![]() Not long before her hemorrhage, Clemency had made a passionate case for a daily dose of music as “a form of sonic soul maintenance” in her book Year of Wonder: Classical Music to Enjoy Day by Day ( public library) - the music counterpart to Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom and poet Ross Gay’s yearlong journal of delights. I found myself wondering what the world might look like if we spoke to each other that way, our words tender with our mortal fragility, resolute with reverence for the aliveness in us and in each other, this grand shared mystery. Eventually, we spoke - Clemency still in her hospital bed, skull bandaged and face radiant with life, each word a triumph, as deliberate and precise as a Bach note. Slowly, slowly, the words started forming again out of the primeval matter of the mind. Multiple surgeries and weeks of rehabilitation began restoring Clemency’s comprehension and sight, but the right side of her body remained paralyzed and her speech voided. Clemency Burton Hill (Portrait: Matthew Septimus / WNYC) She survived, but was left unable to see, move, or speak. ![]() She was thirty-nine, her children one and five. One midwinter day shortly before the pandemic paralyzed the world, Clemency Burton-Hill - an underground London garage DJ turned BBC host turned creative director of America’s oldest public radio station for classical music, and a lifelong lover of Bach - suffered a catastrophic hemorrhage in her left frontal lobe. “Sound is sea: pattern lapping pattern… Matter delights in music, and became Bach,” the poet Ronald Johnson wrote as he contemplated matter, music, and the mind.Ī generation after him, a young woman discovered that when the mind is suddenly unmattered, Bach remains.
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