I Hear Music . . . and Wish I Didn’t : Sound: Music has become a substitute for silence; what can it mean if we hear it constantly?

For Christmas last year I gave my teen-age son my old stereo system--speakers, tape deck and all. I figured I’d soon replace it, but for almost 10 months now, my living room has been a cocoon of silence as I struggle to set aside the staggering sum needed to satisfy my acoustic requirements.

Meanwhile, I have been forced to sample the music of the spheres--that is to say, the stuff out there in the malls, in the dentist offices, on other people’s radios--that we use like chewing gum and Scotch tape to cover the little cracks of silence that accidentally appear from time to time in our soundscape.

I suppose it must be something natural--all that rock and pop and blues and country and Muzak and light classical and environmental mood music--something necessary for the continued functioning of society. Music is all around us, all day long from morning to night, as we move between our sealed chambers--car to lobby to elevator to office to restaurant to bar to bed.

Music has become, chiefly, a substitute for silence, and that is rather interesting. As Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer points out, there is no real way to know the difference between sound and silence if you are born hearing sound and it goes on all your life.

What can music do for us, if we hear it so constantly? Music is, after all--or used to be--a doing kind of thing, not really a language at all. I think Stravinsky was right when he said you can’t express anything with music. We do not say with music, we do not even, really, communicate with one another, as we do in speech.

Much is dumb within us, dumb by definition, dumb forever. Do we even begin to express grief by weeping, or anger by yelling? Some things do not translate into anything, no matter how hard we try. Making noise is a translation--whether into words, or music or just a shout. We get some relief, yes, but the grief, the anger, the joy come out always somewhat flattened.

Music, at its most precise, is a kind of statement of how strange we are, we human beings. We are unnatural by nature. We make up things--angels, poetry, gods, music: There seems to be no reason for so much we do. Why elevate, exaggerate, enlarge, play, dramatize, lie, laugh? We obviously must, because we do.

Music puts us in communication, not with each other, not as a language, but with the Earth and all that encompasses us and brought us forth.

Perhaps, after all, we didn’t quite make it up; it’s us imitating--in voices sometimes harsh and strange--what we thought we heard long ago. At its best, music reminds us of the all-rightness of our unreason. We should probably stop and listen to that, our unreason, now and then.