Sibelius

It pinched. It smarted. It soothed. The pluck… the slap… the caress. Pizzicato, ricochet, and portamento… each so indescribably, viciously elemental.

She took the roller coaster ride of the messa di voce and reveled in the quick jolt of the martelé. The confusion of the détaché was a miracle in her normal existence of clear cut answers and finite ideals.

And when that tremolo sounded, she found herself poised on the brink of an abyss… its pulsating depths so dark and seductive and perfect and rare that when she hit the ground…

…she was intangibly whole.

In the aftermath, her thighs quivered in fevered delight, her mind cleared of extraneous matter, and her heart sang. Her haphazardly ordered world of deadlines, schedules, and flashes of insight distilled on a perfect cadence of understanding.

Simply put, Hermione Granger had learned that when life became too systematic, there wasn’t anything a good concerto couldn’t solve.

Other wizards might find a magically powered phonograph the amplifier of choice, but she wasn’t so antiquated. She knew that real, powerful tones could only be transmitted by an orchestra on a grand stage, the shell of the performance space reverberating an ocean of sound…

Or, by a top quality cd player.

More often than not, being raised as a Muggle had its benefits. Hermione doubted that most wizards had ever heard of a Bose audio system, much less the benefits of surround sound.

But she had, and in her modest flat in Notting Hill, her carefully constructed Silencing Charms buffered the outside world from the thundering roar of her orchestra.

She loved the way it made her walls shake, the crescendos her own personal form of demolition. She loved the way it eradicated her frustrations of the day, each mountain crumbling down into a molehill that could be easily conquered.

And she loved the way the vibrations of a suspended C sharp could push her to the brink of oblivion, perched on the edge between the most glorious tension and resolution.

She could sit on the overstuffed cushions of her divan and let herself be enraptured by the way the soloist existed within and without that saturated wall of sound. How he could exist in his own personal world and yet breathe in time with the orchestra. This was an opposition of passion and order that she understood all too well. She could sit and, in that moment, understand what it meant to exist there and everywhere at once.

There were times when she almost feared the emotion the three movements evoked within her. Times when the tensions of that otherworldly cadenza were almost too much to bear and she existed only for the recapitulation. When the Adagio gripped her soul and threatened to expose every clandestine tear. And when, in that final Allegro, she rose in a torrent of arpeggios and double-stops and shuddered as the violinist’s bow sang with her secret truths.

Perhaps it was all too much for one Witch to handle.

But she loved the fact that there was still a sort of magic that she couldn’t completely conquer, that she couldn’t completely explain away with Arithmancy and Runes. And in that mystery, she could do what no foolish wand waving had ever achieved.

In music, Hermione Granger could revel in her imperfections.

***

A/N 2: Yes, yes, I am a musician, but not a violinist, so I apologize for any potential misinterpretations. I took from my own musical knowledge for most of this chapter, but all other information I found here: http://cnx.org/content/m13316/latest/