Requiem for a Friend

by Math Spook

Chapter 1

The saddest passage in all of music is in the andante section of the final movement of Beethoofen’s cello concerto in C minor. The orchestra recedes into the background while I recapitulate the theme of the first movement. They descend chromatically, swelling with misery, and I stretch a long note into a cry of despair. The note is so sad that it is painful.

It was morning, and I was immersed in the allegro first movement. I was scheduled to perform the concerto with the Manehattan Philharmonic in two weeks. They were Equestria’s preeminent orchestra, and my debut with them would be a major step in my career. If it went well, it would establish me as a top orchestral soloist. I would be able to devote all my time to performing, to the music that was my purpose and life.

A sharp knock on the door startled me. I was supposed to have nothing on my schedule for hours. The knocking, rapid and impatient, continued. With a grumble, I got up. It was Rarity.

My roommate Vinyl Scratch had been in the marketplace, headphones on, shuffling her hooves in time to a beat. She stumbled, as if she had tripped on a rock, and caught herself by flinging her hoof to the side. When she tried to raise herself upright, she listed to the opposite side and stumbled again. She swayed to and fro, spinning her head like she was too dizzy to keep it level. Rarity and Rainbow Dash were about to ask her if she was okay when she fell over, slamming her flank hard into the dust. She waggled her hooves in the air as if she wanted to get up but couldn’t find the ground. By the time they lifted her onto Rainbow Dash’s back, she was gulping air like she was drowning, and her lips were turning blue. Rainbow Dash flew her to Ponyville Hospital, and Rarity galloped to me.

We huffed with exhaustion as we charged into the hospital lobby. The pungent antiseptic odor burned our lungs. There wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere, not even in the sickly beams of sunlight that slashed through the corners of the window blinds. The bright interior lights reflected off the plain white walls and waxed linoleum floor, bathing the empty rows of identical seats in lonely, colorless brightness. The front desk was unattended, and its cubicle walls were bare, with neither family pictures nor personal notes tacked to the walls. Rainbow Dash sat in a chair in the corner, hugging her knees to her chest. She was motionless, entombed by the room’s stillness.

“Rainbow Dash? Where’s Vinyl Scratch?” asked Rarity.

Rainbow Dash didn’t look up. Her voice crackled against the oppressive silence. “I had to balance her on my back. She was going to fall off.”

“What’s wrong?” asked Rarity.

Rainbow Dash whimpered, “She would’ve fallen off if I’d gone faster.”

I put my muzzle right up to hers and demanded, “Where is she?” Dash hid her face in her knees.

Redheart appeared next to us, silently manifesting into the empty space. Her nurse’s uniform was crisp, immaculate, and nearly glowing. She waited, calm and unhurried, ears relaxed, until I lifted my head from Dash. Her face was neutral and betrayed no agitation, but her eyes glistened. She said, “I’m so sorry.”

I cried a lot that day. Rarity volunteered to stay with me. She said, “It’s not good to be alone at a time like this.” I thanked her but said no. She was my wardrobe designer but not a friend. I went home and, between sobs, picked up my cello and tried to play. I have been playing since I was big enough to hold an instrument. I have never wanted to do anything else. Music is my greatest comfort and dearest companion. So I kept trying to play, and stopping to sob, and wiping the tears off my cello, and trying to play again.

That afternoon, Applejack came to give me a pie. “Least I can do,” she said. “How’re ya holdin’ up?” I said I was fine. She raised an eyebrow. “Come on now, sugar cube, we both know that ain’t true. Any way I can help?” I thanked her for the pie and said I wanted to be alone for now.

I hadn't eaten since that morning, but I had no interest in the pie. I felt obliged to eat it anyway, but halfway through, I couldn’t stomach any more. I left it in the kitchen and picked up my cello again. But I forgot there were crumbs on my hooves, and they fell into the bow hair, and I got angry at myself for being a slob. Cleaning the crumbs reminded me of why Applejack had brought the pie, and I cried again. My tears fell on the crumbs and mixed with them, turning them soggy and melting them into the rosin on my bow. I was angry at myself for making a mess, and angry at Vinyl for making me make a mess, and angry at myself for being angry at her, and in my anger I cried even harder.

I had met Vinyl at Filliard School of Music. She had entered as a pianist. She could sight read a full score with a dozen staves, make a piano reduction in her head, and play it, all at once. At a school as selective as Filliard, that alone wouldn’t have distinguished her. It was how she played that stood out. Making music came as easily to her as walking on four legs did to everypony else. Her talent was obvious, and if she had been a classical performer like me, I might have felt threatened. But, unusually for Filliard, her passion was popular music. She always had her headphones on. When she walked, her hooves moved in rhythm, and they clopped a little louder on the strong beats. I thought of myself as a guardian of the Equestrian canon and an heiress to hundreds of years of Equestrian musical tradition. I looked down on Vinyl’s music as puerile, and I wanted nothing to do with it. In short, I was a snob.

By the time I was a senior, I had won competitions, had bookings with regional orchestras, and was preparing for a career as a serious solo artist. The great cellist Trotstropovich agreed to take me as a student after I graduated. It was a rare privilege. He lived in Canterlot, but one of my professors said I should consider living in Ponyville. “Getting up the mountain takes a few hours by train. Too long to commute every day, but not bad if it’s occasional,” I was told. “And Vinyl Scratch is from Ponyville. You know her, right?” I nodded and mentally lowered my estimation of Ponyville.

Trotstropovich observed to me that the musical atmosphere in Ponyville wasn’t as rich as Canterlot. “Frankly, you won’t find anypony on your level,” he said. “You won’t find many in Canterlot, either, but they’ll visit sometimes, and you’ll have a better chance of meeting them if you’re there.” He ruminated for a moment, then continued, “You’ll meet them when you travel, though. And ponies in our business travel all the time. Well, until you get to my age, and then it’s only half the time! Anyway, when you’re not traveling, it’s important to be near friends and family.”

Canterlot, I soon learned, was an expensive city to live in. It was too expensive unless I wanted to be a starving artist or share a tiny apartment with three other ponies. I didn’t have any family outside my home city of Trottingham. At Filliard, I had been more interested in my studies than in making friends, so I didn’t know who else in my class might be moving to Canterlot. When I asked around, I found no one. Ponyville seemed to be my least bad option.

Vinyl and I left Filliard on the same train. At the time I thought it was by chance, though now, I think she must have planned it. While I didn’t care for her music, I knew that appearing rude was bad for business, so I tried to make polite conversation, just like every time I had been forced to interact with her over the past four years. Vinyl, however, thought in sounds, not words. If you asked her how her day had been, she replied with a combination of hums, whistles, and tongue clicks. It wasn’t out of rudeness but because that was the best way she knew to express herself. If she used a word, it was less a tool for communication than an instrument in the song she was making for you. Before long, I gave up. I was staring out the window when she managed to ask, “Need a roommate?” Which I did. Ponyville might have been cheap compared to Canterlot or Manehattan, but a budding soloist doesn’t command a high fee.

After Vinyl died, I began having trouble with the Beethoofen cello concerto. It had been in my repertoire since before I went to Filliard, and I had already performed it a dozen times. Yet now, the long sad note in the third movement sounded wrong. I tried it every way I could think of. Louder. Softer. Accented. Not. More vibrato or less. Faster vibrato or slower. Bowed heavier, lighter, faster, slower, near the bridge, near the hoofboard, at the center of the bow, at the frog, at the tip, with all the bow hair, with only some of the bow hair. The note never sounded sad enough. I spent six hours working on four measures and made no progress.

I kept imagining that Vinyl would suddenly walk through the door, as if she had merely been on vacation, and offer to help. The first time she helped me with a difficult passage came a month after we moved in together. I had worked on the allemande from Buck’s sixth cello suite for hours, and I was frustrated. I don’t know how she knew I was frustrated, but when I looked up, she had taken her headphones off and was watching me.

I glared at her. “Can I help you?” She started to sing the phrase I had just been playing. I interrupted, “I’m busy.”

Vinyl wasn’t easily offended. One of her qualities was patience. She sang the phrase again.

This filly, who preferred the trash played at clubs to the songs of the masters, wanted to talk to me about music? I played the start of the phrase. “There. If you’ll excuse me—”

Vinyl shook her head. She sang the phrase a third time and exaggerated it. It was highly rubato, and her pause after the low C was almost a caesura. The trills were soft, and she accented the dissonant G sharp. She motioned for me to play.

If she was going to interrupt me while I worked, then I would have to move out. But she was here now, and the easiest way to get back to my work was to cooperate. I played the notes leading up to the low C.

Vinyl’s tail twitched, and she shook her head again. She sang the first three notes, and I played them. She grimaced.

As we went back and forth, I became intrigued. She was as particular about phrasing as I was. When, at last, I played and she nodded, I said, “But that won’t work. Because then it goes”—and I played the next phrase. Vinyl pursed her lips. By now I had forgotten to be annoyed at her. I said, “I guess I could go like”—and I played the phrase again.

Vinyl sang it more legato, and she punctuated it with little gestures of her hooves to bring out the parallels inside the parts of the phrase.

“Oh, like this?” I played the phrase the way she had sung it. “Then it’d be”—I played both phrases together. “Actually, that’s not bad.” I tried them again. “Not bad at all.” Vinyl broke into a smile.

Around the same time, I realized Trotstropovich had been right. Ponyville had a community orchestra and semi-professional groups like the Pony Tones, but all the professional work was in Canterlot. Besides me and Vinyl, the only other full-time musical performer in Ponyville was the Canterlot Symphony’s second flutist, and he was a pegasus, so he could fly directly instead of riding the train up and down the mountain. Most musicians in Ponyville supported themselves by teaching, like Toe-Tapper, or were enthusiastic amateurs with day jobs, like Fluttershy.

The only advantage I could see to living in Ponyville was Jasmine Leaf’s tea shop. Like nearly everypony from the Griffish Isles, I had been a habitual tea drinker almost from the moment of my birth. Despite my pride in the quality of Trottingham’s tea shops, I had to admit that Jasmine Leaf’s shop was the best I had ever seen. She had started as a retailer, but now her real business was as a wholesaler. The volumes, and so the profits, were higher. She kept the shop mostly because it made a convenient tasting room for potential buyers.

So she told me. I was an ordinary retail consumer, but she was always eager to talk to me. The time she spent with me must have cost her more bits than she made from my purchases. I appreciated and even enjoyed her affability, and I sensed that she wanted to be friends. We were two of the most ambitious mares in Ponyville, both dedicated to our professions and climbing toward their summits. We understood each other even though we didn’t understand the particulars of each others’ businesses. But while I wasn’t opposed to the idea of being friends, I was too dedicated to my craft to sacrifice my time to frivolity. Despite her overtures, I tried to remain no more than an acquaintance and regular customer.

Two months after Vinyl and I moved in together, I had a frustratingly long train ride from Canterlot to Ponyville. My lesson had left my mind full of Debaysy’s cello sonata, and I was itching to pull out my cello, but some kind of mechanical problem delayed the train for a full hour. The wait made me consider a permanent move to Canterlot. I tried to weigh Ponyville’s barren musical environment and the time I was wasting on the train against the money I would waste on a Canterlot apartment and the prospect of having to find a new roommate or three. Vinyl had been a perfectly adequate roommate, so when I made it home, I asked her if she would consider moving. She wouldn’t. I tried reasoning, pleading, and wheedling, and I would have tried badgering, but she ended the conversation by putting her headphones on. Not only did she want to stay in Ponyville, she seemed convinced that, when I came to my senses, I would want to stay in Ponyville, too.

She was right. Most of Equestria’s major train routes met near Canterlot. But Canterlot itself, being on a mountain, was a terrible place for a junction station. Ponyville, on the other hoof, had one of the largest junction stations around. Jasmine Leaf had mentioned that as one of her business advantages, but I didn’t appreciate it until the autumn concert season. I began performing all across Equestria, and I took the train constantly. Living in Ponyville saved me endless hours going up and down the mountain.

My gigs kept me away from Ponyville for days, sometimes even weeks, at a time. One day, after two weeks of back-to-back gigs and a long train ride from Vanhoover, I arrived home and wanted nothing more than to relax. Unpacking took only a few minutes, and then I sat down and took out my cello. Vinyl was playing her keyboard, and, unusually, using her speakers. She must have been deeply focused because she hadn’t noticed me enter. I said, “Excuse me. Could you switch to headphones? Thanks,” and started tuning.

Vinyl looked up, startled. She fumbled with her headphones for a moment, but when she realized I was tuning, she stopped and gave me an A. I gave her a grateful nod, and she held the A while I tuned my A string. When I started to tune my C, G, and D strings, she switched to those notes. Just as I was satisfied with my tuning, she gave a little smirk and played a huge F minor 13th chord: F, A flat, C, E flat, G, B flat, and D. After all the perfect fifths from my open strings, the effect was ghastly, even though the chord contained the very notes I had just been tuning. As I winced, she struck dense multi-octave G major and C major chords, resolving the noise with a perfect authentic cadence. By then, however, I had recovered. I swiped at my open D string, and the fortissimo major second interval was ear-splitting. We both laughed.

Vinyl and I began making jokes like this regularly. Sometimes they were dissonant. Other times they were melodramatic, like a cadence that promised an ending it never delivered. One of Vinyl’s favorite tricks was to transmute a familiar piece of music. Dour funeral marches became polkas, and dignified madrigals turned into bluesy folk songs. One time she turned a children’s song into an operatic aria. I still remember her warbling, “The wheels on the cart, la la la la! Go round and round, la la la la!” When she inserted a cadenza, I laughed so hard I fell out of my chair.

Gradually, our musical pranks turned into games. Sometimes we set each other challenges, like me only being allowed to play pizzicato or her only being allowed to play with her left hoof. Once I dared her to play with her hind hooves, and not even she could do that. But most often, we simply made music together. We traded ideas and chased melodies back and forth. While I had taken composition courses, I had never tried improvising. I had always associated improvisation with jazz, which, while respectable, was not un des beaux arts like my own music. But playing with Vinyl was too much fun for me to turn up my muzzle and trot away. Our notes were as consonant as perfect fifths, and her melodies were counterpoint to this Melody. She was a musical equal, and it was a joy to be around her. Despite my busy gig schedule, I came back to our cozy cottage whenever I could.

A few days after Vinyl’s passing, her parents came to our cottage to sort through her belongings. Her mother, High Fidelity, offered to give me Vinyl’s DJ equipment. But I didn’t know what half of it did, and the other half I had no use for. When I performed in a concert hall, I needed only my cello, my bow, and spare strings. I needed my own sound system only when I played chamber music for rich Canterlot socialites’ garden parties, and Vinyl’s equipment was too sophisticated for that.

Besides, I took those gigs rarely. The same ponies who paid to hear me in a concert hall ignored me when I was supposed to be background music, and that was hard for me to endure. My parents had sometimes joked that I was the “main Melody” because I liked attention so much. I knew I was an exceptional performer, but I wanted to be the best, and I wanted everypony to know I was the best. I wanted my face in the newspaper and to be recognized on the street. So I took garden party gigs only when I had nothing else on my schedule, and I did them only for the money. Some day, I’d do product endorsements, and then the only fancy estate I’d set hoof in would be my own.

Vinyl had the opposite attitude toward gigs. She always had more offers for gigs than she had time for, and she seemed to pick them based on whether she liked her client. For the right pony, she’d spin records for clubs, music festivals, weddings, school dances, and even birthday parties for foals. She should have raised her fee, but how much she was paid hardly seemed to matter to her. Trying to raise her fee might not have mattered, anyway, because she was terrible at negotiating. If she was interested in a gig, she almost ignored what she was offered. I thought she was continually underpaid. I once told her she needed an agent and offered to put her in touch with mine. She made a noise like a lioness having her food stolen by a band of hyenas. It was amazing how she could evoke such precise images with sound.

Vinyl’s gigs as DJ Pon-3 sometimes kept her out late at night. In the early morning hours when she returned, the door hinge usually squeaked a perfect F sharp, though it went out of tune on hot summer or cold winter nights. The sound often woke me even though Vinyl, always considerate, tried to keep quiet. I could always tell it was her from the rhythm in her step. I found her rhythm comforting, and its sound helped me get back to sleep. Once, when I couldn’t distinguish a rhythm, I got up to see what was wrong. She looked and smelled awful. In a rare moment of volubility, she said, “Drunk pegasus puked on me.”

Vinyl’s work as a DJ was her main income, but like me and garden parties, it was really a side gig. Early in her studies at Filliard, she had switched from performance to composition. I thought of her as a composer even though she didn’t like that label. In school, the ponies who had called themselves “composers” were pretentious twits who thought a G was better written as B quadruple flat (true story). Vinyl was a composer because she wrote original music. She could write a passable song in fifteen minutes and a good one in an hour. At times she seemed to generate ideas faster than she could write them down. Her keyboard was next to her computer, and she sat in front of them endlessly, sometimes playing, sometimes arranging. When she was focused, she leaned toward her computer screen, resting her horn on top of it and scrunching her muzzle to let her sunglasses get a hair closer. Her ears twitched in time to her arrangement while she muttered peculiar noises like, “ba wee doo zot,” and, “shoo dum da rupp.” She would have seemed clownish if her face hadn’t looked so serious. But despite all the time she spent composing, as far as I knew she had never tried selling her music. I had no idea what she did with it.

To my surprise, Vinyl’s parents didn’t know she composed. They knew that she rarely performed anymore, a fact they attributed to her quiet introversion. They thought she had given up her musical ambitions entirely and worked as a DJ only to make ends meet. Together, we investigated Vinyl’s computer. I had long believed that some of her time at her keyboard and computer was spent arranging or remixing others’ music in preparation for her gigs. We found no evidence of that. Instead, we found hundreds of original songs. Hundreds! The oldest predated her studies at Filliard, but most of them had been written since we started living together. We were just a few years out of school and she had already written more music than some composers wrote in a lifetime. I knew she could write fast, but I had no idea she had sustained such a pace for so long.

Vinyl’s clumsiness with words was manifest in her song titles. Most were nondescript, like “remix,” or nonsense, like “aaa.” Out of curiosity, we clicked on one named “intense wub wub.” It was a funky dance tune with a driving beat and a catchy melody, the sort of music you would hear at a nightclub, the sort that made you want to get up and start shaking your hooves. She must have played her music at her gigs, I realized. If all her songs were as catchy as this one, then it was no wonder that she always seemed to be in demand. But “intense wub wub” was also sophisticated. It wasn’t a hackneyed four-chord song like so much popular music. The song always seemed to be developing, and no phrase ever felt like it was fully over. The effect made you writhe with anticipation. As it entered the bridge, it became less frenetic but no less taut. It was like being in a cramped room on a hot and stuffy night, entwined in an intimate, sweaty caress with the main dance theme.

I suddenly had the sensation that we were doing something indecent. I had long known there were songs Vinyl didn’t share with me. Sometimes, even though her eyes were covered by her sunglasses, I could see from the slack position of her head that she wasn’t looking at what was in front of her. Her ears, rendered useless by their inability to hear the tune that had seized her, drooped. When she sat down at her keyboard, what erupted from her came without conscious effort and, it seemed to me, constituted a kind of diary entry. Because Vinyl neither performed nor sold these songs (so I had thought), I assumed she wrote them only because she couldn’t stop herself. I had experienced similar compulsions myself, for when I didn’t play my cello, my hooves tingled almost to the point of itching, and, desperate for relief, I would have to lift an imaginary cello and bow in my hooves and begin playing a phantom instrument. I had never wanted to probe Vinyl’s private life, and I knew now that she hadn’t shown me half, maybe not even a tenth, of her output. That music had been hers, to share on her terms, and, for all that she had respected and trusted me, she had chosen not to share it with me. If she hadn’t passed away, I never would have learned about it. I stopped the music. Listening to it without her permission felt like violating her trust. Only in the following silence did I realize I was shaking. I told her parents, “I’m sorry.”

High Fidelity whispered, “What do we do with all of it?”

“I have no idea,” said Ivory Keys.

Comments

[Phoenix Heart 27]

Ok you know what!? This was sad. Sad. Poignant. Grief-filled. But mostly, it was good. I am now invested.

[WubsAndCellos]

omg

[MatTheBook]

Grief is hard.

[Alden MacManx]

11811123
What you said.