Still There

Sunday morning I woke up exhausted.

My eyes hurt. My body felt heavy. I had a sound bath to host at nine, and I couldn’t believe I had stayed up so late.

The night before had been my first performance of Before the First Peace.

After everyone left, I stayed at Ravenswood to reset the studio. I changed the linens, refreshed the room, put everything back where it belonged.

I was still too awake to feel tired.

By the time I got home, it was after midnight.

I had recorded the performance. It wasn’t meant to be a good recording. I wasn’t planning to share it with anyone. I just wanted some record of the first time I played the piece for an audience.

Around 12:30, I got into bed and pressed play.

I thought I would listen for a few minutes and fall asleep.

For a while, it sounded more or less the way I remembered it.

I knew where I was.

I remembered sitting behind the bowls. I remembered moving across the room toward the chimes. I knew what sound was coming next because I remembered playing it.

Then, at some point, I fell asleep.

I don’t know how long I was out.

When I woke up, there was music playing in the dark.

For a moment, I thought I was listening to something else.

I wondered if the recording had ended and the next track had started playing.

But there was nothing else on the device.

I was still listening to myself.

I had no idea where I was in the piece.

I started looking for it.

A few notes would make me think I had found my place. Okay, this is this section.

Then something would happen that shouldn’t have happened yet.

Or should have happened already.

And I would be lost again.

The longer I listened, the less certain I became.

I knew this piece. I had spent months making it. I had performed it only a few hours earlier.

But I couldn’t find the piece I remembered inside the one I was hearing.

Part of what kept throwing me off was how little empty space there actually was.

I remembered waiting.

During the performance, I would play a bowl or bring a gong up and listen as it faded.

Sometimes I would wait until I thought it was gone.

Then I would wait a little longer.

Those spaces had felt enormous.

Now one sound seemed to run into the next.

I listened more closely.

A bowl faded.

I stopped hearing it.

Then another sound arrived.

And there it was again.

Not the bowl exactly.

But something it had left behind.

I started hearing this everywhere.

Sounds I remembered as separate weren’t separate.

The end of one was changing the beginning of another.

Suddenly some of the places I remembered as almost uncomfortably quiet weren’t quiet at all.

That may have been why I couldn’t find them.

I had been listening for the spaces I remembered waiting through.

They weren’t there.

Or at least they weren’t empty.

I had made every one of those sounds.

I hadn’t heard this.

I kept listening.

A sound would disappear, but some impression of it would remain long enough to meet the next one.

And then that sound was different because of it.

At some point it occurred to me that absence and disappearance might not be the same thing.

Something can be gone and still stay around for a very long time.

Eventually the last sound began to fade.

This time there was nothing for me to do.

So I listened to it leave.

It became quieter and quieter until I couldn’t hear it anymore.

The recording ended.

For a little while, I stayed there listening.