Notes for Sound

Notes for Sound Jodie Dalgleish For my dad 7 Sound is an unusual kind of vibration. It is NOT like the picture often found in popular books of ripples spreading out from a stone thrown in a pond. No, it is not. Air is gas many billions of billions of minute particles, called molecules which are evenly distributed in air. Take a bicycle pump, close the hole by holding a piece of rubber over it, push the plunger in a few centimetres and let go. The plunger comes back. You have compressed the air, pushed molecules closer together, and when you let go they expand back and push the plunger out. 8 We can apply that idea to a sound producer, for example, a drum. We hit the stretched skin and it vibrates; we can see and feel that the skin is vibrating; always vibrating in and out. Sound is always produced by something vibrating. As the skin moves out it pushes on the layer of air molecules immediately in contact with it. Momentarily it compresses that air, but unlike the air in the pump, that air can expand straight away because it is not confined; it compresses the layer of air next to it. 9 And that process of compressing the next and the next layer after layer of air goes on as a continuous event through the air, travelling away from the drumskin. 10 1 It is late afternoon and Cara lets herself walk this street; this street with two offbeat galleries side by side and the second hand bookstore across the road; the galleries with small owner-made prints and drawings lost in window frontage and the second hand bookstore with the caricature of a well read and reclining ferret painted on the glass near its entrance; this street where—so often—she hears a trolley bus, the “clack, di-dum, clack, di-dum, clack” of a trolley bus, as it navigates its overhead lines. Cara remembers telling her father that if there is a heaven, it is a second hand bookstore packed with pre-loved books, posters, CDs, and maybe even sheet music. She said that when people die, their collections might be subsumed, become part of the cloistered interior, the shut up smell of it, the co-operative silence. Now every time she goes into a bookstore she wants something for herself, something that sounds like her. She only has one morning lecture on a Friday, ‘Musical Composition,’ so there is only one exercise book in a shoulder bag that would normally hold more, and she’s been working hard, head down in the library finishing a musical notation assignment since then. She now has a first composition exercise to attend to, but for a few moments, why not see what’s on offer? It is Beethoven, or at least the first few bars of the first movement of his fifteenth string quartet, bringing her into the store, along and past its counter. The ‘fifteenth’ has always struck her as odd, deliberately so. She might call it “humorous,” except for the fact that it is the work of an intensely-browed nineteenth century composer now synonymous with the Romantic mode of listening to music for its depth of emotion. After all, here are the seemingly ponderous notes of the beginning, the could-be-serious introduction of a fugue begun in the bass by a cello, hastily overrun by the first violin, a fast run of semiquavers, four quick notes to each quick beat. It is a single but promising phrase, quickly taken over by the cello and a slightly uncommitted kind of all-strings march. But this rises only to another ponderous interlude, and is taken over, yet again, by the fancy finger-work of the first violin. It’s like a series of false starts that Beethoven, nevertheless, makes the object of his piece; it is his play on the unpredictable and continual process of getting started and moving on. Whenever she hears the first sixty bars—only a minute or so of music making— she wants to bring the violins, viola and cello to a stop and get them to do it over, so she 11 can get a fix on what happened. Perhaps this is why she became a composer, or would- be-composer? So she could get her eye and ear closer to music, take its pulse and find its particular life, make it exist for her, because of her and despite her. “The ‘Arts’ are over there.” He leans on the counter, watching Cara’s distraction, or perhaps indecision. He has seen her look like this, her straight shoulder-length brown hair along the sides of an almost bony face that often looks like it’s part of a puzzle. He’s seen her in lectures. It’s a small class. She hasn’t said much, but when she does there’s a flash of something, as if, each time she speaks, she raises and closes a hatch. She’s damned smart and seems to have to keep checking herself, to make sure she still is. No-one has had to write any music yet—something they now have to do, with their first composition assignment. “There’s music,” he says. Cara turns towards him and listens. She recognizes him: he’s also taking ‘Musical Composition.’ Now she sees and hears him as party to a string quartet. “Yeah, still the first movement. Beethoven’s fifteenth,” she says. He laughs, a generous laugh, a laugh tickled by what she makes of his comment. “No, sorry,” he says, “there’s music, over there, in the ‘Arts.’” Cara looks towards the right-hand corner of the store and its music. “Oh, right.” “Good call though—Beethoven’s fifteenth.” “I recognized it as soon as I came in.” “Opus 132.” “Yeah, in A minor,” she responds while glancing above his head, as if she has just caught sight of the line of the first violin racing towards the end of the movement, fuelling and driven by the chords now struck by it and the other strings. “It’s a CD of string quartets. Someone must have brought it in this morning.” He looks above him to where the sound was seen by Cara. She is waiting for the beginning of the second movement. “It’s Beethoven too, some of it. I mean the music, the sheet music. In the ‘Arts.’” “Oh, right,” she says, making her way to the corner, trailing a finger along the wooden edge of a table laden with autobiographies. She bends over to look at a stack of books, one on top of the other, from the floor to above her knees. They are roughly all the same size, all black and tightly bound in smooth black linen. She picks the top one up, rests her hand on its cover, opens it. It holds a collection of what look like war-time songs for piano and voice, the images of soldiers and various belles decorating the first few sheets. She thinks she belongs to a 12 generation that knows little of war: not “The Great War”’ (why is it called “great”?) and not even the Second World War. She puts the volume on the floor and kneels to get a look at the spines stacked in front of her. She sees a few labelled ‘Beethoven’— two identified as piano sonatas. How many did Beethoven write in all, more than thirty? They can’t all be here. She eases the top- most sonata volume from the stack and is unsurprised when she turns to ‘The Moonlight,’ although she knows this is its popular name, coined by a critic after Beethoven’s death. How many times has she played this first movement of his fourteenth piano sonata over the years? Hardly, if at all, now, but when she was a teenager she had left it sitting on the music stand of the piano for weeks, she had played it so much, too much. It was the low harmony of the opening chords in the left hand, the continual movement of the right hand — 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3, 1-2-3…, and the mellowing effect of the sustain pedal on it all — that first drew her. Then, a little later in the piece, there was the satisfaction of moving those triplets down with left-hand bass notes so low she initially couldn’t even read them, the satisfaction of softly leaning herself into notes rarely sounded with such effect and affection, notes so low she could only rely on the piano to know them. She thinks that whoever had owned these volumes was a pianist. But it is a volume labelled ‘ Concerte ’ that she works towards, taking the overlying volumes onto the floor, making a new stack, revealing it, opening it to find that it contains all of Beethoven’s five piano concertos. Although, she remembers reading somewhere that Beethoven had in fact composed his first concerto when he was fourteen, but without parts for orchestra (at least something was beyond him at the time). And isn’t there an unfinished sixth piano concerto that was completed or ‘realised,’ as the terminology goes, by another composer? Maybe it has even been performed? She and her father would sometimes listen to the slow movement of the fifth piano concerto (coined the “Emperor”) after she left home; it was like unashamedly letting themselves eat white chocolate or drink port after dinner, which is generally when they would listen to it, the two of them in the lounge between two speakers.

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