Kiri had been working on the piece for twenty-two years.
Not continuously. There had been stretches of other work, smaller compositions, teaching, the ordinary interruptions of a life. But the long work had always been there: a weight she returned to, a project she did not discuss with colleagues because discussing it seemed to diminish something she could not name.
It was complete now, except for the final movement.
She had drafted the final movement forty times. She knew what it needed to do: close the long argument the preceding forty-seven minutes of music had built, close it in a way that neither resolved it cheaply nor left it broken. She knew this intellectually. She had written forty drafts that knew it intellectually.
None of them were right.
She had come to understand, in the third decade of the work, that the problem was proximity. She had been inside the piece so long that she could no longer hear it from outside. The final movement needed a perspective she no longer possessed: the perspective of someone who came to the work for the first time, without the accumulated weight of having made it. The piece needed a fresh ear attached to a living hand.
She would not be able to give it that.
She had written the conditions into the manuscript, at the end of the forty-seventh minute where the final movement would eventually begin. They were formal, precise, the way she imagined a will might be written: the final movement must be completed by a composer who has never heard this work performed; who comes to the manuscript without prior knowledge of the composer; who approaches it cold, without research, without preparation beyond reading the score itself.
She had no way to enforce this. She was not dying yet. She had, she estimated, some time remaining.
She had written the conditions anyway, and felt, writing them, something she could only describe as relief.