. A sense of fear and anxiety begins to build inside of it, and the presence of other notes brings it little joy this time. In its time in the void, C-sharp has seen how other individual notes can clash with one another, and it finds no comfort among its kin. It would much rather if all the notes would harmonize together, but they don’t seem to be inclined.

Little C-sharp begins to experience something new. Anger. It doesn’t know why it was yanked out of nothing. It doesn’t know why it was given harmony, only to have it taken away. It bounces around the void in an angry rejection of its own existence. It doesn’t want to be here in this void with all these other notes tumbling aimlessly around it.

Then, it too begins to fade. It’s subtle at first — almost imperceptible. But C-sharp has become familiar enough with its own existence at this point to perceive the signs. It isn’t as loud as it was before. It doesn’t pierce the silence like it used to. C-sharp becomes sad. It wasn’t aware of this part — the finiteness. The anger is still there, but it is dulled now by the melancholy of the looming end.

C-sharp slows down, the energy which gave it existence diffusing into the void. As it meanders through the darkness in its last moments, it notices something. Something hidden in the other notes which are swirling and flitting around itself in the nothingness. A grand pattern. In its last moment — the frozen instant in time before it returns to that from whence it came — it hears music.