Vijay Iyer

Over the last decade, after experiencing deaths of several loved ones and watching friends and family endure too many transitions, I belatedly came to terms with a basic fact about us: While grief may feel excruciatingly personal, it is also one of those human experiences that will eventually touch everyone we know. It is the difficult truth that unites us.

That said, we cannot ignore how our world visits the most inordinate grief on its most vulnerable. Premature death is so unequally distributed, in such depressingly predictable patterns, that it has become a working definition of racism. We find ourselves pulled helplessly into a cruel daily cycle, forced to bear witness to deadly state violence we want to stop but cannot.

This piece is the first fragment of a larger work-in-progress in collaboration with Carrie Mae Weems and Jennifer Koh, intended to hold space to channel our private and public griefs. This project affirms that there is not one way to grieve — that grief can look and sound all of the ways that love can. The piece comprises a collection of sonic scenes, ceremonies, and conjurings, ranging from tender to severe, fragile to robust, melancholy to celebratory, as an offering of communion across our existential divide of living and dying.

– Vijay Iyer
October 31, 2024