Baseline Symphonies
Clarity, symphonies and silences, and listening to the music that surrounds us...
There are familiar concepts that we live with and comprehend in a vague way, but that remain indistinct because we haven’t learned a name for them.
And sometimes, we eventually stumble onto a proper name for one of those concepts, and an entire body of understanding opens, a new frame of reference is set, and the world becomes clearer.
I got one of those rare and magical doses of clarity last week when I found the term “baseline symphony” in Orion Magazine1:
The baseline symphony was the music of a landscape at ease—the confluence of insect, bird, and animal song, underscored by wind and water. The dynamics of that symphony shifted as day progressed into night. There were brief caesuras, but it did not fall silent for long except in the case of a disturbance. Silence signaled the onset of weather events, a stalking predator, the encroachment of loggers, or the footfalls of a teenager…
—Lisa Wells, in “The Sound of Silence”
It’s such an elegant and perfectly descriptive term for a thing we experience daily and only rarely notice, that “music of a landscape at ease” (and the silence that signals disturbance). Now I find myself looking at everything from that perspective, both literally as I move through the physical world, and metaphorically as I think about the various baseline symphonies of relationships and ideas and beliefs. I feel newly enlightened.
As with most things, it’s mainly about paying attention.
The very next day (the solstice, no less), Leon sent me a video he shot that morning (another in a long string of happy accidents he’s had a role in). It captures a unique baseline symphony — a beautifully haunting blend of morning lakeside birdsong and the mournful/joyful howling of wolves2 (a “hit of primal stoke” as he later called it).
[Click the image to play the video (and be sure to turn your volume up a bit)…]
It was startling, that unexpected juxtaposition of wolf and songbird and sunny first-day-of-summer (wolves howl into the wind on snowy winter nights, right?).
But baseline symphonies are individual to each particular place, and further, to each particular time of day and time of year and type of weather, in an ever-evolving array. And I suppose they depend on the listener as well (for example, nearly everything I hear is colored by the internal cicada song of tinnitus).
Sometimes the symphony is robust, hard to disturb. Go out in your backyard in the springtime at 6am and shout yourself hoarse — the birds will just keep on singing.
But wander near a pond of exuberant spring peepers, and no matter how slow-and-silent your approach, they’ll sense you and go silent — the baseline disturbed [“it’s quiet… too quiet”]. It’s a protective pause, a collective holding of the breath, a wait-and-see.
But hunker down and wait quietly for just a few minutes, and the symphony resumes at full blast:
Our lives have the same dynamic. We dance to the daily repetitive rhythms of our individual background symphonies, often unaware. But if we’re wise we tune in from time to time and listen, notice the music that surrounds us (that’s what symphonies are for).
And sometimes (if we’re wise, if we’re to survive) we notice disturbance and go silent, use that protective pause, and prepare for the unknown that’s coming next.
I’ve been reading Orion Magazine cover-to-cover since at least 1999, and dreaming of having an essay published there for almost as long. That (or an interview with Terry Gross) is how I’ll know I’ve made it.
These are “The Wolves of Speedwell” that live at the Wolf Sanctuary of PA in Lancaster County