The melody in us: On the instrument of friendship

Friendship as an act of deliberate, creative resonance

by Carl Manlan and Jonatan Steinig

What the luthier wished

Somewhere in the late nineteenth century, a craftsman bent over a piece of spruce and maple and made a violin. He shaped the f-holes, fitted the soundpost, set the bridge. He did not know, when he was done, that his instrument would outlast two world wars, survive whatever silences, severances, and entanglements those wars imposed on a single European family, and arrive nearly a hundred and forty years later in the hands of a great grandson who never met the man for whom it was first made.

One of us plays that violin

Jonatan’s great-grandfather’s violin was given to him by a wealthy man whose name time has not preserved. Through two world wars it survived untouched. How, exactly, is itself a mystery, the kind that families carry without fully examining. And now I draw the bow across strings that have been waiting, in some sense, for each generation that came after. Unplayed, the wood goes mute. It is the playing that wakes it. The instrument does not merely survive its silences. It needs someone, every generation, willing to break them. The question that stays with me is not about ownership or inheritance in the narrow sense. It is this: What did the luthier wish for it when creating it? What did he hope it would carry? Whose grief, whose joy, whose Wednesday evening after orchestra practice?

When I shared this question, in a WhatsApp message sent from Bonn, after playing Beethoven, my friend received it the way a well-placed note is received by a room: it found the surfaces that would answer it and began to resonate. That resonance is what we are writing toward here.

We want to begin with the luthier because we believe his question is the question underneath every act of genuine making; every poem, every partnership, every friendship that a person enters with care. When we make something and release it, we release it into time we cannot see. The luthier did not know. He bent over his spruce and maple and made his wishes, and then the instrument left his hands.

Our friendship began the way instruments find their players: by being passed through time toward the right person.

The score, its notation, is the same for everyone.

There is a thing that happens when two people from very different formations encounter the same text, the same crisis, the same morning light. The notes are identical. The world is what it is; its injustices, its beauties, its tectonic shifts in funding and power and meaning. A war ends somewhere. A budget is cut. A daughter turns eight and her father holds the memory of the first moment he held her, already knowing this memory will accompany him beyond his life on earth. The score is the same for everyone.

What changes is the playing.

One of us sent Philippians 4:6–7 one morning without preamble. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. The other wrote back a single word: Amen. One of us was in Kenya, beginning a new chapter; the other in Germany, facing the contraction of a world carefully built over many years. Same scripture. Different keys. Both landing on the same note at the end, which is trust.

This is what we mean by the score. The world’s cruelties and gifts do not discriminate by geography. The agricultural crisis that led one of us to Nairobi is connected to the climate pressures reshaping the development landscape in which the other works. The grief processed in a poetry collection; the loss that made breathing itself an act of courage is legible to a man in Bonn who plays a dead man’s violin. Because grief is in the score. So is renewal. So is the love of children, the wisdom of grandmothers, and the strange mercy of God appearing at 4:59 in the morning when you need to tell someone that something you have made has finally been born.

The sforzati are in the score too; those sudden, forceful accents placed where one does not expect them, and precisely for that reason creating their special effect. In classical music, the sforzato cannot be predicted by feel alone; you encounter it in the score and then, when you play it, it surprises even you, surprises the room. Friendship has these moments. The November evening when a flight was boarding for Cape Town. The end of a twenty-one year professional cycle and a message arrived from Germany: a link to a violin piece by Dvořák called “Songs My Mother Taught Me”. Immersed in this piece, the violinist is embraced. Not a simple memory. It is a mother’s warming presence, for as long as the strings resonate. The title of a next book arrived, unbidden, complete. The accent landed where no one had predicted. It opened something.

The grandmother on the bench in Hamburg, born in 1909. That image arrived the same way. She was the unifying force in a family through which wars kept making cracks. Through kindness and grace she kept knitting it back together. The violin made just two decades before she was born: still hearing her beautiful tune, barely grasping what she has been through. When that image was shared, the other received it and wrote back simply: The universality of our grandmothers. Because there was a woman in Abidjan who held that same role. She was gone. The loss was already in the poems. And suddenly two grandmothers: one in Hamburg, one in Abidjan, a continent apart were present in the same conversation, because we had each chosen to bring them there.

The soul’s freedom within the form

A solo violinist does not simply reproduce the score. The written notes remain constant; the interpretation is always new. The difference lies in the dynamics chosen in the moment. The crescendo held a breath longer than marked, the pianissimo that approaches silence without quite reaching it, the slight variation in tempo that makes a phrase feel inevitable rather than metronomic. And when the musician connects the piece with the soul, something unusual occurs: a composition from hundreds of years ago is transported into the present. It lives again. It lives now. Like Beethoven’s little-known Konzertsatz in C major for solo violin: a fragment that breaks off at bar 259, unknown whether it was ever finished or the rest lost, sounding today only because those who came after chose to complete what was left unfinished.

We think of this when we think of what friendship requires.

One of us read “i can breathe” and something moved. Not a review but a meditation arrived in return: on love so deep it runs through the veins, on the vulnerability that real love demands, on how grief without God can become an ending rather than a passage. This was not a repetition of what had been read. It was an interpretation connecting the original notes to a specific interior, a particular faith, an irreplaceable life. The poem became something new. The score was honored and exceeded simultaneously.

The same happened in reverse. Thoughts on the violin were shared: the great-grandfather’s instrument, the mystery of its survival, the question of what the luthier intended and what came back was an essay. The images were received and carried forward. The interpretation moved through both of us.

This is artistic freedom within the form. The commitment is constant to show up, to pay attention, to offer what you genuinely find rather than what you suppose is expected. The sail can be set; the breeze comes from elsewhere. Within that structure, everything is interpretation. You bring the full instrument of yourself. You play the shared score with your particular soul.

We are people formed by different soils. One of us grew up in Abidjan and carries the intellectual inheritance of a pan-African tradition, the grief of parents whose dreams he inhabited before he could inhabit his own, the slow arrival at a destiny that was always there but required time and loss and breath to reach. The other grew up between Hamburg and northern Spain, trained in the disciplines of climate and development, connected to Latin American networks and a 94-year-old friend who still writes about peace as a discipline built through dialogue, tolerance, and respect, not spontaneous but earned. We did not choose to be shaped by these different things. We were given them, the way a grandson is given a violin.

What we chose was to play together. To pass things through a Dvořák link, a scripture passage, a carnival image of sweets thrown to children in winter Bonn, a reader’s message from Instagram: your poems are comforting, they capture the quiet bravery, gentle courage, and resilience it takes to carry on. Each of these passed through the thread between us and became part of a shared score that neither of us wrote alone.

We are still writing it.

That is the nature of the thing. Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 opens with a theme split into two halves: bold and punchy, then soft and singing. The orchestra carries one side; the piano, the other. Neither is complete without what the other brings. When played well, the audience does not hear two separate lines. They hear one movement.

The luthier did not know, when he set down his tools, what the violin would carry. He made his wishes and released it into time. I created this. Who is going to play it? What will become of it?Perhaps that was what he let go with the violin. Nearly a hundred and forty years later, a man in Bonn draws the bow across those strings after orchestra practice, and sends a message to a man in Nairobi, or Rabat, or somewhere above the Atlantic at 4:59 in the morning, and something is passed between them that neither could name precisely but both recognize immediately.

That is what we are trying to write toward. Not the friendship itself lived, not written but the melody underneath it. The thing the luthier wished for when he made something beautiful and let it go.

About the Authors

Carl Manlan writes from the intersections of pan-African development, poetry, and shared memory. He is based in Nairobi, Kenya.

Jonatan Steinig is a climate and development practitioner, violinist, and essayist based in Bonn, Germany.

https://www.surysur.net/la-melodia-en-nosotros-sobre-el-instrumento-de-la-amistad/
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