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The Healing Begins

from Summary of the First Half by Ian Ring

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I created this piece in the quiet early hours of Sunday, February 15, 2015. This piece drew from two moments of inspiration, both involving extended stays in a hospital ICU. The first of those was my own brief trip across the veil at the end of 2012, and the other was my grandmother's extended stay which ended with her peaceful passing on January 3, 2014. More generally, it recalls the all too common experience of bedside vigil in a hospital that anyone of a certain age is likely to have experienced.

This song evokes the mood of sitting beside one of those beds with chrome side rails. Someone you care about is sleeping, drugged, hooked up to drips and monitors. You don't hear them breathing, but you know they are, by the incessant beep ... beep ... beep of a machine next to the bed.

There's nothing to do, and nothing to say. They're asleep and everything is quiet except for the beeping, and a man moaning somewhere down the hall. Everything that can be stitched together or bandaged up or medicated has been tended to, and now there's nothing to do but wait and see. Maybe it will all be OK. Maybe it won't, and then it will be you that needs to heal. Either way, this is neither a beginning nor an end - it's the upsetting time in between when you don't know which way it will go.

Two blatant devices are used in the composition - one is the repeated and unstopping "beep beep" of a vital sign monitor. The other is the direct quotation of Westminster Chimes. The Westminster melody represents the passing of time, and for me it has very specific associations with my grandmother, and emotions of stillness overlaid with a general unease. I used the same quoted material in a more literal manner in the Opus Arcana movement "Hermit".

As I was putting the last few notes into place, my good friend Ian Willms had just had a series of his photographs featured in TIME Magazine, chronicling his father's extended hospital stay after a terrible motorcycle crash. It was an uncanny moment of synchronicity; Ian's photos captured visually what I was attempting to capture musically, and I am grateful that he consented to let me use two of the photographs from that series as cover images. In return, he employed this music to accompany this photo series when it was shown at LOOK3 in Charlottesville, Virginia, a major international photography exhibition.

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from Summary of the First Half, released August 18, 2016

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Ian Ring Ontario

Canadian Composer of works for solo piano

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