Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s song, “The Folks Who Live on the Hill,” contains the lines: “Our verandah will command a view of meadows green, / The sort of view that seems to want to be seen.” The rhyming of “verandah” and “command a” is what jumps out, but I’ve always enjoyed the thought of an exhibitionist vista.
The line came back to me when reading, out of order, Lawrence Kramer’s books, Experiencing Sound: The Sensation of Being (2024) and The Hum of the World: A Philosophy of Listening (2018). As a composer as well as a musicologist, Kramer has long been inclined not just to poke beneath the workings of a piece of music but also to dig about in its putative meanings. In this pair of books he goes further, scrutinising the meanings thrown up by sounds themselves and particularly by the ways in which we perceive them. He is concerned with what he calls the “audiable,” which, he writes, is “the material promise of sound,” the capacity to be audible or, as Oscar Hammerstein II might have put it, “things that seem to want to be heard.”
The impetus for Kramer’s investigations, he tells us in the preface to Experiencing Sound, was his “increasing awareness… that music is made of sound,” an obvious fact, as the author is the first to admit, but one that is often overlooked. In The Hum of the World, he quotes Annie Dillard:
At a certain point you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there… You feel the world’s word as a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: the hum is silence.
“What Dillard hears,” Kramer says, “is that silence is not the absence of sound. It is the sound one cannot yet hear… the near-sound of life in motion.”
The Dillard quote is taken from her book Teaching a Stone to Talk. In Greek mythology, Orpheus, the first composer, makes such compelling music that stones move nearer to listen and weep at its power. Music, for Kramer, is a “recording device” for the audiable, “in which auditory knowledge and feeling become storable and retrievable.”
Take the opening of Beethoven’s Symphony No 3: a short chord, played twice — bam, bam — followed by a simple, winding scrap of tune. In Kramer’s account: “‘This is sound,’ [the chords] seem to say, ‘not quite yet music. Consider where it comes from and what it can show. For example, this…’”
Or take the opening of the ninth symphony, a “world’s hum” if ever there was one. Ten bars of trembling Ur-music, Beethoven’s symphony emerging from what Kramer calls its own “origin myth.” The abrupt conclusion, in which a sudden crescendo gathers up the whole orchestra, is shocking, especially, as Kramer underlines, coming after only ten bars; it is also a premonition of the yet more violent dismissal, at the beginning of the final movement, of all that has gone before (a musical gesture so unprecedentedly violent that an equally unprecedented baritone voice steps forward to condemn it: “Nicht diese Töne” — “Not these sounds.”)
Thomas Tallis’s forty-part motet, Spem in alium, composed in London around 1570, is an early example of a composer revelling in sound — a wall of sound, you might say — as much as in the musical devices that make it up. It is composed for eight five-part choirs, and begins with the sound of a single soprano, the sonic immanence implied by the presence of the other thirty-nine singers a nice symbol of “the sound one cannot yet hear.”
These days, the piece tends to be performed by singers stretched out in a big semi-circle, but there’s a theory it was originally sung in a complete circle. Taking her cue from this, the Canadian artist Janet Cardiff made an installation consisting of a circle of forty head-high loudspeakers, each relaying one of Tallis’s voices. The visitor is encouraged to roam around the circle, standing next to one speaker and therefore opposite another, experiencing Tallis’s music more as sound and less as grand construction: to some extent deconstructing the piece, in fact.
Each of Kramer’s books is full of examples of this sort, encouraging the reader to rethink the sound of music and the music of sound. They’re relatively slim volumes, yet each is made up of sixty-odd chapters. They invite dipping and the dipper won’t be disappointed, but there are throughlines that will best be discovered by reading sequentially.
One of the most frequent recurrences in both books is the Aeolian harp, an instrument that plays itself when its strings are activated by a breeze. It is the perfect metaphor for the audiable, because it is as much the promise of sound as sound itself. •
