Writing What He Cannot Hear
内なる耳だけを頼りに作曲を続ける。想像上の響きを刻む孤独と創造の逆説。
In the months that followed, Reyner learned to compose in a growing quietness.
The world thinned around him, sound by sound, until whole registers had slipped away.
Birdsong went first, then the higher voices of women, then the fine edges of the violins.
Yet inside his skull the music was as loud and exact as it had ever been.
He discovered that he did not truly need his ears to know how a would sound.
Thirty years of listening had built an orchestra within him, complete in every section.
He could summon the dark warmth of the cellos or the silver of a distant flute at will.
Composing, he realised, had never happened in the air; it had always happened in the mind.
The performance was only an echo of something already finished in the silence of thought.
He sat for hours at his desk, the pen moving, his lips faintly shaping the melodies.
To a visitor he would have looked like a man listening to nothing at all.
In truth he was listening to more than any hall could hold, an ocean of imagined sound.
There was a cruel at the centre of this new and lonely method of work.
The deafer he grew, the more clearly he seemed to hear the music that mattered most.
Freed from the accidents of real players, the sound in his head was and pure.
No reed cracked, no horn faltered, no string slipped a hair beneath its proper .
He was painting sound the way a blind man might paint the memory of the sea.
Each note was placed by knowledge and feeling rather than by the confirmation of the ear.
Sometimes the loneliness of it pressed on him like a hand laid over his mouth.
There was no one who could enter the concert hall inside his skull and sit beside him.
The music he loved most was music that, for now, only he would ever hear.
He wrote faster, filling page after page with the tall black forests of his .
The fourth movement began at last to take shape, and strange and unlike his earlier work.
It was music built not to please the ear but to answer the silence closing around him.
On the worst days he doubted whether any of it corresponded to real, hearable sound.
On the best days he knew, with a deeper than hearing, that it was true.
And the silence, which he had feared as an enemy, began to feel like a strange .