Part heard

I love the activity of sound
John Cage

In that 1991 interview, Cage also quoted Kant: "two things that don't have to mean anything - music and laughter".

I'm staying close to the barn and farmhand's cottage today; it's Sunday and I'm baking bread. There's no-one about and clearly to be heard is the sound of a single aspen leaf oscillating in the coming-and-going breeze from the sea. When the wind freshens a little, I stand under the aspens and they tick like a museum full of clocks. Move a little and the onshore wind brings on the sound of seething water in a pan on the stove. Further off all the aspens together make that noise of a burn running sharply downhill, tumbling across boulders then falling a foot or two.

The maples, Norway maples, Acer platanoides, in the same wind have the sound of surf soughing on the strand.

The first Aeolian harps were not only placed in trees' branches, but must have been inspired by the music of trees in wind. The colours of autumn, or rather the dryness of each tree's leaves colour the sound. These maples are pure fire; the aspens range from butter-gold to green; a shade that brings to mind syboes: tender young spring greens, but in autumn.

There's a red maple leaf: silent, come to rest in falling onto the latch of the gently listing nineteenth century four-seater privy.

I sit on the sun-warmed stone steps of the granary. It's the highest point of Saari, the former island. I'm somewhere between hearing and listening; in fact I'm not sure here, now, how to differentiate between the two states. One is of attention, perhaps; the other of awareness. There's leaf drop as the oak sheds: one, two three, four: drifting down rustling off branches on the way to the floor.
The counterpoint is the drone and zuzz of fast flying insects. The jay chatter: clicks, whirrs; and shriek. The short trills of fleeter lives than mine. Island music, and always the far-off whooping of Canada geese.

Here's a cricket, sunning like me on the steps to the scribble of my pencil, scratching in the quiet. Dragonflies below the threshhold of my hearing, except for a low whirring of the rotor wings of one brown dragon as it settles on my head, who knows in what reverie of its own. The blue-flies' buzz is distant part-heard speech.
The eight sweet notes of a blackbird as rapid as any bat-skreeks and clicks come sudden into the mix.

With ears finely tuned - listening or hearing - could I hear growth and decline, or is that what the hum of the day is?
Could I hear wind whistle through spider webs as it does through a steel wire fence? Could I hear the clicks of communicating woodants?

It all happens when there are no expectations. And this music can never be played twice the same.