“Ta-daaaaaah, ta-dah ta-daaaaaaah, ta-dah, ta-dah, dah-dum-daaaaah.”
I close my eyes to the world around me so I can hear the song a little more clearly. With nothing to see, my ears pick up the patterns and sounds that I might otherwise miss.
The bassoon sings its low sad song. He’s telling the world what life is like right now. “There’s no one else around,” he says. “I’m here, singing my song, waiting for the day that I can be reunited with my orchestra.”
“I have so much to sing,” he says, with his low trills and small scales. He plays such a somber tone—slowly rising and falling again. It’s almost like a lullaby. Repetitive and calm. Slow and beautiful in its solitude.
As he plays his song, there’s the beauty of a twinkling piano intertwined. It’s as if the piano reminds him of brighter days to come. She lets him wrestle with his sorrow, and just as it sounds as though he’s wondering if he really can go on, she lets him take a break and inserts her playful melody. The one that sounds like birds chirping in the morning air. She reminds him that spring is up ahead. “This sad time doesn’t last forever,” she sings.
He responds a little brighter this time, “I hear you, but sometimes that’s hard to believe. Especially when you’re living in a time like this.”
She continues her short proclamations. This time taking a sadder tone. She acknowledges his pain with a minor key. She agrees to sit with him for a while. She lets him mourn. She lets him grieve. She holds his hand as his sadness turns to rage and then back to sadness once again.
As he plays his final note, over and over again, first short and staccato, then longer, and another even longer, it almost sounds like a foghorn. Morse code. Perhaps it’s his SOS?
She answers his every call with a note of her own. “I am here,” she says. “I am here.”
This reflection was written in response to Song for the Lonely, composed by William Grant Still and played by Lecolion Washington.
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