Kynan Johns, conductor for the Rutgers Symphony Orchestra, talked on Sunday morning about what Saturday night could have been like and should have been like for Tyler Clementi in the second violin section, fourth stand, in a chair just a little bit to Johns’ left.
Johns talked about the place in Berlioz‘s “Symphonie Fantastique” where Clementi would have gotten a chance to shine in the first college concert of his young life.
“It would have been the third movement,” Johns said. “The second violins have a moment that soars above the music.”
Johns spoke briefly and eloquently to the audience before the concert. Then the music began.
“We didn’t leave an empty chair,” he said. “I felt that would be too distracting, for all of us. On this night, we just chose not to fill Tyler’s chair.”
Johns paused and said, “Then I just asked the others to play stronger.”
Of course Clementi never made it to the Nicholas Music Center, to a piece of music about a gifted artist and what Berlioz described as a “hopeless love.” In the first month of his college life, Clementi is dead as a suicide, a jumper off the George Washington Bridge, not long after a cruel, hideous invasion by his own roommate, after being secretly videotaped during a liaison with another man.
We talk constantly about social networks. This was the dark, flip side of all that, what happens when the whole thing becomes an anti-social network.
There is a tragic irony to the fact that the suicide note that Clementi chose to leave behind was a brief message – “Jumping off the gw bridge sorry” – posted on Facebook. People are supposed to go there to tell as much as possible about their lives. Now Clementi had used it as a bulletin board announcing his own death, at 18.
“It has become a constant thought for me that Tyler came to orchestra rehearsal on the day he chose to end his life,” Kynan Johns said yesterday. “I spoke to him a couple of minutes before beginning rehearsal as he waited to come onstage in the auditorium, violin in hand, with other students. I told him I had confirmed and organized his individual violin lessons and that he could start next week. I can’t remember his reply, but saw nothing in him that indicated the tragic actions he was going to take later that evening.”
Johns talked then about how he had known Clementi for only a few weeks, but how you could see the young man’s talent, and promise, and love for music. How Clementi was the first freshman who ever made it into his orchestra as a nonmusic major. And Johns talked about how he spent as much time on Saturday night looking at the other undergraduates in his orchestra as he did at the place in the second violin section where Tyler Clementi was supposed to be.
“I found myself thinking about young lives that hadn’t been touched by loss,” he said. “Until now.”
And now there is the question about what will constitute proper justice in this case, whether this was a meanspirited prank gone wrong or not. The roommate, Dharun Ravi, has been charged with two counts of invasion of privacy. So has another Rutgers freshman, a young woman named Molly Wei. Both could face up to five years of jail time, more than that if prosecutors decide what happened to Tyler Clementi rises to the standard of a hate crime, because Clementi was gay.
So little is known of either Ravi or Wei, which means their own private lives haven’t yet been invaded the way Ravi invaded Clementi’s.
Just off what we know this really was the Internet version of a home invasion. At the very least Ravi, with help from Wei, seems no better than the creep who cyberstalked ESPN‘s Erin Andrews with a camera fashioned through a hotel peephole.
Tyler Clementi is famous now, a terrible fame the world knows about. Maybe in his dreams he thought he would be famous for his music someday. You go to college, after all, to discover what your life is going to be, not to end it after a month.
Clementi is gone. Ravi and Wei, whatever the law does with them, have altered their own lives forever. Whatever they thought would happen, they will face the tragic consequences of what did happen across the rest of those lives. But they are here and he is not.
“You just hope we can all learn from this,” Kynan Johns, the conductor, said. “Myself included. That we all consider our own actions and how they can affect other people.”
Consider how the malicious use of a laptop in a freshman dorm room can become assault with a deadly weapon. Not a weapon of mass destruction. Just destruction.
