Critic's Notebook: Opening ears to summer's sounds

Just a few weeks ago, when we were still waking up to chilly June mornings, the neighbor across my back wall put up another radio antenna. That makes three, and I took this development as the squirrel might greet the news that a crop of peanuts had just been planted for his express consumption and pleasure.

It would be only a couple of weeks until my neighbor - we'll call him Fritz - would be sitting out nights under his patio umbrella, releasing distant radio signals into the warm air. This scanning across the crackle and static for strands of music and indistinct languages is an instant atmospheric change, as though Fritz turns our house over to a previous era.

Summer in the city comes with its own vocabulary of sounds - not the driving buzz of suburban lawns being mowed, but stray rap escaping from passing cars. Those of us living near South Street know the seasonal contours of the soundscape: the early stirrings of nightlife with Mardi Gras, the squeals of young women on the first warm weekend night in late spring, the unsettling feeling of Independence Day fireworks over the Delaware rattling the early-19th-century timbers of our houses.

Saturday nights end with the 2 a.m. roar of crowds as the police sweep them down South Street and onto the side streets, where, as revelers get into their cars, the girlfriend says she saw the way he looked at that girl at the bar and he says, "Come on, baby, you're imagining things again."

The sound scrapbook also holds more deliberate highlights of summers past: Dilworth Plaza and a silent crowd of not-the-usual suspects perhaps experiencing a range of thoughts and feelings only classical music can set off; one night long ago at the Mann Center when the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and Manfred Honeck delivered the news that Pennsylvania has not one but two great orchestras; the arrival of surprising storms - one of rain, the other of Brahms - at Tanglewood.

Windows open in summer, and, unbidden, news of the outside world drifts in. E.B. White, writing Here Is New York in a stifling Manhattan hotel room in the summer of 1948, said he "heard the Queen Mary blow one midnight . . . and the sound carried the whole history of departure and longing and loss."

The whistle of the ferry to Camden may not pack the same aural metaphor, and though it might try, it won't be able to compete with the velvet steamroller of the Philadelphia Orchestra, which pulls into Penn's Landing again this summer. And we don't lack for majesty or authenticity when the Philly Pops plays patriotic tunes using Independence Hall as a backdrop. Is there another city that can marry sound and setting so meaningfully?

For the more aleatory music of the city, you're on your own - but with excellent chances of discovery if you listen. Sometimes, when Fritz and his wife have friends over, I can hear their chatter distinctly. Our courtyards are small, and the way our homes and precious patches of land align, their words are just a few feet away. This is the reality of city living. We are separate, yet not - roommates who do not meet. I keep thinking of that line from James Agee, the narrator lying on a quilt on the grass beneath the stars, listening to his people. "They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all," he writes in Knoxville: Summer of 1915.

Philadelphia: Summer of 2015 might have fallen comfortably on Agee's ears. Not the rap, not the helicopters or motorcycles, of course. But on some nights as I lie in the dark, into listening range comes a horse - as Agee wrote - "breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt," and the sudden sensation of being part of a larger continuum is too strong to allow sleep.

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