Music is like a dream. One that I cannot hear.

—Ludwig van Beethoven

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      On February 27, 2022—three days after Russia began its military attack on Ukraine—I took my daughter to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with its euphoric Ode to Joy finale. While we comfortably reclined in Orchestra Hall with its symmetrical façade, deeply raked stage, and luminous domed ceiling—all designed for acoustically full sound and immediate reverberation—on the other side of the world, weeping mothers pulled lifeless children from the rubble of their bombed-out homes.

      I sat in silent anticipation.

      There was a nervous cough in the hall. One of the violinists straightened his sheet music and a flutist turned her head toward the audience, daydreaming. The woman in front of me leaned forward while the man next to her whispered his admiration of the copper timpani drums. My daughter shifted restlessly in her seat; she had too many questions that I could not answer. I placed my hand gently on her knee.

      When the conductor, Riccardo Muti, finally stepped up to the podium and the orchestra settled into position, a wave of silence swept across thousands in the audience at Orchestra Hall. This single point in time was for me what American writer and intellectual Paul Goodman would have defined as “the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul…the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.” When that profound silence ended—the one that swept across the hall as if the earth were still without form in the darkness—Muti raised his hands to commence the beginning of creation. Phillip Huscher of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra describes those first sixteen measures of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as faltering and uncertain—with “no secure sense of key or rhythm”—when music moves from disorder to order, and darkness to light. Sound emerges from silence and is granted life.

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      I was in no mood to listen to beautiful music that afternoon. The moan of air raid sirens on the news—then the vibrating whoosh of incoming missiles, followed by muffled booms—had kept me up at night with fear and uncertainty since the beginning of the Russian attack. Ukrainian mothers were likely telling their children to bite down on sticks—house keys, knitting needles, anything they could find before impact—praying that their eardrums would not burst from the shock waves of exploding bombs.

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      My mother never sang to me as a child. I grew up in a home that was silent except for the unbearable sound—what might be described in music as dissonance or lack of harmony—of my parents fighting. As a small child, I covered my ears when they screamed and yelled, when they slammed kitchen cabinets and stomped their feet. I hid behind my closed door so that I would not hear my mother crying. As a teenager, I listened to sad music with my headphones because it was something that I understood, and because—at least—it was not the sadness of my own life. Now, as an adult, I do not enjoy singing and I still struggle to make a joyful noise. Speaking does not come naturally to me. It is much easier to be silent. I cannot keep time, hold a beat, or identify tempo in music—except for my own runaway thoughts and racing heart.

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