The gift of companion music during dark times
Good Time and Bad Time. The English novelist Margaret Drabble, in her novel The Gates of Ivory, wrote memorably of Good Time and Bad Time by depicting them as being on opposite sides of a river, connected by a short bridge. This image haunts me because it so clearly illustrates how easily we slip between these two states in life. We bustle along in Good Time until a shattering moment when we cross over into Bad Time. Loss. Grief. Loneliness. Emptiness. Where many things inspired while we were in Good Time, we stand as if abandoned on the other shore when we’re in Bad Time. We ask ourselves who or what can accompany us through this barren place, blindly reaching for fragments of hope and solace wherever they appear and praying that in time we’ll find meaning in our suffering.
Musicians are not immune to Bad Time. And when we’re thrust into it, we naturally reach for the comfort offered in the music we love only to find that many of the notes now sound hollow and false. In that moment we learn an awful truth—that walking the difficult road of adversity and grief includes the pain of discovering how few voices are capable of following us to that barren place. We try one thing and then another. We wait. And one day, if we’re patient, the gift appears: companion music.
I’ve been graced with companion music three times in my life. A Bach Prelude and Fugue arrived while I mourned the death of a close friend. Dave Deason’s Reminiscence was gifted to me while I mourned the death of my paternal grandmother. Most recently, Federico Mompou’s Musica Callada came into my life as I journeyed with my mother through the final six months of her life. In all three instances, these pieces became the only things I could play during the worst of my grief. In all three instances, the pieces chose me, rather than me choosing them.
In my experience, companion music provides more than solace. It offers insight. It offers a safe structure in which our biggest questions find a home. Companion music rarely requires great physical or technical strength. It knows we don’t have the energy for that. Instead, it invites us into a musical embrace. It’s a mirror. It’s a friend. And as we learn the music, each note and phrase is encoded with our experience, becoming a time capsule of our sojourn in Bad Time.
Companion music is a gift, and as such can’t be sought or seized through the intellect. This gift arrives through our intuition and our internal ear. How does it appear? We may start thinking about a certain piece, or the gift of one may arrive on our doorstep. Sometimes it’s the ear worm we can’t escape until we surrender to it. It obeys no outside voice. It can be any piece by any composer. All it asks is that we trust it, surrender to it, and let it offer us companionship while we’re facing the wasteland of Bad Time. And when we cross that bridge back to Good Time, companion music travels with us, a musical journal, a reminder that we’re never alone—even in Bad Time.
Time and healing have allowed me to play that Bach Prelude and Fugue and Dave Deason’s Reminiscence again. To this day, I feel Bach’s rock-solid Lutheran faith guiding me through the labyrinth of his notes, still assuring me that whatever I felt in Bad Time, Bach has been there before. Dave Deason’s Reminiscence remains colored with all that I loved and still miss about my remarkable grandmother, and my YouTube recording of it is what my octogenarian father watches when he misses his mother. I’ve not been able to play Mompou’s Musica Callada since my Mom died. The feelings are too raw to revisit, even several years later. But I know that someday, when I’m strong enough, I’ll return to those notes and once again walk that final journey with my mother.
If you’re in Bad Time and have found that everything you’re playing feels empty and pointless, wait. Don’t push yourself. Put aside what you’re working on and listen. When your companion music presents itself, don’t question it, just accept the gift of it and play it—even if it’s not in your preferred style. Don’t discuss it with others. Don’t over-intellectualize the choice or the manner in which you’re drawn to play the notes. Just play it. Tomorrow, play it some more. Trust the music. Understanding and healing comes, but only through the doing. And someday, when you’re brought gently back to Good Time, you’ll know why that particular music became your companion and you’ll feel gratitude for the aural record it offers of your journey. There, in the notes of your companion music you’ll find your memory book of all you felt and learned, told in a language too deep for words.
Photo by Tim Rübmann, courtesy of UpSplash