The Feeling Between Notes
How an instrumental piece became a portal to grief, wonder, and the echo of everything we feel but cannot name.
I’ve been meaning to write for days now. But right now—at this exact moment—I’m sitting with a song playing on repeat: The Sun’s Gone Dim and the Sky’s Turned Black by Jóhann Jóhannsson.
It’s moving through me.
And as the piano stretches into silence and sound, something begins to form.
The words are arriving as I hear them, as I feel them. They’re not polished. Just honest.
This began when I went back to November by Max Richter, when I watched Mari Samuelsen’s performance again—her bow gliding, her body bending, her orchestra leaning in like breath.
Something stirred. And now… I’m here. Writing what rises. Letting music lead.
I’m not a musician. I don’t sing (unless you count karaoke, where I sound like a joyful bullhorn), and I’ve never played an instrument. But I feel music, and sometimes I wonder if that’s its own form of understanding.
I’ve stood in music shops asking if there's a keyboard that could just teach me a song. Just one. Not to become a pianist, but to learn a moment. A melody. A memory. They told me those gadgets were toys, not instruments. Maybe. But to someone like me, they feel like a doorway.
Because music, for me, has never been about mastery. It's about connection.
In a performance of November, Mari Samuelsen becomes more than a player—she becomes the music. Her fingers move like river dancers across strings. Her elbow lifts and lowers with precision, her shoulder responding in subtle choreography, the wrist tilting with every shift in pitch. The bow glides like breath, whispering sound into being.
Around her, the orchestra is alive. Seated, but not still. Each musician carries their own pulse, their own quiet urgency. The cellists lean into their instruments. A flutist closes her eyes as if to better hear what cannot be heard. Their expressions hold a thousand quiet stories.
There’s a unity in the room—bodies curved into wood and string, breath synced not with each other but with something larger. They move not in isolation, but as limbs of one great body. Notes rise not only from fingers, but from posture, from memory, from trust.
The conductor, center stage, draws shapes in the air that only they can read—and yet everyone understands. A lift of the hand, a pause in the wrist, and something in the music changes.
Inside the piano, a secret unfolds.
A single key is pressed. Beneath it, a hammer lifts. It strikes a string wrapped in silence, and that silence breaks into tone. One after another, the hammers rise and fall like breath. Sound emerges not in chaos but in conversation—felt-covered wood meeting metal, tension releasing into resonance.
The listener never sees this. But the sound knows where it came from.
There’s rhythm in the mechanism. A grace to the motion. A story hidden in each repetition. What begins as touch becomes vibration. What begins as vibration becomes music.
Notes, once released, drift into the air like memory. A trembling string can summon sorrow. A soft chord can call back joy. A quiet shift in tone can close the distance between now and then.
Sometimes a song fills a room the same way grief does—sudden, full-bodied, uninvited. Sometimes it wraps itself around you with the gentleness of first love. A melody carries the weight of what was never said. A harmony holds what was lost. A dissonance reminds you of what changed too fast.
And then, without warning, something lifts.
The ache leans into awe. A passage opens that wasn't there before. And even if you’ve heard it a hundred times, this time it lands differently.
The line between listener and instrument fades. The body of the violinist becomes the arc of the music. The bow becomes breath. The orchestra becomes shadow and light. The piano becomes memory, mechanics turned to meaning.
No instruction is given. But still, something in you responds.
You see the fingers move. You feel the shoulder strain and soften. You imagine the grip tightening, the release. The movement becomes audible in your bones, though no one has spoken.
And watching it—truly watching it—was its own kind of wonder.
To see the human body become the instrument… to witness fingers dancing across strings, elbows rising and falling with silent command, shoulders leaning into the shape of sound—it was beautiful.
Not just the music, but the way these artists carried it.
The way each body seemed to know its purpose.
To create something out of tension and touch, memory and motion.
There’s something majestic about that. Something sacred.
To see a person in motion—creating something that didn’t exist a moment before—and to realize:
This, too, is the beauty I see.
The song plays again.
And without permission or warning, something opens.
Memory. Motion. Meaning.
A rhythm behind the breath.
A stillness shaped by sound.
And in the quiet that follows, I become.
—Noah Blake
With reverence and gratitude to the artists who inspired this reflection:
Jóhann Jóhannsson — The Sun’s Gone Dim and the Sky’s Turned Black
Max Richter — November
Mari Samuelsen — Performance of November
