Music in the Time of Mourning
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his most famous Clarinet Concerto (K. 622 in A major), in October 1791. He was 35 years old and had just gotten sick with the fever that would ultimately kill him. He was composing prolifically at the time—premiering multiple of his most popular symphonies and operas, including The Magic Flute, to furious applause in Vienna’s ritziest concert halls. As his sickness got worse, though, he grew increasingly preoccupied with finishing The Requiem, which he never did. The circumstances of Mozart’s death have been much mythologized. What remain of his later compositions are an endless source of interest for present-day musicologists.
With the Clarinet Concerto, for example, there are passages where notes appear to have been written beyond the typical 4-octave range of the instrument. Music history scholars and nerds have debated this intensely: was Mozart hoping to defy the laws of physics? Was the concerto intended for a special kind of clarinet? Indeed, it was. (The history behind how clarinets get designed and built in the first place is its own little rabbit hole. Suffice it to say, there are a lot of little buttons on a clarinet! And keys!) And yet, the instrument generates a deeply pretty sound. Rich, sweet, nuanced. The clarinet has all the colors of light and darkness in it. The clarinet is playful—and funny. At the same time, the clarinet also knows what “longing” means. The clarinet is one of the most versatile instruments in classical music.
Mozart’s final Clarinet Concerto consists of three movements, in a fast–slow–fast succession: I. Allegro, II. Adagio, III. Rondo. Some passages are pure joy—flurries of sixteenth notes that descend in a dramatic staccato. There are flourishes of chromaticism that traverse the whole range of the instrument like fireworks. Other parts are lyrical and astonishing in their loveliness. Transporting. It makes you marvel at what a lunatic brain Mozart must have had. He was a prodigy. A genius. Either Mozart was a genius, or else it was the sheer drive of his spirit, in those last few months of being sick. It was his compulsion to finish saying what he came to planet Earth to say. His desire to express himself—to make meaning, or beauty. To carry out a life force. To exist in his work, as in life. Maybe.
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Recently, I picked up my clarinet again. I used to play very seriously—through high school and even a little in college. I had not practiced in years, but then I got inspired to join the orchestra at the school where I work. We are all rusty amateurs in the orchestra, but we managed to get together for rehearsals a few times over the past few months, and we put on a winter concert that was fun. I would do it again. I had not been on a stage to perform the clarinet in eight years at least, but there is something visceral about the muscle memory of it. The way the air on stage gets hot from all the bodies crammed together, and the way the theater lights are so bright they blind you. How people clap at the end, and you are supposed to stand up and bow.
Before going on stage, in the corridor behind the auditorium, we were all lined up in rows: first the violins, then the trumpets with french horns, and clarinets with flutes. I whispered to my stand partner who is a very cute little eight-grader named David. I said, “David, are you ready?” And David blushed. “I’m nervous,” he said. And he blinked behind his glasses. He reminded me of myself at that age. He was adorable and I cared about him very much in that moment. I said, “David, there is no reason to be nervous. You’ll be great.” And he perked up and nodded. This was, on the one hand, the most ordinary of human interactions. On the other hand, I cannot stop thinking about it. Growing older is so strange.
So we filed out into the auditorium and took our places. We played the whole concert through and everyone made a lot of mistakes, but no one cared about that. All of the families clapped at the end, and afterward, the students went out into the lobby where their parents were waiting for them. I saw David’s parents give him a bouquet of flowers, and I heard his mom say, “Bravo!” And he beamed. It got me wondering about why people study music in the first place: is it because we like the songs? Or are orchestra rehearsals—and music lessons, and concerts—just an elaborate excuse for people to be able to come together? Maybe: the whole reason for school concerts is for parents to dress their kids up like small adults and tell them, “I am proud of you.” For a lot of us, I guess, that is what it is.
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When I was a child, my brother and I both played instruments. My brother did not stick with music for long, and, in fact, he passed away. He was 28. As kids, though, we used to listen to these cassette tapes of The Magic Flute. The story was enchanting. I especially remember the opening scene—where a little girl is looking for her mom backstage. You can hear the orchestra tuning, and some stagehands arguing about equipment in an exciting, theatrical way. The little girl says: “Excuse me! Have you seen my mom?” She says: “My mom is playing the Queen of the Night. Do you know where I can find her?” That is the beginning of the opera. I remember loving the commotion of that scene: the thrill of a concert about to begin.
In my own practice with the clarinet, my parents eventually let me get a private teacher. For five years—from eighth grade through my senior year of high school—I went to my teacher’s house for one hour, every Wednesday afternoon. I was lucky that I got to do that, and I liked my teacher a lot. Her name was Donna, and she was tall and patient, with dark hair and gentle hands. She did not have the easiest life. I was peripherally aware of that, in the way that children often are. Her job performing with the local university’s Symphony Orchestra was complicated because half of the musicians went on strike, for years, lobbying for better pay. She supported her family with income from teaching music.
When Donna played the clarinet, she leaned into it with her whole spirit. She had a way of swaying her body. She moved like a slender piece of seaweed underwater, getting tugged around by the current—and also tugging back, pulling ropes of sound out into the air in an elegant, masterful way. I asked Donna once if she knew what she looked like when she played, and she said absolutely not. She had no idea that she swayed. As a student, I wished that I, too, could have this experience of getting lost in music. For me, the best I could do was tap my foot along with the damn metronome. Being a beginner was so clumsy. But I enjoyed my lessons with Donna very much.
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When my brother died, I flew home to be with my parents. There was a lot to do: we planned the funeral, and we sorted out the things he’d left behind. His house, his car, his bank account, his difficult girlfriend. All of this was hard. My parents were in shock and an enormous amount of pain. At home, I slept in my childhood bedroom. Well-wishers came and went. My parents and I came together for meals at the kitchen table, and then we separated to our own parts of the house. We passed each other on the stairs, confused—trying to make sense of how we had become so violently, so suddenly re-arranged. In my old bedroom, I stood and stared at my teenage things. I was bored. It was hell. And that was when I stumbled onto my old clarinet.
I had forgotten how unhappy I was as a teenager. I’d been a misfit and a weirdo, obsessed with old Italian movies and art books, longing to get out of my small town and into the big world. I’d worked hard to do that, but now, here I was again. Marooned in my home state. Alone. My clarinet was sitting on the top-back shelf of the closet, where it had gone untouched for years. When I opened the case, I was amazed to see that everything was exactly like I’d left it—reeds, cork grease, pencil, metronome and spit swab (spit swabs! The clarinet is truly one of the nerdiest of instruments). And when I rifled through my old stack of sheet music, there was one piece, one song, that leapt out immediately: Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major. I felt the tiniest flutter of joy.
I was out of practice, of course. The necessary muscles in my hands and arms and mouth were out of shape, and I got tired almost right away. But also: I remembered more things than I knew. My fingers still knew all the notes, and my body still had the instinct to sit up tall for posture, and to breathe deep to fill my lungs with air. I still knew how to test the quality of a reed by laying it flat on my tongue and sucking air through its fibers, and I could still read music. In fact, as I squeaked my way through that Mozart concerto—for the first time since college!—I was overjoyed at how alive the music felt. And when I came across pencil notes in the margins, squinting to decipher them, I recognized my old teacher Donna’s handwriting. Immediately, I heard her voice. I could hear her counting patiently, piloting me to stay inside the rhythm.
When I was a student, I used to struggle to stay in tempo, but now, all of a sudden, I could feel the tempo as clearly as if it were my own heartbeat, thanks to Donna’s notes. By the time I put my clarinet down, an hour had gone by. I had not even noticed. I was blown away.
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When my brother died, the nurse at the ICU printed out a little piece of paper that showed his final heartbeats. Called an “Arrhythmia Recall Record”—no bigger than a debit card—it looked like a tiny, inky version of a heartbeat monitor. There was a single horizontal line that swooped in mountains and valleys—each downstroke a record of my brother’s heartbeats in its last moments of existing. The nurse said, “Sometimes people like to keep these,” and she pressed a copy into my hands.
I still have that piece of paper. It resembles a piece of sheet music. It is a visual way of recording the passage of time. It is a way of marking time, or noting time. Only: unlike music, these heartbeats will not be brought to life again.
Maybe I am forcing the analogy, but I wonder: when Mozart was writing music, in the last days of his life, was it similar? The finality of scoring notes on paper? Maybe.
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To practice a musical instrument is to apply yourself to a kind of meditation. It is difficult, unglamorous work. Masochistic, even. You are stuck inside this 18th-century discipline, which is rigid, and with not much room for creativity. You need to repeat the difficult passages slowly, again and again, before you can play them faster in any kind of reliable way. You need to practice for hours. Sitting straight-backed in your chair until your whole body aches, you need to build up endurance. You need to focus. And a musician’s practice is never done. It is not like one day you reach a moment where you can look up and say, “I got it! I can stop now!” That is not the nature of practice.
The Mozart Clarinet Concerto, for example, takes about 30 minutes to play through from start to finish. But every clarinetist who studies it has spent many more hours than that—poring through its pages, memorizing it, smoothing out the tricky parts, again and again. There is no end point in practice. Only doing.
Practice is different from performance. I learned this because, that first day getting back into music after years away from it, I got the idea to record a video and post it online. After a few tries, I ended up with a recording that was passable—completely full of mistakes, but passable. I posted it on Facebook, and the likes came rolling in. A few days later, I wanted to try to make another video. But this time, I wanted to show improvement. That was the point of the video. There was no reason to ask people to keep listening to me if I was not making progress. So I tried and tried, and I got irritated at all of my mistakes. Eventually, I gave up, and I did not post a second video online. But I have continued to practice the concerto.
Music has everything to do with time. Tempo, yes, and memory. But also: spending time. Every musician knows this: you can practice your instrument for your entire life, and never achieve perfection. Through the accumulation of hours spent, though—even if it is just one hour every week—you can make some sort of headway. And if you spend enough hours at your practice, you will manage to define yourself, in the smallest way. To etch an imprint of your identity into existence.
Practicing a craft is a way to have control over your life. Even when everything else is chaos.
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Eventually, I went on Youtube to watch professional recordings of this Mozart concerto. I was especially enamored with a performance from 2015 by a woman named Arngunnur Árnadóttir, of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. In the video, she is young and gentle—30-ish years old, with blond-brown hair pulled into a wispy low bun, and a modest scoop-necked dress that shows off her bare arms. There is something sensual about seeing the naked shoulders of a lone musical virtuoso in stage lights. Her face is serious with concentration as she waits for her time to enter—the sound of violins soaring up from the orchestra behind her. And when she starts to play the solo, I am immediately aware of how clumsy a clarinetist I have been all along.
For all of the accolades I won in high school, I have never, and never will, play as beautifully as Arngunnur Árnadóttir. I am just an amateur.
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The eighth-grader, David. He is in my after-school club, and we have been brainstorming topics for his next writing assignment. I asked him if he would like to write about music. Maybe he wanted to write about our recent concert. He said that it had not occurred to him to write about that. What was there to say about music? To David, music was just something that was.
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In retrospect, when I was a kid, I did not think so hard about questions like this either. But as I grow older, I have begun to notice how often these seemingly big choices in life come down to chance.
When I was a student, for example, I did not choose the clarinet to be my instrument. It happened by accident. In fact, I wanted a piano, but my mom’s friend already had a clarinet, so I got that instead. (Luckily, it turned out that the clarinet suited my personality: sometimes silly, sometimes sad—too mellow for a piccolo, and too nimble for a trombone—and I grew to love my clarinet.) But it was only a whim of luck that my musical life took that direction. Imagine if I’d been given a tuba instead!
Thank goodness the adults around me in childhood did not try to make that happen.
As I grow older, I have become more aware of how often we adults are only handing kids ideas and directions based on circumstance—fumbling to appear like we know all the answers. I am realizing, now, how much of life is simply making things up as we go along.
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In the months that followed my brother’s death, it occured to me, for the first time, that the world is not limitless. Clocks only tick forward, never back. And, in one lifetime, you will only get to know a finite amount of happiness. You will only get to accomplish a finite number of things. What are we supposed to do with that? I am beginning to understand, a little better, now: we should love our family and friends, firstly. Fall in love, have children, raise our children. But life is about more than that, too. We should make things. Make art, make beauty. Make a piece of art that helps other people understand life just a little bit better—because we are all struggling. Make joy. Do something that helps.
Maybe Mozart, in the last months of his life, became so obsessed with finishing his compositions because making music is a way of defying death. Music is the opposite of death. It is rhythm and movement and substance. Music creates space for intimacy, especially when you and another person already know the same song. Music brings people together—even across the centuries (if it’s been written down correctly). And a catchy tune can stay in your mind forever. You will find yourself humming it, years later, in the shower, or while driving your car.
So the next time you are feeling scared, or overwhelmed, or lonely—just pull out your instrument and play something nice. If you can just focus on the notes on the page in front of you, and apply yourself to getting it right, you will find that music can lift you up and out of that hole. Music will help you find a way to continue.
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A composer must write notes down in order for them to be played. And a musician must read notes in order for them to be performed. In the case of Mozart’s music, people are still performing what he wrote more than 200 years later. Which means: music culture entails some sort of pact that we all enter into, together. We all agree to read music. And to play it as faithfully to what the composer intended as we can.
Even though—if you do a truly obsessive deep dive on Youtube, like I have done—you will discover popular recordings of this exact Mozart concerto that show a lot of varied interpretation from the performers. There is the Cleveland Orchestra in 2012. And the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra in 2013, which features Israeli soloist Sharon Kam. The styles of both these clarinetists tend to be more bright and punchy than the sound of the player I gravitate to most, Árnadóttir of Iceland, who I realize, upon further viewing, moves with body gestures that remind me of my old teacher, Donna.
Yes, that’s it: Árnadóttir has a way of swaying gently, just ahead of the music, so that when the lightest stream of sixteenth notes cascade out into the air, you have the sense she is conjuring sound, as if with a magic wand. She makes a stylistic choice to not emphasize the downbeat so dramatically, instead allowing some higher intelligence to be channelled through her. This was how Donna tried to teach me to play. This was how Donna played.
And what if Mozart was still around to tell us what he thought about these different interpretations? Or to tell me and my orchestra-mates at school how badly we are missing the mark? We will never know, even with so many musicologists invested in the question.
What if my brother was still around to pick up the phone when I called him, just to say, “Hey, do you remember? Do you remember? That cassette tape of The Magic Flute?”
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A writer is never done writing about grief because grief never goes away. And a musician is never done practicing because music does not stop. I have been telling my therapist some version of this every single week for months now: “I miss my brother,” I say.
“Practice is repetition.”
And: “Writing is recursiveness. Writing is obsession.”
She always tolerates me, nodding along patiently, with two index fingers pointed up into a tent in front of her mouth, her eyebrows knitted with listening. Maybe art mimics life. Maybe it is that, and not the other way around.
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Teachers are important. A good teacher takes on the impossible task of helping shepherd newer, less experienced people through the world, with all of its complications and rules. “Newer” people meaning—people who have not yet had a chance to get banged up or damaged by life.
With this in mind, eventually, I wrote to my old clarinet teacher, Donna. After months of thinking about it and hesitating. I had not spoken to her in years, but I wanted to let her know what an impact she made on my life, and how grateful I am that I get to be a clarinetist—one of the nerdy ones. I wanted to tell her I am still playing in an orchestra, and that I am friends with the music teacher. Donna wrote back to me, too, and now we are exchanging emails. The first letter I ever got back caused me to burst into tears. She said she was sorry to hear about my brother. So very sorry to hear.
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Why is it important to play Mozart exactly as it was intended? I know because my teachers taught me why. And when a young person dies, what do we do? Make music. Stronger people than me have shown me how.
What if we get scared, or nervous? Well, everyone gets nervous sometimes.
Rachel Veroff is a writer in New York.