At the chink: a reflection on music
I see a voice: now will I to the chink, To spy an I can hear my Thisbe’s face. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act v Scene i).
One of the most painful consequences of losing my hearing was no longer being able to listen to and so to experience music; one of my greatest regrets is that I had not been taught to read a musical score and ‘hear’ it in my mind, as I can still hear words spoken when I read them. Most of the music I am able to recall is, therefore, vocal, nearly all of it associated with hymns whose words and music are so lamentable I would, I think, almost rather have forgotten them! For the rest, I can still remember what it felt like to listen to, say, Bach’s double violin concerti, but I cannot recall the music itself.
When I first became deaf, and for years afterwards, I could not bear to be in the same room as anyone singing, playing or listening to music. Gradually, I can’t say how quickly, I think it was very slowly and over many years, I have begun once again to experience music, even, occasionally, to ‘compose’ – or is it just unwittingly to recall? – melodies, sometimes even long pieces of instrumental and orchestral music, ‘in my head’, something I don’t remember doing when I could ‘really’ hear. However, it is not the occasional ‘composing’, but ‘seeing’ and experiencing music that is important to me now.
So far as I can pinpoint, any possible beginning of this renewed ‘musical’ experience was through my participation in Quaker Meetings, which can reach such an intensity of gathered stillness and silence that it is as if, paradoxically, we are united in a choral dance.
Outside Quaker Meetings, I don’t think I experienced music again until I went to Italy and found, walking through the ducal palace in Urbino, that standing on the Riva degli Schiavoni in Venice felt like being at a performance of a magnificent orchestral chorale.
Afterwards, as I pondered these wonderful – they really were wonderful – experiences, I remembered that Renaissance architects, consciously and deliberately, designed their buildings’ mathematical relationships to resonate with what they thought of as the fundamental mathematical relationships of the universe, expressed in ‘the music of the spheres’ to which all creation ‘dances.’
I had always found these attractive ideas, but they were not ones that I felt most modern people would take seriously, quite apart from the fact that, being no mathematician, I didn’t (and don’t) really understand the maths involved or the relationships that exist between mathematics and music. Nonetheless, and no matter how weird the theory may (or may not) seem, the experience was, for me, overwhelming.
Gradually, in the same way as, if I watch carefully, I ‘hear’ people who speak to me, I also began to ‘hear’ singers, even those singing something completely unfamiliar. To a much lesser extent, I occasionally ‘hear’ instrumental music, in this way, too. Now I am able to enjoy watching TV programmes of instrumental, and most particularly vocal, music, not only because I ‘hear’ the performance in my mind, but because I have come to appreciate the way good performers are so completely absorbed in what they are playing or singing that their faces and bodies express the music, that ‘bright mosaic of the air’.
So, I have been led from ‘seeing’ musical voices to ‘hearing’ the music in faces. Such experiences are very difficult to articulate.
