Sibling Assignment #57: Writing Vivaldi

This week Silver Valley Girl gave the sibling assignment.

Listen to this piece of music: Vivaldi’s "Concerto for Violin", and write what you hear. InlandEmpireGirl's remarkably imaginative and experimental dive into poetry is here and Silver Valley Girl's post will be coming before too long.

If you'd like to listen to Vivaldi's piece, click the music notes on the panel below the screen on the player posted above.

I hear melancholy.

I hear longing.

I hear dignity.

I hear resolution.

This piece triggers memories from twelve years ago when I began to spend a lot of time with Benny's mom.

Since Benny is a Downs Syndrome guy and autistic, he has a great need for routine, for regularity. Much of the time I spent with Benny's mom was at their house.

Benny's mom and I listened to a lot of instrumental classical music. Benny's mom checked a lot of music out from the public library where Benny loved to go and pick out books and movies and she recorded much of this music and she and I often lay down together and listened, and did little more than let the music have its impact.

Benny was often in his bedroom watching a video, rocking and laughing, enjoying life on his terms and his mother and I would be in the living room enjoying life on our terms.

Ultimately this relationship did not work out. Memories of it remain, though. So does the longing. I felt melancholy and longing for things to work out when it started to be obvious we would go our separate ways.

In Vivaldi's piece, the emotion is resolved as the composition ends.

It never works that way in life itself. Vivaldi lets us imagine resolution and gives us a sense of how it feels to experience the resolution of melancholy.

I've never known such resolution. Things were never resolved between me and Benny's mom and so while the feeling up to the end evokes feelings I had in the last several months of our relationship, if the music were true to my life, the piece would shatter at the end, notes scattered all around, and the music would leave me unsatisfied.

I like the Vivaldi piece the way it is. It's good for me to feel sadness resolved musically, even if it never is in actual life.