The 22nd anniversary was more than two weeks ago. So many of us were in the same situation, far away from what was happening but feeling the shock and senselessness of it, feeling the overwhelming helplessness. It comes rushing back, it’s all over the news for a few days. There are memorials, documentaries, concerts, articles, all keeping it alive in our hearts and the collective consciousness. The thing that gets me most is the reading of the names in that slow, somber rhythm.
Back then, on The Day, we didn’t know what to do, no one knew what to do, what to think, what to believe. What we were seeing on the incessant news broadcasts was completely incomprehensible. There was nothing TO do, right? The world was suddenly crazy, unsafe, everything was wrong, insane, unbelievable.
We couldn’t carry on as usual. Lots of parents kept kids home from school, from lessons. We finally closed the doors of the music school and went home. Before we left, we hastily scrambled some flyers together. Pink paper, because that was all we had. “Gather and sing, 4pm tomorrow at the music school,” or something vague like that. For lack of anything else concrete to do, we decided to open the doors to the community. No one should be alone in a national emergency, even if we didn’t know what we were facing. We decided to wait and see if anyone showed up. Would anyone come, would anyone want to leave their homes? To sing in the midst of all this?
We set chairs up in rows and it just didn’t seem right so they ended up in a circle. What would we sing? Play? Do? We printed up lyric sheets with songs like The Wind Beneath My Wings, Let There be Peace on Earth, America the Beautiful. I think even Kumbaya was on the list. Nothing hokey seemed hokey that day, those songs had promise and solace.
Someone said I should play something. Gabriel’s Oboe was a suggestion. The piece is about a massacre and is the main theme of the movie The Mission. I didn’t know if I could do it and not cry. The only pianist around was someone that I found challenging as a human – young, snotty, usually always bordering on rude. I didn’t want to play this with her but I had to stop in my tracks and think: these are the kinds of thoughts that foster otherness. That enable hatred and atrocities. The people that did this horrible thing did it because we were “other.” And I located a seed of that in me – other, better-than, judgmental. Ugh.
So. We played it as people came in. Lots and lots of people. No one really sat down, everyone milled around. The singing started and a circle happened. There were people wandering about chatting and suddenly everyone was standing in a circle, some of us holding hands. We sang and sang, every song on the sheet, and then we started over. Lots of crying. No talking, just singing. And then the singing wound down and came to an end. People hugged, everyone left, and the space reverted to silence. A hopeful silence, the energy of humanity, an acknowledgement of how, really, we are all one.
Gabriel’s Oboe:
(Yes, it’s for oboe. You can find many renditions online. This is one of the most beautiful ones out there, played by Yo-Yo Ma.)
"This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before." Leonard Bernstein, in response to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Read more here:
Beautiful and so true. Music was the only solace - and mostly hymns from my childhood church - songs of love and peace. Music seems to always find itself in the middle of immense tragedy- the Sarajevo cellist, the pianist at the Bataclan in Paris came to bring solace and healing. Yo Yo Ma's rendition of Gabriel's Oboe is my favorite.
A perfect response to that horror. ❤️