Some days the city sounds like delicate touches on the piano: Sondheim, a rush of strokes against the chords, pattering like heels on the concrete. The rain hums against the pavement like the double bass, a caress to the commuters who hear it over sharp notes from the flute sections. Cars dart among each other without rest. The percussion section fires up as tempers flare in traffic, the banging of symbols in the face of stop signs. The lights signal a rest. While one section hesitates, the brass blares: horns signalling a staccato beat as lives weave through the melody. Commuters prattle like a chorale society. Their lungs project the worries of the day into a phone, while others tap their own tune, fingers against their legs in time with the rhythm of the city.
Tempo nine to five.
When the sun slides away, the city begins a sweet descent as the birds hum a different melody. Office lights blink like a drum beat against the darkness, as the city grinds to a brief semibreve before tomorrow’s reprise. Trains slink out between the skyscrapers, the clunking of metal carriages drowns out the buzzing city beat as passengers are huddled and pushed homewards.
In townhouses, families sing their own tunes. Children learn the scales from their parents, borrowing phrases passed down through ancestry and infusing the melody with their own accents and dynamics. Teens sing arias, blocking out the noisy generations of the past and making their own mess of jumbled and disjointed scales. Soulmates sing sweet harmonies while other couples fall out of key.
Apartments stacked against each other: different lives are different songs. The bustle of each instrumentation slows as twilight falls, aligned by the shadows cast through windows. Each sonata in the key of the neighbourhood.
With the rising night, a slower song creeps through the wind: an oboe crooning across the black sky, lulling children to sleep. Others lie restless in their sheets, heads full of the city’s humming, drowning out the soothing song of the evening. Meanwhile in the metropol, some have lost their rhythm. Instead they jump to the tempo of the club or stomp their feet to the symphony of cigarettes, spilled drinks and clubgoers – sloshed and screaming in the crowd.
In the early hours there are moments of mezzo, where the birds sing like strings, slipping between the notes of brass and the banging of the drums. The French horns signal the yawns of those who would rather be sleeping in, stretching as their ears are set ablaze with the ringing of alarm clocks. The commuters choir warm their vocals as they stumble from home. Scales in early morning yoga; squabbles between families before school.
The orchestra of metropolis is endless. The clock chimes every hour but the clang of times passed fades into the background of the urban jungle drum. Instead we count our tempo in time with the chorus of our coworkers. We leave behind the hands on our watches and listen to the tempo of the city. The conductor never wavers in their wielding of the baton; there are no beats of silence, no room for breaths. The city churns on as nature sits still. We can hear her sweet crescendo among the bustle of the modern composition.
Sam McDonald