The Sound of Music

A little while ago I was listening to “Maine’s Classical Station,” WBACH, while eating my fourteenth meal of the day (for those of you who don’t know, I am cursed with hypoglycemia, which means that practically every time I turn around I am having to eat, to keep my blood sugar up). They were playing a piece that was very familiar to me, though I didn’t catch what it was, and couldn’t remember. But I was sure it had been used as the theme music in some movie I’d seen long ago. I was thinking it was “The High and the Mighty,” but as a check, turned to that resource that those of us with unraveling memories would surely be lost without: the Internet.

It turns out that the movie was “Suicide Squadron,” not “The High and the Mighty” – the latter having its own famous, melancholy whistling theme, which I also remember – and the name of the musical piece I was trying to recall was “Warsaw Concerto.” Which isn’t actually a classical piece at all, having been written for the film, in 1941, by the British composer Richard Addinsell. According to Wikipedia Spike Milligan refers to the music repeatedly in his autobiography as “the bloody awful Warsaw Concerto,” but I find it dramatic, evocative, and obviously memorable, since I remember literally nothing about the film, but am able to recall its theme music with no problem, what must be forty years or more after hearing it.

I have a passion for music, pretty well live my life to it, though there are also times I prefer good old-fashioned silence. And I find music has the power to evoke strong feelings in me, which is surely true for most people (and why is that, one wonders). When I was staying with my sister Ellen in Colorado, after my return from Scotland, I would do my Hated Exercises to a CD of hers that I really liked, and later bought for myself: Shania Twain’s “Up” It is very up, making it the perfect piece for bouncing around to. But there was one track that I would always have to skip; otherwise I would find myself trying to do my final jogging around the house with tears streaming down my face. The track was called “Forever and For Always,” and made me think of my husband, every time I heard it. This was only a year after his death, and hearing lines like “I’m keeping you forever and for always/ We will be together all of our days/ Wanna wake up every morning to your sweet face/ Always”* was more than my emotions could bear.

I believe in an earlier incarnation of these Notes I mentioned posing to myself the question, which would be worse: being blind, or deaf? My opinion remains the same as it was then: life is surely more difficult for the blind, but oh, to never hear music. Or for that matter, to never hear church bells – real bells, not recordings – and know the (rather inexplicable) comfort that sound always brings to me. To never again hear the haunting, melancholy sounds of a whippoorwill at dusk, or lonely loon on the lake at night, or gentle, cooing sounds of a dove as the day is getting underway. Even just undifferentiated birdsong, at anytime. To be able to watch the waves of the sea come in and go out, but not hear that shhh...shhh...shhh sounds it makes, like the breathing of the world.

I am so often bothered by noise – our world is full of it, so much of it unnecessary – but there are also wonderful sounds to be heard, and I’m glad I get to hear them. Sometimes – not often, but sometimes – I am struck forcibly by my luck in this crapshoot called life.

*”Forever and For Always,” written by Shania Twain/R.J. Lange
Universal Music Publishing Group