theconversation.com · 2 hours ago

I Composed Music About Infertility and Pregnancy loss, Then Performed It in a Pittsburgh Hospital

When composer Katherine Pukinskis arranged for a Steinway piano to be delivered to a working hospital, she was doing something both practical and quietly radical: insisting that grief too often carried in private deserves a public room. Her 60-minute work, "One in Four, One in Eight," takes its title from two statistics - one in four known pregnancies ends in loss, one in eight women needs medical help to conceive - and transforms them into four movements of music, dance, narration, and visual art, performed in the very institution where so much of this experience unfolds. The piece holds together what is usually kept apart: the clinical and the emotional, the data and the body that lives inside it. "To be fortified is to be made stronger," Pukinskis writes, and the final movement earns that word honestly, without offering resolution so much as acknowledgment - of cost, of persistence, of what remains. That the concerts were free, that childcare was provided, that community organizations gathered in the lobby afterward, speaks to something the music itself enacts: that bearing witness to hidden suffering is not a private act, but a form of care.