If a downbeat falls on a rest in the forest, does anyone hear it?

First my review of The Music Shop, a novel by Rachel Joyce:

This was a fun book to read, very quick and lively -- if you find thinking about music to be lively, which I do. I was completely taken in by the charm of the self-proclaimed "community" of characters who own shops (tattoo, fallen high-church kitsch, a funeral parlor) in a sort of rundown, industrial-revolution-era-version-of-a-minimall (as near as I can figure) in a British city with docks that smells of cheese and onion (important detail). Among them is a wounded (psychically) fellow who runs a record shop (vinyl ONLY before vinyl ONLY was cool) who has an uncanny gift for picking exactly the music that anyone needs to listen to. When along comes one day a mysterious young woman with green gloves (important detail) who stands out front of his shop and passes out. In reviving her, the record shop owner is smitten but at the same time being psychically wounded he cannot allow himself to get close -- psychically -- to her, but she returns and hits him in his weak spot by asking him to teach her what he knows about music.

By the way, did I say this was a romance? So of course things don't work out! I mean, not yet.

I was completely charmed by it in the way one is when one knows people who get married and one wants things to work out especially after an actual wedding, with the book having the tremendous advantage of enabling one to find out very speedily if that does in fact happen. I sped through this book in only a day and a half! Magical realism indeed!

Or maybe just magic without the realism? Wherein perhaps lies the charm! Whatever. That is all mechanics I'm sure, and we're all susceptible, particularly "Americans" (psychically) suffering through a presidentially-imposed episode of "greatness." If only things would smell like cheese and onions, and tattoo artists and lapsed priests and handholding-brother-morticians provide us with universal health care and a sense of community!

Not to mention a saintly music shrink, someone who has listening booths in his shop where people can come in and listen to VINYL as long as they want and never buy anything. Not that they will ever find anything they are looking for in the shop, because. It's. Not. Organized. That. Way. It's a jumble of associational filing according to the associational juices of the record shop owner, who being a saint, knows what goes with what. He just knows. The miracles! He cures one man of his Chopin fixation -- not that there's anything wrong with Chopin at all; it was just not really what the man needed since his bride slept with the best man on the wedding night -- with Aretha Franklin. And not just any Aretha: Spirit in the Dark. It has to be that one. So the whole enterprise functions like an atavistic public library in the American imagination, only better, because a psychically-wounded British music saint beats a shushing librarian any old day. I mean, he's got kids -- kids! --coming in who are happy not to find what they're looking for, because they slip on some headphones and wind up music tripping! It's wonderful! No LSD, just Miles Davis! No one expects Miles Davis!

On the other hand: the Hallelujah Chorus. Expect the Hallelujah Chorus. Not for its sound but for its silence. Because all music is about silence, in the wisdom of this book. Although John Cage's 4'33" isn't on the playlist. Hmm. But here it is: Happily ever after in a day and a half. Fiction, but charming! Particularly the psychically wounded cheese-and-onion community for all the suffering "Americans."

Like me.

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So, the rest of this is kind of in the way of a spoiler, so if you think you might want to read this fun book -- which I especially to those who you love music either as a performer or as a listener -- best leave for now and come back later.

Music is so so so so SO vast. And tastes and opinions occupy such disparate places within the arc of that spectrum. Let me just say that my music shop owner would recommend music different for the most part from Rachel Joyce's. He would be wedded to other pieces from the various genres and sub-genres of music. And within classical music, different composers or, if the same composer, different pieces. And it would be that way for anybody, so no point boring you with my choices since yours would be different and every bit as boring.

Except for one area that has to do with silence in music. This is the organizing principle of Frank's philosophy of music. Frank has a fixation on the Hallelujah Chorus, and seems to find particular meaning in the moment of dead silence before the final "Hallelujah!" Because of this moment of silence, music is therefore all about silence, in Frank's mind anyway.

Not wanting to plumb this particular bottomless pit of speculation, I will say that I would pick a couple of different moments of silence in music as having that opening-trapdoor-of-the-scaffold feeling to them:

1. Ezekiel Saw the Wheel, arranged for treble choir, by ??? I was an aspiring chorister in the audience of a Chattanooga Boys Choir performance of this song, and I was bored. I was also 10 years old, no adults or other children were with me, and I was sitting by myself in the back row way behind anybody else. I found I could alleviate my boredom with the cap of a lipstick tube that I had found on the floor by popping it with my thumb in time with the music. It was a soft pop -- a satisfying, soft pop that I could hear underneath the sound of the choir, which I could now give a nice little offbeat rhythm for the lively, syncopated song that without my help had been so boring. But I was digging it now with my little backbeat. The song went into a grandiose coda in which the choir was almost yelling "way up in the middle of, way up in the middle of, way up in the middle of, way up in the middle of ..."

And then, nothing.

And then, a soft pop from the top of the lipstick tube. By itself. A pop. My thumb slipping a pop. Alone. In rhythm, but alone. Very, very, stunningly alone. I could not believe it. People way in front of me whirled around and glared, as the choir roared, "THE AIR!"

2. The downbeat of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the preparation for the most famous motif in all of classical music: da-da-da-dum! If you just listen to the music, you miss one of the most significant moments of the piece: the silent downbeat. If you're watching a performance and seeing the conductor delivering the downbeat, only then do you get the complete sensation of what must be one of the most exciting moments in music: when the baton crashes down and out of the silence sizzles this orchestral flash of lightning.