A little bird tweeting merrily away at the crack of dawn woke me up the other morning. In midtown Manhattan. That never happens. The morning is usually signaled by the slowly rising volume of the city itself waking up, the always-there hum building with the morning rush, punctuated by garbage trucks and unnecessarily-honking construction vehicles.

But these are unusual times. New York City is in the middle of its COVID-19 lockdown. Businesses are shuttered, most construction sites are quiet, and the streets are fairly empty. 

The sonic masterwork that is NYC is performed by one hell of an ensemble. In musical terms, it’s a giant orchestra with choir and a variety of soloists, and its musicians hail from all genres: rock, classical, jazz, Broadway, rap, Latin, hip-hop, and on and on — you name it, it’s in there. But since the lockdown, it’s no surprise the city’s sound has been different.

Perhaps the coronavirus is forcing us to have an extended performance of John Cage’s 4’33”, the groundbreaking 1952 work that epitomized his every-sound-can-be-music philosophy. Cage lived in a loft on Sixth Avenue and 18^th Street, and he enthusiastically spoke, on numerous occasions, about listening to and enjoying the sound of the traffic below.

Fascinatingly, decades before 4’33”, a very young, political (but no less philosophical) Cage wrote in his prizewinning 1927 speech, “Other People Think”:

“One of the greatest blessings that the United States could receive in the near future would be to have her industries halted, her business discontinued, her people speechless, a great pause in her world of affairs created, and finally to have everything stopped that runs, until everyone should hear the last wheel go around and the last echo fade away … then, in that moment of complete intermission, of undisturbed calm, would be the most conducive to the birth of a Pan-American Conscience … For we should be hushed and silent, and we should have the opportunity to learn what other people think.”

Almost a century later, here we are. And indeed, there’s a lot to think about right now, on so many levels.

I’ve been taking some of this time to listen anew, experiencing the sonic composition of a paused city. Rather than the usual onslaught of everything you can possibly imagine, ebbing and flowing depending on the time of day and the day of the week, in the relative quiet its myriad musicians are standing out as individuals. Hearing it now, slowed to a relative calm, it speaks volumes about what comprises the whole.

Usually, in my part of Manhattan, very present are the stereotypical players everyone thinks of when envisioning NYC: traffic and honking horns, people talking and laughing and swearing on the street, music and chatter spilling from restaurants and bars and apartment windows, street performers and boombox-wielding cyclists, jackhammers and construction, sirens and helicopters, and so much more.

But on my recent walks, the breakdown of the list of players has become clearer. The quieter sounds that lend their voices to the whole are surprisingly audible now: water rushing through the storm drains, garbage bags rustling in the breeze, exhaust systems churning, pigeons’ wings flapping in the middle of Times Square, the clicking of cyclists’ wheels, the flapping of flags, the rustling of the leaves, the sound of the rain.

And the birds. They seem to be the thing everyone’s talking about. To me, it sounds as if one morning, not long after the humans were asked to stay home, the city’s winged residents rushed to Twitter to tell all of their suburban and rural friends to join them here for a more peaceful take on a Hitchcock film. But really, they were here the whole time. As those other sounds have been — I’ve heard some of them before, deep in Central Park and on my early morning walks around town, especially on Sundays, when the city is especially quiet.

David Bowie used to love to go for early morning walks, and in a September 2003 New York Magazine essay, he wrote of the change in the city as it woke up: “The signature of the city changes shape and is fleshed out as more and more people commit to the street. A magical transfer of power from the architectural to the human.”

Bowie’s point about the power of the architecture is on full sonic display right now. Walking through midtown, you can hear the music of the buildings themselves: the HVAC units churning away, mysterious high-pitched tones, lights buzzing with electricity. Below the streets, the subway still rumbles, but now you can also hear the infrastructure itself: the rushing of the water through the drainpipes and the quiet bubbling of the steam pipes. I’ve even noticed, in the middle of the night, that my building has its own voice, too.

And Bowie’s also right about the transfer of power to people. Normally, as more and more humans emerge and go about their daily routines, the song of the city changes. That subtle architectural background serves as an accompaniment to everything we add to it. But right now, that soft, sonic underpinning is having its moment in the spotlight.

Ultimately, this quiet, introspective time of listening has made me realize that the sound of NYC is, for the most part, humanity. All of the things we are, do, and create. Our good sides and the bad — everything is there. Maybe that’s why, when we all lean out our windows at 7 pm every night to cheer for those who are risking their lives to get us through this incredibly difficult time, I feel a little bit better. The people are back, sounding over the architecture for two minutes, reminding each other that we’re here and in it together. NYC will get through this.

The song of New York City is us. And I can’t wait until we can all get back to making some great music together. Though, this cleaner air makes me think … wouldn’t it be nice if, as we head into whatever the new normal will be when this is over, that music could be a little healthier? Perhaps a little less honking traffic so we can give the birds and the bubbling storm drains a little more room to sing?

Via