If there is a rapid change in the weather, we can sometimes receive faint radio signals from Poland or Lithuania on the island, once even Finland.1 Out of nowhere these unfamiliar soundscapes will enter the car, evoking worlds I know little about—then we’ll make a turn down the hill, and they’ll be gone.
and I turned off the main road, down one of the gravel paths through the beech forest, so I could slow the car to a walking pace and really listen. Rolling my window down and leaning out, I looked up at the slowly passing trees—they looked otherworldly wrapped in this music. I had never seen them like that before.
How is it possible for music to alter the world like this? It’s like when you take a scene from a horror movie and add funny music and the killer suddenly looks hilarious. Isn’t it strange that that happens? Why can we put certain sounds together that make the trees feel unfamiliar? Music is tones and rhythms in various mathematical relationships to each other—it is almost pure abstraction.2 Why should that move us? It is a realm of patterns largely independent of outside reality, and yet, when Maud closes her eyes, the music leads her somewhere, to some inner landscape.
