put us all together (let's just put us all together)

Pyra's heuristic for a night well felt, music well rendered, is the feeling that it's transformed her just as much as she's transformed it. It's a responsibility, a sacred duty. She doesn't view this as making her better than other players, but does always make a point to do her best - others may or may not be a barometer, for that, on occasion.

(Has to be better than herself. Has to be better, stronger, firmer than she was the last time, no matter the sheet new or old set in front of her.)

When she feels a light flickering at the cracks between the lines, that's when she knows she's setting her world aright. Everything slots into place, soft and hard elements of symphonic composition that recall and recant the same themes forward and back again. It's an effervescent forever-tumbling cycle that calls her on and on. But little by little, now, she's forgotten what it must ever have felt like for that not to be. For the lights to be out.

There was nothing Pyra hated more than having to blindly feel her way around, for proof that she was even still lit by her own kind of smoldering spark within.

And to speak of smoldering, there was no one greater in mystery than Gray, if one wished to imagine all sounding members of the orchestra happy, sonorous, swell.

Pyra had been the glowing recipient of his quiet, magreticent praise on more than one unsolicited evening in the middle of November, or February, or some other slow-moving month (never so much that way as January, but approaching; it had the feeling of encroaching stagnation, anyway).

This night, she struggled, but she knew she couldn't fight her instrument itself for the right to return. So she approached the back row, chest tight for no reason she could name.

A fight against apathy, was it? A refusal to capitulate when she could feel her passion slipping away?

The clarinets. The waltz - the magic! Oh, and of course the horn solo... This may have been the sticking point. It almost surely was. Did she blame Alvis...? Impossible.

Impossible, and yet here she was, approaching the unapproachable.

Gray didn't make eye contact unless it was he who'd chosen to speak to you. It just wasn't his way. Pyra was, of course, content with this, seeing as she felt the impetus to unfocus her eyes, too.

Preamble? Not necessary. A miniscule tilt of head granted Pyra the audience she'd requested by the mere shuffling of her shoes.

"Do you think we're ready for the concert?"

Gray unceremoniously emptied a slide. "We rehearsed."

Yes, we did. Pyra waited.

"We can play it through. No explosions. What else?"

Aha. A cue Pyra could take, for sure. When he wasn't being difficult, Gray could be shockingly understanding.

"I thought it was missing something."

"Since last week?"

"Since..."

Since ever. Since the point at which she was, musically, born.

"I feel like someone's talking to me," Pyra said, slowly. "But...but I hear it more clearly than I would if someone actually were speaking to me. Like, I'm hearing more."

More vibrations, right? So, hearing more. More colors. More contours.

More powerful. More potent. More vital, surging, alive.

Right in the center of her chest.

This could be for quick passages or slow drawls, careful circles of the wrist to switch bowing directions and draw out the very innermost depth of the string. Of course, everyone wants to play their best. Everyone wants to make a good showing, to rise to the occasion. But is it maybe more than that?

"More?"

She'd never seen Gray show such a transparent expression; never thought that Gray ever or would ever let anyone else watch him think. But indeed, Gray considered this. Maybe strained to hear it himself - Pyra wasn't sure of that much, 'ether or not, just yet.

"I played well tonight," she said, now in a small voice that contrasted heartily with all the talking she must have been doing through her instrument, just or not even ten minutes ago.

"Always do."

"Well, so do you. But would you always say so?"

"Yes," Gray replied shortly, bluntly.

Gray's not an egotist; he's a pragmatist. His point, here, Pyra gathers, is that he pays more attention to his bad nights than his good ones, and the rarity of those bad nights makes the good ones a solid reputation to stand himself and his horn on.

The peanut gallery always have a lot of derogatory things to say about brass, and low brass in particular. But Gray's not like that. In fact, he's much more like a double - that is to say, upright string - bass. Like Monica, really.

Solid. Steady. Thumping. Never, ever, ever in the spotlight.

Pyra's like that too, though, as far as being sheltered out of the standard lime; the music is here for her as much as she's here for the music.

And so, when the music talks, who's really talking? Is it Monica? Is it Gray? Is it Maestro Tikkaram?

Or is it all of them together?

Obviously, of course it is. A unison by two voices, three and four, six and six and ten and ten. A tidal wave of tension built and released, phrase over phrase, sound and cadence and all sighing sense.

Gray doesn't hold back, when he plays a line. He leads it up through its leading figures, down by its sailing curves, sincere and centered even if the tone itself is planely focused, a little unsanded and a little dark.

People play the pipes they're given, but anyone who sticks with it long enough will eventually mold to their instrument, if their instrument didn't start its life molding itself so intuitively to them.

The horn speaks where Gray doesn't have to, doesn't want to, just plain can't. He's a man of few words, and he chooses those words well, but sometimes, if Pyra had to wager...sometimes the words just didn't, wouldn't, couldn't come.

(Imagine a young Gray. Imagine a Gray that was eager, or even just one that bit back, instead of prowling.)

So that's when he had his music. That's when he had this sacrament to offer, instead.

Pyra won't ask it now, that crucial question about where and why and how Gray found himself here, of all places, in the wings with a violinist lost by the wayside of meaning. Of course, she does want to know. How could she not? And then she could play to Gray's timbre, too.

In time, maybe he'd reveal himself. Maybe after long enough he'd get fed up with Pyra's abstract interpretations of tone concept and just toss his two cents on the table to lay it out without being prompted.

(Gray probably didn't like being prompted as much as he didn't like talking. He didn't like having to. And so, you see...)

That wasn't why she'd gone to him. No, she really wanted to know, here and now, if it made sense to anybody at all.

Maybe Gray understood it (recall the shocking capacity for empathy and emotional perception). Maybe Pyra had only helped to enhance herself.

Still, that in itself did a real load of good for everyone. It was what ensemble music was all about.

Yes, said Gray. I always play well and I always will.

No fear. No doubt. No loss of music and spirit, ever for a moment.

Pyra hovers on a reply for a few seconds, watching Gray watch her with wobbling eyes (hers, not his, never his). Then she gently shuts her mouth, and nods.

Always well. Always will. All of us, together.

So Pyra will continue questing for symphonies with shimmers and glimmers of hope in the pagefolds, in grandness for all the pauses, in flight through all the lifts.

So she'll talk to the music, if not also to a certain stiff-lipped bass trombone whenever he's playing, and listen for it to talk back.

Together.