Arvo Pärt wrote this piece because Benjamin Britten died. What he built from that loss is a canon that only knows how to fall. A bell strikes, and strings answer by descending — the same downward step repeated across voices entering at different speeds, so that the line layers over itself like a wave retreating through earlier waves. The motion is simple in concept and almost impossible to hold in the ear: the more voices join, the more the descent becomes a tangle you feel rather than follow. That tangle is the grief. Not dramatic grief, not the grief of someone performing loss, but the grief of someone who has found one true gesture — downward — and trusts it enough to let it run for six and a half minutes without deviation. The scored silences at the start and the long decay at the end are not framing devices; they are the piece admitting that sound itself is insufficient, that the bell will stop ringing, that the only honest ending is the room going quiet on its own. What remains after the last sound is the feeling of having stood inside a slow, layered exhale that never turns upward.