A Scored Afternoon

How music makes the moment

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Sometime last year, while lashed to an elliptical, my resentment high as always when forced into hamster-wheel exercise, I began listening to The Open Ears Project, a podcast where featured guests – from artists to professors to business folk – talk briefly about a piece of classical music, why it moves them, and perhaps the first time they heard it. It was there, bouncing up-and-down underneath the hiss of fluorescent lighting, that I first heard Spiegel im Spiegel by Avro Pärt.

As the gentle piano and violin lines interwove and diverged, playing off one another in gentility, loss, and a nostalgia with all the force of its etymological roots, I slowed down, stopped, and eventually fled to the locker room to sob in pseudo-privacy.

I hadn’t heard the piece again until last week. I went out-of-town to visit a dear friend who’d just received a diagnosis of vascular dementia – a surprise to no one, but the scrape of the sharpening axe is more menacing than the anxiety of it having been taken out of the garage. One afternoon, sitting in his house while he attended to things other than reminiscences, the local classical station was on, and out from the speakers came Pärt’s composition. I grabbed my notebook, the one I carry around with me to jot down random inspirations, because the atmosphere, the melancholy, the early winter day, and the soundtrack were perfection:

Hearing this early November looking out the window of the house at autumn, many leaves, but not all, down. Yellow, orange still; gray, lowering skies.

Here immediately after the diagnosis. A breath, an inhalation of tenderness, of time, and the bass note always striking, not as a menace but a reminder of what’s to come – the simple right hand and the, not mournful but tender because mortal, melody of the violin.

And in the room, a clock ticks.

It’s the second hand’s inexorable march against the rhythm of the piece that made the moment, a happenstance that any artist dreams of but can never force. It reminded me of the beautiful scene in Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier when the Marschallin, a mature woman with a very young lover, in her act one soliloquy confronts her age and tells of how she goes around her house stopping all the clocks, a futile gesture, but one we’ve all contemplated.

Back in New York, writing this at the library, I’m sure there’s a term (German, right?) to capture exactly the reflections of that day last week in the living room, a word that distills both the heartache and the unexpected, comforting pleasure of the pain, the tightened grip of an embrace knowing there might not be another like it, but until I remember that one word, I have the piano, the violin, and the tick of a clock always in my mind.

Also, for those who’d like to join me on pilgrimage to the Black Madonna of Loreto in October of 2026, click here.