A Smashed and Splintered Music

by Adam Dalva
The New York Review of Books – NYR Daily

A little boy was snapping broken strings against his cello. The man in front of him produced a rattling noise by frantically inserting and removing his trumpet’s mouthpiece. To their left, an intent woman’s bow-strings dangled like shredded spider webs across the face of her violin. Taken individually, any one of these people would have simply seemed unusual. But together, this orchestra of four hundred amateurs, students, and professionals was forging something unique, a new symphony that was at once significant and ephemeral. Not just in the sense of the eerie, often beautiful sound they produced with their misfit tools, but because the instruments themselves would soon disappear.