Ask a hundred people to name their favorite piece of music and you are likely to get a different answer from each, from the Beatles to Beethoven, from country to classical, from Amadeus to Zeppelin.
This question came to mind the other night as a much-needed Southern California rainstorm was drumming madly on my rooftop and rat-a-tat-tatting against my bedroom windowpanes. Buddy Rich and Keith Moon never played more magnificently.
Rain is the best lullaby of all, I thought while lying in my warm dry bed, but before drifting asleep I considered the subject further.
Reaching back in time, back to my youth in Ohio, back to humid summer weekends at our family’s modest cabin with a nearby pond and a not-far-away lake, I conjured up another magical melody: the chirping of crickets; joined occasionally by bullfrogs croaking their basso notes a short walk away; and in the distance, much less frequently, the eerie-but-beautiful lonesome howls of coyotes.
Moreover, instead of counting sheep to fall asleep one could count a cricket’s chirps for 15 seconds, add 40 to that number, and arrive at an approximation of the outside temperature in degrees Fahrenheit.
Winter nights, where winters are truly winters, have their own soundtrack for inducing slumber. If you listen closely with eyes shut, I swear you can hear snow falling. Rather, I suppose, one actually hears an absence of noise as the snow muffles out all but the loudest of sounds. All the same, it is a beautiful lullaby indeed for as Mozart noted: “The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.”
Nearly as hushed as snowfall and softer than tap-dancing rain, with a cadence slower and more soothing than a cicada’s summer song, is to fall asleep to the whispered breathing of someone next to you. Here, too, the music is in the silence between notes, between inhalations and exhalations.
And yet, pressed to choose just one song to fall asleep to, I will opt for a percussion performance of waves crashing on the beach. Even in daylight, this is my favorite music, but at nighttime the ocean’s song is tenfold more mesmerizing.
One of the magical properties of music is that it is a time machine. Hearing a specific song can instantly transport us back to where we were – and who we were – when we first heard it and listened to it frequently.
Such was the case for my wife’s recent birthday when our family, all seven of us, rented a beach house in Avila Beach – or “Vanilla Beach,” as three-year granddaughter Maya renamed it. It was a long weekend of paradise.
During the daytime, the cymbal-like crashing waves were largely drowned out by talking and laughing and all other goings on of life. But at night, after the moon rose and “Goodnight Moon” had been read to Maya and we had all likewise gone to bed, the surf raised its volume pleasantly. Again, the music was as much the silence – the sea rising into a gentle swell, rising into a wave, rising into a vibrating crest – between oceanic muffled thunderclaps.
And again I was transported back in time, back to 1972, back to when I was 12 and spent the entire summer at Solimar Beach with my godparents. For a kid from the Midwest who had never before seen an ocean, falling asleep to the Pacific’s pacifying cadence was even better than listening to a rooftop symphony of rain or concert of cicadas and coyotes and bullfrogs.
All these years later, the surf’s song remains my favorite lullaby.
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.
Personalized Signed copies of WOODEN & ME: Life Lessons from My Two-Decade Friendship with the Legendary Coach and Humanitarian to Help “Make Each Day Your Masterpiece” and “Strawberries in Wintertime: Essays on Life, Love, and Laughter” are available at WoodyWoodburn.com