spirit stories

This piano music — Histoires by French composer Jacques Ibert (1890-1962) — was first shared with me in late 2020. Frustrated by learning the strange and clashing dissonances of Bartók, I sought something straight-forward to play on the piano at the end of long days spent doing advocacy work. As with any music, these pieces gradually embedded themselves in my mind, tendrils of melodies repeating over and over with increasing clarity as I moved through those forever days.

What I did not anticipate — having never lived through a pandemic in a global city before — is that, with no other sensory experiences beyond sirens and TV and tinny online voices, this music would come to singularly define my memory of the harshest periods of COVID. These ten pieces, each evoking a small scene or delightful character study, were the sounds in my mind as I lived through that otherworldly time.

Now that five years have passed since the beginning of COVID, I’d like to release these musical spirits to the place where they came most alive for me: Carl Schurz Park, a treasure of a public space in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan.

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This soundwalk is designed to be heard as the listener winds their way through Carl Schurz, hopefully with enough breaks that one can still hear the natural soundscape of the park itself, without musical adornment. In this soundwalk, I have matched selections of Histoires (written between 1912 and 1922) with the spaces where I always sensed the music. But of course, this is your adventure to design. The only request is that you remain mindful of the others you share the park with, and be sure to look up from your device to experience the walk as it was intended.

As you will hear, this music was recorded simply and alone in an apartment, no sound proofing or mixers used. Glimmers of the city sounds appear throughout the recording: the blare of a siren through the window, the drip of an AC unit, a neighbor moving about in the apartment next door. These noises have been reduced at times, but reality can’t be removed entirely. What results is a virtual concert, placed in the park where I heard and felt the melodies of Ibert’s Histoires most clearly, where I grew closer to the spirits that this music so effectively conjures. 

Visiting a park in a pandemic is easy fodder for the spiritual imagination. With so many lives lost at a scale I had never witnessed before, my mind, filled with these piano miniatures I was learning at the time — literally translated from the French “Histories” to “Stories” — asked questions like: ‘Which spirits live here? What sounds do they make? Do they play and quarrel when no one is watching? How many species have foraged here, beyond the squirrels and sparrows? How many lives have crossed these trails?’ I’ve seen proposals, plays, and weddings in the park. I’ve received news of family deaths and illness while walking its paths, and I’ve heard the cries of protests outside Gracie Mansion after another injustice made its mark on our city. I’ve taken part in life-changing conversations traversing the esplanade, with many hours spent in silence, too.

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It’s been five years since COVID began and yet there is still so much we don’t know about how our lives have been utterly changed by this experience. Now I volunteer in Carl Schurz myself, mostly shoveling mulch, sometimes planting native species for the pollinators who make their way across the East River to rest here. There is no greater form of healing than tending to land in this way, especially in a city where nothing seems natural at all. What I have grown to appreciate — through the act of making music for this sound walk, gardening with neighbors on Wednesday mornings, simply paying more attention to all that happens here — is that there are extraordinary people and creatures all over this park, often working quietly, who make it a true wonder of this city.

This small offering of shared attention is a nod of gratitude for the care that has been given to this space.

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