It was hard to believe that Hound Tor was a natural
formation. This pile of granite, inspiration for my favorite Sherlock Holmes
novel, looked as if a giant had used boulders as toy blocks. I looked out over
the moor, straining my eyes trying to see through the fog. The hills looked exactly as Conan Doyle described them, “russet and olive slopes”
torn by wind. Amazing that the landscape still looked the same over a century later.
As I walked back down the hill, towards the little stream at its base, I heard
the breeze sweep between the stones, moaning like a lonesome dog. I sped up my
pace a little, only half-jokingly remembering that the Hound of the
Baskervilles lived around here.
Dartmoor National Park felt ancient in other ways, too. My parents and I braved the
twisting, sheep-dotted roads and visited three of the many towns scattered
around the park. All three – Widecombe-in-the-Moor, Bovey Tracey, and
Moretonhampstead – would’ve fit comfortably inside a small Atlanta
neighborhood. Their houses and shops clung to the moor’s greener parts,
determined to hang on in the wilderness. They were the kind of towns where
churches were still the tallest buildings. Many of these churches were
ridiculously old, dating from as far back as the 1100s.
Dartmoor had some of the most fantastic views in England!
The church in Moretonhampstead was
my favorite. Its tiny stained-glass windows and moss-covered headstones looked
out on a play park and smooth green hills. Above, an invisible line seemed to
separate the inhabited land and the deserted moorland. The top of the
olive-colored hill was literally purple with wildflowers. Tearing my eyes away
from this color explosion, I looked at the church for a moment. So many
important events had happened here: christenings, marriages, deaths. Lives had
begun, ended, and been forever changed here, for centuries. The very air seemed
to tingle with history.
I
followed my dad through the churchyard gate. The only other sound in the little
graveyard was the whispering of the wind.
The Tube doors opened quietly, their swish accompanied by
the usual reminder to mind the gap. As my parents and I stepped off, a second
train rattled past, briefly raising my hair with its wind. The silence on the train
swiftly became a low hum of sound as we joined the crowd on the platform. I had
forgotten just how huge the King’s Cross/St. Pancras Tube station was. Six
different Tube lines converged here, underneath two of London’s major railway
stations. The rabbit warren of tunnels seemed to twist endlessly into the
earth.
Mind the gap!
Appropriately, all kinds of people
bustled through the rabbit warren. A bewildered-looking group of tourists
consulted a wall map and argued in French, as a second group searched
frantically for a Tube worker. Meanwhile, the rest of London swarmed past,
apparently having memorized the entire Tube map. Students going home from
school, nannies pushing sleeping babies, and neatly dressed men and women
returning from work zipped around in every direction. Just around the turn in
the tunnel, I heard a violin playing and the chink of coins falling into a case.
Bastille station, Paris
Four
days later, I scrambled onto another underground train. The Paris metro, like London’s Tube, seemed to
cart people of every imaginable description across the city. Students,
construction workers, and tourists elbowed their way into cars, the rattling of
the trains and softly spoken French providing sonic background. I watched the
stations zoom past, mentally pronouncing the names as best I could. Music even
echoed from the twisting tunnels, just as it did in London. Entering the Louvre
station, a merry jazz tune on a saxophone echoed up from the depths (check out
all these sounds in the video below).
The older Tube stations, like Baker Street, are quite stunning.
Every
time I set foot in the Tube or the metro,
I was always amazed at the variety of people. In cities where it’s difficult to
own a car, the subway becomes the street. It is the place where everyone, no
matter who they are or where they come from, shares the same goal: getting
somewhere. For this reason, if I were looking for good cross-section of
humanity, I would need to look no further than a subway system.
My mom and I walked out of the National Gallery, blinking in
amazement at the crowd. In the short amount of time we’d been in the museum,
the foot traffic in Trafalgar Square had grown by about a million percent.
Tourists from every time zone bustled past, Big Ben keychains already dangling
from backpack zippers, cameras at the ready. Children scrambled underfoot,
chasing pigeons and climbing on the lions at the foot of Nelson’s Column.
Street performers dressed as Darth Vader and Yoda posed for photographs, and on
opposite sides of the square, two guitarists serenaded the crowd at once. Some
might have called it a sensory overload, but I found the energy stimulating.
St. Martin in the Fields
I
excused myself from my mom, darting up the National Gallery steps for a
photograph. At the top of the stairs, I struggled to fit the whole of Trafalgar
Square into my phone camera frame and took about ten shots, planning to pick
the best one later. Nelson’s head was cut off in all of them, but what mattered
to me was capturing the way the square felt. I hoped to somehow freeze this
moment in time, but keep it feeling as alive as I could.
Lowering
the phone, I looked out over Trafalgar Square. From up here, I could faintly
hear the fountain rushing and murmurs from the crowd. Red buses, black
taxicabs, and a couple of police cars rolled past in every direction, adding
their horns and sirens to the din of the tourists and locals. Then, over it
all, I heard bells ringing. Smiling, I glanced over at St. Martin in the Fields,
the little white church to my left.
A thought tugged at my sleeve,
commentary on the wonderful madness: When
a man is tired of London, he is tired of life. This was life indeed, and I
was thrilled beyond all expression to be a part of it. Laughter, the kind born
out of mind-boggling happiness, accompanied me back down the National Gallery
steps. I was only a bit surprised when I realized it was my own.
I am a self-professed Anglophile. England has fascinated me
for so long, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to live there. But it
was England’s music – its sounds – that cemented my connection with the
country. As a musician, how a place sounds is just as important to me as its
customs and appearance. So it seemed only natural when sound shaped both of my
journeys to England. This May’s trip even began with a song: as I caught my
first glimpse of England from our plane, I listened to Peter Gabriel’s
“Solsbury Hill.”
It
was originally my dad’s idea to record sounds during our trip. From London to
Paris to Liverpool, we captured sounds of ordinary life. We came home with over
twenty recordings, seemingly of random moments: gentle reminders to “mind the
gap” on London’s Underground; the crowd singing a Beatles song in Liverpool’s
Cavern Club; the creak of a churchyard gate in Dartmoor National Park. But,
listening to those recordings, I realized that they were reminders of how
England felt, not just of how it looked. The sounds we captured preserved
details that I would have forgotten without the recordings.
My
love for England is intimately connected with music and sound. So the sounds of
its everyday life, with a cameo or two from Paris, are the focus of this blog.
It is a musician’s celebration of the beautiful land I hope to someday call
home.
