For a good chunk of the fall semester, I spent late nights either hunched over a piano or sitting at my computer frantically writing music on a page. And often, that music stays buried in some folder on my laptop for years before I finally decide to delete it. My most recent piece, Dances from a White Wicker Drawer stemmed from random ideas I had not yet decided to throw out. For the most part, these melodies were just notes on a page, and it took months for them to take on a bigger meaning in a process that hit me almost instantaneously.
As a hospice volunteer, I had been visiting a patient named Alice (changed for privacy reasons) for a few months. She had late-stage dementia, so most of our conversations were limited. I reintroduced myself every time I visited—it felt like I was meeting a different version of her every week and after several visits, I still really didn’t know her. I was told that her family kept letters and pictures from her life in a white wicker drawer beside her bed, and one day my coordinator encouraged me to look at pictures with her in the hope that we could have a meaningful conversation. Her entire life was in that drawer—pictures of her and her family, letters she wrote to her son while she kept up the family business, pictures of her family’s farm and more. As we looked at pictures, I tried so hard to get a response for her. After 30 minutes of trying it finally happened.
I showed her a picture of a newlywed couple. Immediately, her eyes opened wider and she broke into an unforgettable smile. “That’s my son!”, she whispered. I could sense the excitement in her voice, and I eagerly urged her to tell me more. We had a short conversation about her son’s wedding, and in about three minutes she receded back into that lonely, blank stare I knew too well. Apparently, these episodes of remembering are quite common among dementia patients, but physiologically I’m not sure why they occur.
When I saw her smile, I realized that this piece that I was writing—merely notes on a page—could be a tribute to that special moment I shared with Alice. Armed with that insight, I wrote the piece in a frenzy, dedicating each melodic idea to an aspect of her life that I desperately wanted to know more about. By the end of the semester, it sat collecting digital dust in my composition folder.
In early January, I visited Alice for the last time. Just hours after I saw her, I got word that she had passed away—I realized that with her passing, all of the memories that she held onto for dear life had disappeared. That was hard—she was one of the first patients I had lost, and I never got to hear her whole story.
I went back to listen to the piece I had written about her and realized that the big major chords at the end of the fourth movement (the universal musical signal that says “this piece is over”) didn’t quite do the piece justice. It was then that I wrote the epilogue—a few bars with the opening melody returning against a background of sul tasto strings (giving it almost a muted sound). I felt like that was the only way I could communicate that the memories she held disappeared forever when she died. It was ultimately a reflection on the life she lived and the precious glimpses of it that I saw and relived with her.
Just this past week, I had the amazing opportunity of working with a few friends to record the piece. Up until that point, the piece existed only on paper and in the form of a MIDI recording using computer generated instruments. And as you can probably guess, computers can’t do much with music—the MIDI file is only a shadow of the actual piece it represents.
Playing this piece with actual human beings was one of the coolest experiences I have had in college. Sure—there were wrong notes and intonation issues, and a computer can literally play any series of notes with perfect intonation and rhythm. But people bring out the real music: the slowdowns, the pauses, the expression and the emotional experience that comes with that.
Find below a recording of the piece. A HUGE thank you to Dr. Podgorsek for guiding me through this process and to Saskia, Alan, Laura and Mackenzie for bringing this piece to life. And if you have comments, suggestions or ideas, feel free to comment or contact me!
“Dances from a White Wicker Drawer”— Listening to this poignant and beautiful composition was a profound experience for me. I lost my mother to dementia in October, and I could see a familiar disease in your description of Alice. Thank you, not only for your art but also for your art of compassion.
As your former teacher, I am grateful for the opportunity to continue reading your writing.
Thank you so much for your moving words, Mrs. Temple! I’m so sorry to hear about your mother, but I hope that art and music can continue to tell people’s timeless stories. Writing this piece was a musical challenge as well as an emotional one, but I have grown so much as a person in this process.