Music should inspire us to LIVE ON... and so should the legacy of Elijah McClain

  I honor of Elijah McClain.
   His legacy could have been a symphony, now his silence is a warning.

An intermission in ‘Light Moving’

I was inspired to write this today after the classical music streaming on my laptop last night bumped into an old acquaintance, named Hillary Hahn. Hahn is a premier violinist hailing from Louisville Kentucky. I went to see her perform in Tampa, Florida several years ago. The excellent mastery of her instrument reminded me again of the young musicians who have recently died, their instruments silenced by police brutality and racism. Her music reminded me of the potential their lives and music may have possessed to offer the world, before darkness squandered both.

That evening, the auditorium thanked Hahn with both uproarious adulation and respectful silence. She began to play a song titled ‘Light Moving’, an extremely rigorous and demanding piece whose syncopation conjures sublime imagination and visualization of the movement of light. Light that may emerge from an unknown place to land on the vast universe of familiar or buried landscapes and life experiences, to be spent and renewed. In the middle of the piece, she suddenly stumbled, then regained her composure and resumed translating light into sound.

Witnessing how she pushed herself momentarily beyond her limits that evening only underscored the power of the experience, and the role that artists have in illuminating and aspiring to sublime beauty. It exists everywhere, trying to filter its way through the darker shades of our world. It resides in nature, in us, and in those who are supposed to be our brothers and sisters. In recent years, and in response to a flood of ugliness and artifice, I have turned increasingly to art, nature, and now my fellow men and women to see and feel this beauty. It’s a survival mechanism. Perhaps its not unlike the sense of survival that resonated between the ‘different’ young man, who is now deceased, and the cats he once played his violin for. I’d like this survival mechanism to shed light towards saving both Black Lives, and LIFE as we know it.

May the legacies of Elijah McClain' and others like him, continue to inspire us to LIVE ON!

Light Moving, Hillary Hahn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf7dZMdlE-0