Slow music for grief

Most cultures keep an instrument for mourning. The Armenian duduk, played at funerals for fifteen hundred years, sounds like a human voice that has nothing left to say. The Turkish ney was the chosen flute of the Sufi mystic Rumi, who wrote that the reed cries because it has been cut from the reed bed and remembers home. The Celtic harp carries the slow airs the Irish call caoineadh — keening songs. These are not background music. They are companions.

Each recording here is uninterrupted for thirty minutes. There is no narrator, no guided meditation, no attempt to fix anything. The point of this music is not to make grief smaller. It is to make grief a less lonely room to sit in.