Ask and Answer

A young composer named Wren had written eight bars of melody, and something about it felt lopsided, though she couldn't say why.

"That's because you wrote two asks," said Answer, kindly. "Both your phrases climb up and hang. It's like someone asking you a question, and then, before you can reply — asking you a second question. It never lands. It just keeps hanging." Wren played it again and, sure enough, her tune felt like a staircase with no landing, climbing and climbing into nowhere. It made her a little anxious, honestly, the way an unfinished question does.

"Let me try the second half," Answer said. She took Wren's second phrase and bent its ending downward, curving it home. Suddenly the eight bars balanced — a rising question, a settling reply — and Wren felt the lopsided anxiety smooth right out into something whole.

But Answer was quick to point at her partner. "Don't think I'm the important one," she said. "Without Ask, I'm nothing. I'm an answer to a question nobody posed."

To prove it, she played her settling phrase all by itself, with no question before it — and it was strange and empty, a reply floating in space, a "yes" with no one having asked "will you?" Ask laughed his hanging little laugh. "And without her," he said, "I just dangle forever." He played his climbing phrase alone, and it hung there, open and open and open, until the room squirmed. The point landed for Wren: a musical sentence needs both halves. One opens the thought; the other closes it. A question needs its answer, and an answer needs its question, or neither means much of anything at all.

So Wren rewrote her melody as a real conversation.

Four bars that climbed and asked — the room leaning in — and then four bars that echoed the shape and curved gently home, landing on the note that felt like rest. Ask, then Answer. Question, then reply. The tune that had felt lopsided and anxious now felt balanced and whole, like a sentence that started with a capital letter and ended with a period. Wren played it three more times just to feel the click of the two halves fitting together, that little tumble of open... and closed, and each time the room tipped its head at Ask's question and then nodded, satisfied, at Answer's reply.