I’m so glad I … hear the music.
When I was a kid I was obsessed with Top 40 radio, but I also hoarded my dad’s 78 rpm records and fell in love with Artie Shaw’s “Frenesi” and Benny Goodman’s “Sing Sing Sing” and Raymond Scott’s “Powerhouse.”
My background music as I type this is Anoushka Shankar, and I seem to write most efficiently to Ahmad Jamal, but Bruce Springsteen and the Beatles and Rachael Price and Jason Mraz have been known to accompany my fingers as they tap along … and of course the likes of Beethoven and Bach and Strauss and Copeland.
We have wind chimes hanging outside the window to my office year-round, so I hear music without melody whenever the slightest breeze or the heartiest gale is underway out there.
I am pleased to report I even hear the music in a work like “Revolution 9” by the Beatles, with its rhythms and mighty crescendos.
I think it was Terry Pratchett who had one of his characters say, “Music is everywhere if you know how to listen.” And so it is.
I pity the ones who only hear noise, because there is music everywhere, ready and willing to unite us in peace. Some days I feel like I’m the only one who hears it, but that’s the lie the noisemakers would have us believe.