Where's the Music?

"Where's the music?" asked the child.

The fiddler put his bow to the strings and challenged the statement with a riff that would have made the devil weep. The child smiled and clapped her tiny hands in response. The fiddler smiled back and lowered the violin from his chin.

"Where's the music?" the child asked with a furrowed brow.

He let loose another promenade of notes to which she wiggled her body with the graceful ineptitude of childhood. He stopped, she clapped her hands, and then a short moment later turned her palms to the sky and asked, "Where's the music?"

Yet when he went to begin again, the child pointed at something behind the fiddler with a smile and exclaimed, "There it is!"

He looked behind him and found nothing but a small patch of well manicured tulips bowing in the gentle breeze. The child clapped her hands and smiled before executing two small leaps of glee during which her feet did not leave the ground. Her father grabbed her by the hand, dropped a worn bill into the musician's violin case, and led his daughter down the street to continue their day.

The street musician stared at the bed of tulips, and then he closed his eyes and tried to find the notes - the hum of bees, the nearly soundless rush of a light breeze over the velvet of petals, the footsteps of strangers passing by. With his eyes still closed, he raised the violin to his chin to add to the ensemble, but as the bow met string, the song was gone.

Where's the music? He wondered, turning his violin upside down to see if it might fall from the holes of its body.

—

No one knew who had built the windmills. There was an abandoned cabin nearby, but the remoteness of the site had led explorers to the strange outcropping of the prairie too late to have crossed paths with the creator. Now, tourists and musicians across the world traveled a hundred miles of barren grasslands to see the site. Or more aptly, to hear the site.

Claude drove with the radio off and his windows down. The only thing to hear was the whipping sound of the river of air flooding in through his windows. He had seen videos of the place, read theories, studied the science which allowed its incredible spectacle, but nonetheless, he did not know what to expect. His palms were clammy against the leather of the steering wheel and he had to keep reminding himself to unclench his jaw. He was not sure why, but he felt as though the windmills held some sort of secret, some understanding which he had been unknowingly searching for. Some mystery which, by its very nature, was too elusive for him to grasp.

Then, beneath the sound of the wind, he thought that he could hear the deep baritone notes of a bass which seemed to be played by the prairie itself. Movement atop the horizon caught his eye, and his breath caught ever so slightly in his throat at the sight of a windmill blade cutting through the sharp blue of the dawn sky. His car cleared a small rise in the prairie, and the moment it did so he was greeted by the grassland's incredible expanse, and dozens upon dozens of strange sentinels guarding an absent kingdom.

He drove the final few miles to the windmills in clouded awe. There was nothing inherently spectacular about the sight, but the strangeness — the mere out-of-place-ness — left Claude with a feeling akin to being the first man on the moon only to find a worn flag already planted. The windmills held that eerie solemnity which we reserve for the holy sites of ancient religions, and they demanded a reverence which he seemed only able to muster through a blank mind. He stepped from his car and craned his neck to the first windmill. Its blades spun slowly and the supporting tower whistled a fluting call like bird song.

He walked through the field marveling at each windmill and, as most marvelous things make us do, he wondered. He wondered who had built them. He wondered how they worked. He wondered if he would ever create something a fraction as spectacular. He wondered at the strangeness of a universe where some madman could build a city which sang the song of the wind.

For the one mystery which the windmills had never invited was the reason for their creation. It took no more than a few moments of standing on the prairie, watching the blades gather speed, and hearing the melodies which would pour out of their tower windows to know that it was one grand instrument. Each windmill produced tones and sounds entirely unique from the others, and each set of blades was placed at a particular angle to capture glancing blows of the wind which the others would miss. As a result, on any particular day, the breaths of God would make a song that was never repeated.

Claude stood amongst the towers with closed eyes, and took in the pieces of the song. He listened to the thumping of bass, the tolling of brass, the dancing of strings, and the hum of a truck engine. The engine growl tore him from his revelry. He opened his eyes to see a battered pick-up truck stir up a cloud of dust before parking next to his own rental car.

The car door opened and an old man in cowboy boots lowered himself to the ground. He waved Claude over and asked him to grab two folding chairs from the bed of the truck, before reaching into the passenger seat and grabbing a small black case.

Without a word, the man began to walk into the field of windmills, trusting that Claude would follow. Every few yards the old man would turn his face into the wind before adjusting his course. Finally, he stopped.

"Put the chairs here."

Claude waited thinking there might be more, an explanation or introduction perhaps, but the man only offered a strange stare which seemed to ask if Claude might be dumb. Claude set the two chairs next to each other, and the old man took a seat. Opening the black case upon his lap, he removed a violin. The windmills sang their strange hymn, and the two of them simply sat and listened.

Finally, the old man rolled his head around his neck a few times, stuck the violin beneath his chin, and, as though following a conductor's wand, began to play his part. Claude sat in wide-eyed disbelief and listened. He did nothing else.

The wind played an incredible song. It was not the random noise — that senseless, endless din — which we so poorly attribute to Nature. It was chaotic and unpredictable — yes, but in that strange way of jazz. As though, if you listened for long enough, if you had heard enough songs, you might be able to recognize the pattern in the patternless. Claude tried to keep up. He was no fool. He had been playing music since he was a young boy, and had studied at the most prestigious of music schools, but he could not seem to keep the time. Even in his mind he was a step behind. He sensed that there was a rhythm, he felt it in his bones, yet in his attempts to find it he found himself utterly abandoned.

Where Claude was the blind man, the old stranger was blessed with sight. He and the wind seemed to know one another like old bandmates. The wind would take the lead, and the old man comped it with an appropriate ostinato. The wind would tag the fiddler in, and he would take over with a riff which left the plains rolling in appreciation before passing it back. To the uninitiated, it was nothing more than a good show. To those who understood the difficulties — the subtle nuances — one needed to recognize to play such a tune, it was unthinkable. It should have been impossible. No one should have been able to recognize their place in a pattern which did not exist.

After a few minutes, the song ended. The wind continued to play, but there was no doubt that this was the start of a new tune. The stranger placed the violin back in its case and kneaded his hands, rubbing the performance free of his flesh. Then he stood up and folded his chair, walking back to his truck without a word.

"Wait!" Claude shouted.

The old man stopped and turned back towards Claude.

"What was that?! I mean, how did you — I mean, that was incredible," Claude stumbled over his words. He took a breath and collected himself trying to find the right question. "How did you do that?" he asked.

The man shrugged, "I just listened to the music," he answered.

"Oh come on, man! There's got to be more than that. I mean, I tried to 'listen to the music,'" Claude said with air quotes, "And I was as lost as a dog in algebra class. There has to be something I'm missing."

The old man stared at Claude for a long moment, as if trying to determine his worthiness. Eventually, he lifted a bushy eyebrow, and with a glint in his eye asked, "Well, where's the music?"

Claude gaped dumbly, and then, with the uncertainty of an ill-prepared student, gestured vaguely at the windmills.

The old man chuckled, turned to continue walking towards his truck, and said "Oh no, that's not it at all."

Claude was left sitting in the folding chair wondering, as a cloud of dust kicked up by the truck's tires, blew music through his hair.