Music
IF YOU ASK PEOPLE what they miss when they lose their hearing they’ll usually mention specific voices or songs. And then after that, they’ll almost invariably talk about birdsong. It doesn’t seem to matter how much they actually know about birds or how connected they feel to nature. They could be lifelong twitchers or they might have difficulty telling a pigeon from a pterodactyl, but what they mind is the absence of that loveliest, most inconsequential of sounds.
Between birds, every note presumably carries as much meaning as words do among humans, but because we can’t understand that meaning, all we can hear is the whole. It’s entirely possible that all we’re really listening to is the avian equivalent of ‘did you take the bins out?’, but it doesn’t matter – all that really matters is its existence. For them, it’s a biological imperative, but to us it just sounds like pure, naked joy.
Similarly, it’s not necessarily the full symphonic splendour of a dawn chorus in the country that people need most, but urban birdsong. During daylight hours the magpies and parakeets are there as reminders that there’s more to a city than just humans, but after dark on a January night blackbirds enchant with their lonely solos from satellite dishes and power lines, from the tops of shop signs and the ends of cranes. That’s what we need, and that’s what we miss – not just voices we understand, but all those high-up reminders of sound’s unsayable loveliness.
ABOUT SIX WEEKS after getting back from the second operation I had gone with an old friend to a concert. Miranda had somehow got returns to see the Berlin Philharmonic under Sir Simon Rattle. The Berlin Phil are famous for their creamy sound and their many-splendoured reinterpretetations of the classics, and although they may be too rich (in all senses) for many people, the chance to see them is not the sort of thing you turn down. I can’t remember what was on the programme – Haydn? Schubert? – but it wasn’t music I knew. The right eardrum was still half healed and I shouldn’t really have gone, but I’d taken my old hearing aids to wear as earplugs just in case.
We shuffled programmes and leaned over the seat-rests for a quick catch-up. Lights down. The well-trained hush of the audience. Then a clatter of applause as Rattle walked towards the conductor’s podium. He stood, faced the orchestra, raised his baton …
And then something happened.
Until that moment, my experience of the world had been scanned through a digital filter. For the past twelve years, everything had been met at the door and given a quick electronic frisking before being sent on its way to my brain. Every sound, every note, every word had first had to get past the little plastic gatekeepers I kept in my ears. But on that February evening when the first notes rushed towards me, instead of meeting the usual wall of electronic resistance, they met nothing. Nothing except openness. And, meeting nothing, the music broke straight through. At this time and in this place, it filled me from tip to brim. It swept in through my senses and danced in my brain, smashed open my heart and blew the bloody doors off my lovely, precious, astounding hearing. I sat there, sound-blasted, while a few bars of Schubert changed everything.
The music poured in, a great shining river, pounding like a waterfall over every atom in every corner of my being. And as it swept through I could feel, genuinely feel, neurons and synapses sunk for years into darkness snap back into life. It was as if someone had walked in to my engine room, found the internal fuse box and with one great downward slam of their hand had thrown both switches – Bang!! Bang!! – and now every light in the place blazed out again. I walked into that concert hall monochrome, and I left it in colour.
It was the first true music I’d heard in more than a decade, and I promise you, I absolutely promise, that if you should ever have cause to question the power of sound or its capacity to reset the very cells of you, then try going deaf and then getting your hearing back after twelve years. Science had given me back my hearing, and now music had returned me to life. It blew everything, transcended everything. It’s astounding. It was a thousand volts of birdsong, a blackbird translated.
All I had known during all the time that I was deaf was that there was something missing, something I couldn’t put my finger on. Whatever that thing was, it wasn’t just connected to the straightforward mechanical facts, it was something invisible, something that slipped in unnoticed alongside a tone of voice or a harmony, something which took sound from being a mono or stereo process to a multidimensional comprehending. I’m struggling to explain it now, so there was no way I could have taxonomised it at the time. I couldn’t have said, look, I know I can hear the notes all right, but the song seems to be missing. But at that moment, in that place, with an old concerto I’d never listened to before or since, I understood. Music is as powerful as it gets. It is love, made liquid.
I think maybe the whole thing was almost worth it just for that single experience. Almost.