1. Silence
“Did you hear that?”
Ziggy kind of squints at me and tilts her head, putting her right ear a little higher than the left. She concentrates, but there’s nothing she hears that would trigger some action, like the arrival of the mailman or the sound of the electric can opener. After a few years of hyper puppydom (Ziggy was a German Shorthaired Pointer, so puppydom lasts longer for her than for most breeds) she began to listen to human speech more carefully, and her comprehensive vocabulary grew from her name, and ‘over here’ and ‘No!’ to ‘fetch the paper’ and questions about desires, such as going out for a walk, play, find your toy and much more.
Because dogs are so tuned into us, and such observers of us, they are always listening for words they recognize in the midst of all the chatter. Ziggy listened so closely that one had to be careful. A casual mention of ‘beach’ would send carpets flying as she accelerated toward the door. There came a time when a lot of important words were spelled out if she were in hearing distance.
What can you hear at this moment? If you’re in an office, you might be hearing the chatter of other people, the hum of air conditioning, the ring of someone’s cell phone. Maybe there’s music on somewhere.
The one thing you probably aren’t hearing is nothing. As in: silence.
And that’s a challenge if you want to start exploring classical music with your best friend. The roots of classical music go back several centuries, when things were much quieter.
If you lived in a small village in the sixteen hundreds and cocked your head to one side, you might have heard the wind. Or a bird. Or the soft swish of a scythe as someone worked to harvest the wheat. On Sunday, if you lived in a large enough town, you might go to church and hear music. There might be a choir, or if the church was big enough, there might be a pipe organ.
Pipe organs are still some of the most amazing musical instruments on the planet. With tens of thousands of pipes all controlled from a single console, with pipes as long as 32 feet and as short as a tiny pencil, pipe organs are thrilling in their vast stone churches.
Imagine the contrast a few centuries ago between the normal quiet of everyday village life and the overwhelming power of a great organ. Today we are more likely to get out of a car, cross a noisy street with horns blaring, and go into a church for a service or an organ concert. Once noise fades away, our ears settle down for a moment, and the organ begins.
The canvas for classical music is silence. That’s why concert halls work the way they do — they are actually quiet places where music can be easily heard. If we want to hear music in our homes and in our cars, then classical music has a tougher time. If you’re listening to someone play a solo classical guitar, for instance, if they play softly your refrigerator and your furnace are likely to be louder than that soft guitar.
This creates special problems for your dog, with his or her short attention span and sensitivity to loud sounds. If you put on something that starts soft, they won’t hear much of it and their attention will naturally drift away. And then if the music gets loud and exciting, it will probably be too loud and someone not far from you will yell, “Hey, can you turn that down?”
So here’s a thought. If you can close the kitchen door, do it. Run the dishwasher and the washing machine some other time. If you can, for awhile, turn off the furnace or the air conditioning. Then listen for a moment and see what’s still audible. Can you hear an occasional bird outside? If someone is reading not far from you, can you hear the rustle when they turn the page? Then maybe it’s quiet enough to gather some treats and invite your dog to join you on the couch and listen to something. Of course, there will still be jets overhead and sirens in the distance from time to time, but you’ve at least taken a step in the right direction.
I have a completely unproven hunch that only the great musicians understand the power of silence. Beethoven plays great musical jokes against the listener’s expectations, with sudden established beats giving way to totally unexpected silences so that you almost fall forward out of your seat waiting for that next note, but it never comes when you expect it.
In Abbey Road, before the last cut of Here Comes the Sun King, instead of a quiet lead-in groove between cuts on the original record, the soft sounds of crickets establish that ground of silence that music needs to build on. The crickets invite you to listen closely, and your trust is not violated by the loud start of a new song, but by the Beatles almost in a whisper.
What is sound? What is silence? Sound is anything that changes the air pressure in a regular enough way that your ears can hear it. If a thirty foot organ pipe has air running through it, it’s going to make the air pressure change at around twenty times a second. You’ll hear it as a low rumble, and feel the pressure on your stomach or in your chest. The note of A just below the middle C on a piano is 440 cycles per second. A tin whistle might be a few thousand cycles a second, and not too far above that, we can’t hear it, although your dog probably can.
What about noise? A waterfall may have all the different notes we can hear, all happening at once, and that’s called white noise. A tree crashes to the ground. Is there a specific note we can give it? No, probably not, and that’s why you and your dog will just think of it as noise.
It’s hard to say that music and noise are always different, but in general the sounds that we think of as being music are more organized than noise is. Something that has a consistent number of vibrations, like the note of a song or a flute playing, our ears will hear as music.
As soon as a musician organizes noise into something, then we start hearing it as music. The British composer Malcolm Arnold got so used to composing music with a vacuum cleaner going in the background that he eventually wrote a piece which called for a vacuum cleaner to be worked across the stage during his new piece, and for every performance forever after. So the vacuum cleaner, in that instance, changed from being an annoying noise to being part of the music. If your dog likes to chase and bark at the vacuum cleaner, find Arnold’s Grand Grand Overture and put it on. Your friend will have to choose between hearing the machine as a noise or as part of the music. But beware! The piece contains some rifle shots and a floor polisher, so if you’ve been exploring Mozart so far with your dog, this piece might cause feelings of betrayal.
Sometimes at live concerts, members of the audience aren’t aware of how intensely the performers are listening to members of the audience. It goes like this: every hall sounds different from other halls, and even different on different days depending on how many people are present and even depending on the air temperature. When you’re on stage singing for your audience, you will be adjusting your pauses, your loud and soft range, everything, depending on what you hear coming back from the hall itself. For you, the performer, every rustle of a program, every cough, every chair squeak, will be really intense to you, since you’re listening so acutely.
If you have the opportunity to go to a concert, with or without your dog, you’ll notice that the musicians, and if there’s a conductor, they will always take a few seconds before they make any sound to first establish a window of silence. The players will almost start to play, but first they’ll wait. Just to make sure. A conductor will raise her hands, and then not give the first flick that gets things going until she first gets the silence she wants. You may even see times when, if someone is coughing or talking, the conductor will just freeze with hands up, and wait. And wait.
Whether or not you already play piano, I would like to teach you how to play a famous 20th century piano piece by John Cage. The work is simple enough that I promise you that you will able to regale your friends with a masterful performance as soon as tonight.
And I’m not talking chopsticks here, This is a Serious Piece.
The piece is called ‘Four thirty-three.’ And here’s how you perform it. First you approach the piano and announce you are going to perform a piece by John Cage. Next you sit down at the piano and take off your watch and put it on the music stand so you can see the time.
And now comes the most difficult part. You must establish silence or the piece can’t take place. So you say something like, ‘The name of this piece is Four thirty-three, and it takes four minutes and thirty three seconds, and it starts now.”
And then you fold your hands so that you don’t touch the keyboard by accident, and you start listening really intensely. Some people will laugh a little nervously at first, but if you’re serious enough and fortunate, you might get your audience to listen with you. There will be murmurings. There might be noise off somewhere, upstairs, or down the hall or from the kitchen.
And when the four minutes and thirty-three seconds are over, you can unfold your hands, stand and bow, and thank your listeners for being such a great audience.
So what was the purpose of Cage’s piece? Part of it certainly is absurdist in nature, offering the opposite of what we expect will be music. But part of it is to share with the audience two of the fundamental dimensions of music: silence and time. If you have the nerve to perform this piece some day, you will experience how incredibly long four and a half minutes can be. And you’ve probably also experienced how impossible it is to achieve genuine silence.