A Little Night Music

It took me back nearly 40 years, this wash of chirps, clicks, and hoots surrounding my sister-in-law’s screened porch outside of Chapel Hill. A nighttime symphony cascading through the Carolina pines brought me back to a rickety trailer not far away and the cinderblock stoop upon which I sat nightly.

My trailer was nestled in the woods down a country lane called Manns Chapel Road. I lived there for all four years of graduate school, making an uphill transition from my background as a pianist into the field of musicology. The isolation was perfect. I could rant and rave at any hour about the difficulties of my music bibliography assignments and the raccoons didn’t mind. I could practice at any hour. And I could sit on that stoop and talk to the stars about how my dreams might play out.

Back then, trailers and clapboard houses speckled Manns Chapel Road. And, yes, a few dwellings did have freezers or washing machines on the porches. Today, the road is beautifully paved. The fragrant corner store with its barrels of pickles and blocks of cheese has been replaced by upscale commercial development. The forests are carved into luxury, wooded developments with properties worthy of Architectural Digest. In short, you’d never recognize the neighborhood.

But the bugs, bats, and birds haven’t changed. Hoot owls, crickets, whip-o’-wills, and night sparrows still weave their hypnotic music, creating a soundscape that, once in the ear, is never forgotten. At the time, I didn’t realize how much this night music brought inspiration to my weary mind and blurry eyes. I didn’t realize that these sounds were shaping my soul.

Smell evokes the deepest memories, they say. But sounds unleash a cascade of memories too. The rusted hinges of a childhood pantry door. The creak of a certain bottom step. The whirl of an aged appliance or perk of a coffee pot. These sounds may not inspire symphonies, but they cause a flow of melody inside of our hearts.

Not surprisingly, the aural palette of night creatures has inspired many musical compositions. One of my favorites is a piece from Out of Doors, a suite written in 1926 for piano by Béla Bartók. In the fourth movement, swirls of pitches delicately layered and punctuated by irregular rhythms realistically evoke the tapestry of nighttime sound. Close your eyes, and you will be transported to Bartók’s beloved Hungarian countryside, a place beautifully captured by the painter László Paál.

László-landscape
Paál László, Landscape with Cows (1872)

Bartók wrote Out of Doors while still in Hungary. Unhappily, European chaos caused him to emigrate to the United States (1940). Despite much effort, he could never replicate his success. Everything that worked artistically and personally in Hungary did not work in the New World. His artistic soul was rooted in his native soundscape. His health deteriorated. Little in his new environment brought him peace or joy.

Memories. Why did grownups talk so much about their memories, I wondered as a child. Didn’t they have anything interesting going on their lives now?

tufted-titmouse
Ken Thomas, Tufted Titmouse

How could I understand that memories build columns that nurture us throughout our lives? How could I realize that we can spend a lifetime trying to recapture our sound memories. Amidst his struggles, Bartók did reunite with the aural richness of memory. In the last year of his life while in North Carolina, the sound of a tufted titmouse inspired the slow movement of his final composition, the Third Piano Concerto.

Imagine how deeply this sound touched him. A vital font of memory suddenly poured out once again in music.

Maybe my reminiscences of nocturnal sounds on that screened porch were not so profound, but the experience still captured me. It was a vivid example of the music created by God. It was a gift we all crave: a reminder of where we’ve been, and what we have valued—a soundscape of our hopes and dreams.