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Beverly’s Sonata

by Jennifer Hudak

 

When the record player first spoke to Beverly, it used the voice of her old piano. At first, just the whisper of air among strings, like a clearing of the throat. A single tap of the middle C. Then came the scales, forwards and backwards, and the muted thud of felted hammers against metal strings. Beverly took in a sharp breath. She’d learned to play her first notes on that piano, decades ago. She knew its vocabulary intimately: the delicate chuckle of the upper registers, the lisp of its sticky high A, the squeaky press-and-release of the sustain pedal. There was no mistaking it.

The scales turned into a melody, bass and treble weaving into a voice that gained strength with each pop and hiss of the needle, each revolution of the vinyl. Every glissando asked the same question: Where are you?

Beverly wavered on her feet. The carpet — too new, too plush — felt like shifting sand beneath her house slippers, and she sat heavily on the green chair. The chair was one of the few pieces of furniture to have made the journey with her from her lovely house by the sea. The piano had not. It wouldn’t have fit in her son’s van, much less this tiny apartment.

Yet here it was. Her piano. The ghost of it, anyway, hovering over the record player like French perfume on an old, forgotten coat.

The glissando again, more insistent: Where are you?

“Where are you?” Beverly echoed.

The piano answered with a thundering chord that spoke of waves crashing into cliffs, and a plink of seventh-octave keys that felt like salt spray. A solid sequence of chords drew square rooms, echoing wood floors, chilly windows that let in as much of the sun-painted ocean as possible.

Home.

As the record played, the upholstery of the green chair hardened into smooth ebony and ivory beneath Beverly’s fingertips. Music washed over her skin like an ocean breeze. In her mind, she envisioned a whale breaching and then crashing back down into the water, leaving nothing but an enlarging circle of foam.

A brisk knock on the door, and Beverly flinched.

“Hello?” called her son Mark’s voice.

Beverly pressed her lips together, but the piano had stopped speaking through the record. Instead, an inoffensive jazz standard played from the tinny speaker. Mark knocked once again, louder this time. Beverly hoisted herself out of the chair and fumbled with the multiple locks on her door.

Mark stood in the hallway, holding up two disposable cups. “I stopped for coffee! Don’t worry, yours is decaf.”

“Oh,” said Beverly. “How nice. Well, come in.”

Mark entered the room just as the needle reached the end of the record; the arm lifted as if manipulated by invisible fingers, swinging back to return to rest. “I did some poking around,” Mark said, handing her the cup of decaf. “There’s a lot going on in this place. Classes, lectures, concerts . . . There’s even a yoga class! Wouldn’t that be fun?”

“Maybe,” said Beverly doubtfully. She tried to imagine herself in a yoga class, dressed in something scandalous. Didn’t people do yoga barefoot? Beverly’s toes clenched inside her house slippers.

“Also, Mom, they have a piano.”

Beverly looked up in surprise, her heart beating as though she were a little girl caught doing something naughty. “How did you know about that?”

“I asked, of course. It’s downstairs, and you can play it whenever you want.”

The word “downstairs” sparked a moment of confusion before Beverly realized what Mark meant, and she sank back in her chair in disappointment. “It’s probably an upright,” she muttered.

“Come on, Mom.” Mark’s eyes were as open and guileless as they’d been when he was a child, with that same anxious desire to please. “At least this way you’ll be able to play.”

Behind Mark, the record player sat motionless and silent. Beverly felt a pang of guilt, because she did want to play. Even now, her fingers twitched, searching for ivories to tap.

She adjusted herself so that Mark’s head blocked her view of the record player. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

After Mark left, Beverly started the record again, but only the soft jazz song warbled from the speakers. She didn’t know if the piano was angry with her, or — and she admitted that this was more likely — if she’d imagined hearing it to begin with. She lifted the needle and turned the player off before changing out of her housecoat and slippers, brushing her hair, and putting on her face. Then, before she lost her nerve, she slipped out of the apartment to find the upright.

---

The piano heard the door close behind Beverly, heard the locks click shut from the outside like the final notes of a song. She’d abandoned it, again.

The first time she’d abandoned the piano, it nearly lost itself completely. It had a vague memory of jostling around the back of a moving vehicle and feeling itself fall badly out of tune. It remembered rough handling, its side bumping against a wall and its clawed wooden feet scraping against an unfamiliar rug.

Then hands — new hands, halting and sweaty and awkward, hands as unlike Beverly’s as hands could be — tapping its keys without asking. Before those graceless fingers could play five notes, the piano’s consciousness had fled its body.

It could have evaporated, becoming birdsong and the whistling wind and the music of the spheres. But the piano remembered what it once was. It remembered the keys Beverly used to tickle, the graceful body she used to dust and polish, the pedals she’d pressed with her right foot only.

Beverly. It needed her to make music. It needed her to be. And the force of its need had led it here, where it had become something new: revolving vinyl disc and tiny diamond needle.

It missed the weight and heft of its wood and brass. It missed the shine of the copper that wound round its strings, and the percussive feel of the felted hammers. It missed its graceful curves and its carefully carved feet. This small, rectangular body was not the same.

But Beverly would help it find itself again. Together, they’d find their way back to what they once were.

---

Beverly let the slow elevator carry her down to the lobby, where the leftover smells of the morning’s breakfast service mingled with the boiled-vegetable smell of the upcoming lunch. Landscape prints lined the walls, and artificial trees in pots clustered in corners. As she walked, she saw other residents sitting in chairs, or making their way down the hall. Beverly eyed them with suspicion. If Charles were still alive, the two of them would have gossiped together, and it mightn’t have been so bad. They might even have bolstered each other’s courage enough to introduce themselves to some of the people they passed. She did not have that courage on her own.

The hall led into a large, open space with a scattering of chairs, a television mounted on one wall, and a piano in the corner. An upright, as Beverly had suspected. Photocopied sheet music fluttered weakly in the breeze: “God Bless America.” Beverly stifled a groan.

She flipped the cover off the keys and played a tentative scale. It felt wrong, like kissing a stranger. The notes had no heft, no depth; they floated straight up into the air like smoke up a chimney, rather than coalescing around the room like an early-morning ocean mist.

“It’s awful, isn’t it?” came a voice behind her.

Beverly turned to see a man sitting against the wall. A pair of glasses perched near the tip of his nose, and a walker with tennis-ball feet waited next to his chair.

“Not your playing,” the man clarified. “The instrument. Doesn’t matter how beautiful the song, when a piano isn’t cared for, it can’t really make music.”

“Is this piano not . . . cared for?”

The man gave a dismissive wave. “They do the best they can. But it hasn’t been tuned in years. Not enough people use it to make it worthwhile, I guess.”

“You don’t play, then?”

He shook his head. “Cello was my instrument. Lucille — that’s what I called my cello — she had a lovely singing voice. But it’s been a long time.” He looked down at his hands. “Arthritis. Makes it hard to do the fingering.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s all still right here.” The man pointed once to his head, and once to his heart. Then he smiled. “I’m Walt.”

“Beverly,” she said. Her voice came out stiffer than she’d intended; she arranged her face into what she hoped was a pleasant expression and stood. “Well, I should be getting back.”

“Oh, please, can I hear a song? Do you know ‘Music, Music, Music?’” He pushed his glasses up his nose and started to sing. “Put another nickel in . . .”

“No,” Beverly interrupted him. “I mean — I’m sorry, I don’t play that kind of music. And I don’t usually play in front of other people.” She brushed the wrinkles from her slacks. “Excuse me, I really do need to be getting back.”

As she walked briskly back down the hallway, Beverly worried that she’d been rude. But Walt had been getting a bit too familiar. Beverly hadn’t come here with the intention of meeting anyone new; it felt too much like she was being disloyal to Charles. She pressed the elevator button and then wrung her hands, trying to rub away the feeling of the upright’s keys.

When she got back to her apartment, the record player stared at her accusingly, as if it knew. As if it could smell the upright on her — and perhaps it could. To make amends, Beverly lifted the record off the turntable and gently wiped the dust off the vinyl with her shirtsleeve, just as she used to polish the piano’s wooden cabinet. The paper label in the center of the disc was so faded that the words were indecipherable, even with her readers on. Beverly placed the record back down and flipped the switch to turn the player on, then watched the needle lift up, hover over the edge of the disc, and float down, settling into the grooves of the vinyl.

Right away, the smell of the piano washed over her. Polished wood and the metallic aroma of strings. Cottony dampers and the non-smell of gleaming ivory. Old paper that crumbled at the corners when she flipped the pages during a sixteenth-rest.

“It’s really you,” Beverly whispered.

The record turned and turned. Beverly recognized the sonata she’d started to compose when her son was in high school. The first movement was bright and brash, mimicking Beverly’s little-girl fists pounding gleefully on the keys. The following movement increased in complexity and surety, until it became the song Beverly had played at her senior recital, when she was at the peak of her skill. The next movement had a motif similar to Beverly’s wedding song, the one she played for Charles on their anniversary each year.

She’d never finished the sonata, but she returned to the snippet often — when her son went to college, and then when he moved across the state. When Charles died, leaving her alone in their house by the sea. She thought, now that she’d left her piano behind, that the song would remain forever unfinished. Beverly held her breath, waiting to hear if the piano had somehow completed the piece in her absence.

Instead, it returned to the glissando. Where are you?

Beverly looked around herself nervously. She wasn’t entirely sure where she was. That is, she knew this facility was somewhere near her son’s house. But she couldn’t remember the name of the town, and even if she still had her car keys, she knew she wouldn’t be able to find her way back to the coast.

The piano seemed to understand, even though Beverly hadn’t spoken any of this aloud. It shifted back to the unfinished sonata, playing through to the end of the movement Beverly had composed and then looping back to the beginning again. As it played, Beverly remembered running her hands along the piano’s curved sides, the same way Charles used to let his hands linger on her own waist. She flicked a bit of dust off the record player’s case, and remembered how she used to ask the piano permission every time she lifted its lid and propped it open. Seeing its wires and hammers exposed to the air felt like an intimacy that required consent. The piano allowed this because they’d grown up together, their shared history visible in the mapwork of small cracks in the piano’s aging black finish, and in the laugh lines on Beverly’s own face.

Tears stung Beverly’s eyes. She felt embarrassed even by the small bit of time she’d spent with the upright downstairs. What was that ridiculous instrument, compared to her full-size grand? What was this life, compared to the life she used to have? When she was a child, she used to put her head as far inside the body of the piano as she dared, breathing the air directly from the piano’s lungs into her own. Now, she wished fervently that she could crawl back inside it, like a snail inside its shell. Instead, she let the sonata wash over her again and again.

---

The days blended together. Aside from meals, Beverly spent each moment with the record player — with her grand piano, in her house by the sea. Today, she heard seagulls call outside, felt the stiff breeze tousle her hair. Inside, Beverly’s sonata swelled like the tide. She reached the end of the piece as she’d written it and, rather than returning to the beginning, she paused. Her hands hung suspended over the keys, like a whale’s tail hovering half in and half out of the ocean. Beverly took a deep breath, as if readying for a dive.

An insistent fist knocking at her door jolted Beverly and brought her new apartment crashing down around her. She blinked. No more piano, no more sea air. Nothing but the hum of the central air system, the smell of new carpets, and the pounding against her door. Her heart thundered in time with the knocks. “Goodness, what now?” she muttered.

Once she’d gathered herself together, she opened the door. Mark stood in the hallway with his forehead all wrinkled. “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” answered Beverly, even though she wasn’t. Her room was too small, and too quiet, and it didn’t smell of the sea at all. The record player’s arm had lifted up and returned to its dock, leaving silence in its wake. She swallowed down an aching sense of loss. “I’m fine.”

“I’ve been knocking for a while. I got worried. Did you not hear me?”

“I’m sorry. I was just dozing. I didn’t expect your visit, after all.”

“It’s Sunday, Mom. I told you I’d come by today. Remember?”

Beverly felt a flash of irritation mixed with anxiety. How was it Sunday already? Had she really spent a week in this place? But she stepped aside and let her son in. “I wish I’d thought to make some tea. If you wait a moment, I can heat up some water.”

“Mom.” Mark sat on the small love seat and gestured for her to sit in her armchair. “I was talking with the folks at the desk. They say you rarely come out of your room. And even when you do, you rarely talk to any of the other residents.”

“Why are they so interested in my comings and goings? Do they have nothing better to do than spy on me?”

“They’re worried about you, Mom.” Mark leaned closer. “I’m worried about you, too.”

“There’s nothing to worry about. Why, I eat in the dining room every day.”

“Well, that’s good to hear. Because I was thinking we’d go down there together and have some lunch.”

Beverly glanced at the record player, which stood silent and still. Now that she’d been interrupted, she realized she was a bit hungry. And if she did have lunch with Mark, he’d stop worrying about her. He’d leave happy, and she could come back to her room — to her piano, to her house by the sea — and to her sonata.

“That sounds fine,” Beverly said. “I was just about to have lunch anyway.”

In the dining room, Beverly began to lead Mark to her regular table in the back corner. But Walt, who was sitting near the entrance with a woman named Martha, spotted Beverly and waved her over, nearly knocking over his walker.

“Oh,” Beverly said, “thank you anyway, but I’m just going to have a nice quiet lunch with my son.”

“Don’t be silly, Mom! I’d love to meet some of your friends here.”

He took Beverly by the elbow and guided her gently toward Walt’s table. Beverly smiled thinly and sat down. Her napkin was entirely too close to Martha’s water glass, and Beverly discreetly tugged it closer to her own plate. This was exactly why Beverly tried to avoid the noon lunchtime rush.

Once the food arrived, everyone quieted down to the business of eating. While Beverly spooned up her soup, the sonata looped through her mind.

“What’s that you’re singing?” asked Martha.

Beverly flushed. She hadn’t realized she was humming out loud. “Nothing. Sorry.”

“No need to apologize. It was nice. I didn’t recognize it.”

“It’s . . . just a song that reminds me of my home.”

“That’s right,” said Mark. “It’s that piece you used to play on the piano all the time, isn’t it?”

“You don’t have to stop singing. Go on, serenade us!” said Walt, holding up his arms as if cradling a cello. “Or, better yet, you can play it for us after lunch.”

“Oh, no,” Beverly said. “I barely remember it.”

Walt shrugged his shoulders and grabbed another roll from the basket in the center of the table. Beverly silently berated herself. The sonata was private. It helped her remember who she was, and who she’d been. She couldn’t help feeling that if she shared it with others, the sonata would lose its magic — that she’d lose all sense of herself.

Martha shivered and pulled her cardigan more tightly around her shoulders. “Why do they keep it so chilly in here!”

“Are you chilly?” Beverly asked. It felt perfectly pleasant to her, even a bit on the warm side without a stiff ocean breeze rattling the windows.

“Don’t mind me, I’m a lizard,” Martha said. “I lived in Florida for too many years.”

Beverly hesitated before asking, “Do you miss it?”

“Oh, goodness, yes. But do you know, it’s not even the heat I miss the most. It’s my trees: citrus, avocado . . . They grew like weeds in my backyard. What I wouldn’t give for a freshly squeezed glass of grapefruit juice, still warm from the sun!”

Beverly wondered what it would feel like to walk into one’s yard and pluck a grapefruit from a tree. To smell citrus in the air instead of salt. She could hardly imagine it.

After they finished their lunch, Martha declared that she was going to her room to warm up, and Walt left to take a snooze in the library. Mark gave Beverly a hug before promising to come back soon. And instead of heading for the elevator, Beverly surprised herself by wandering into the common room. Along the back wall, the upright stood, lonely and sad. The same photocopied sheet music was propped on it, with that same god-awful song. The lid over the keys was open, leaving the ivories indecently exposed. The poor thing. Beverly gingerly sat down on the rickety bench, tested the sustain pedal with her right foot. She rested her fingers on a major G chord and, before she lost her nerve, pressed the keys down.

The chord, tinny and a bit flat, was a bit louder than Beverly had anticipated. As it sounded, something shimmered outside the window, like sunlight over waves. A seagull cawed in the distance. Beverly gasped and released the sustain pedal. She stood quickly and hurried back to her room.

Her own piano greeted her by spinning its turntable and lowering its diamond needle onto the grooves of the record. The vinyl spun, the sonata played, and Beverly eased herself back in her comfortable, worn armchair. But instead of relaxing, she found herself fidgeting. She tried to pay attention to the sonata, to each movement, but her focus wandered. Her room felt small and confining. Even with the piano, it was too quiet and sedate. Beverly looked out the window and, for the first time, began to wonder what mountains might look like in the distance, instead of ocean.

---

Lately, the piano had noticed an odd look in Beverly’s eyes. It could tell that she had changed, slightly but significantly, the way a sequence of chords can be dramatically altered by one new note. It played the sonata for her again and again in an effort to soothe her, and Beverly hummed along, her notes bringing the ocean to her window and the piano’s glorious body back into the room. But even this — the routine of their playing, practiced for decades — wasn’t exactly the same. Increasingly often, Beverly hummed sequences the piano didn’t recognize. Sometimes the hint of a cello wove through the notes, like fine embroidery on the collar of a coat. Sometimes, a lemon tree sprouted in the corner, incongruous and out of place, and the sharp citrus smell cut through the stagnant air.

Finally, Beverly blinked and looked directly at the record player. “I want to finish it,” she said. “The sonata. Together. But you can’t, can you? Not like this.”

The piano played a minor scale. It remembered the feeling of new music, just like it remembered its harp expanding and contracting with fluctuations in humidity, and which of its ivories had darkened over the years. Each imperfection on its body told a story: of the child who had accidentally kicked a ball into its legs, or the aggressive surface cleaner Charles had used once instead of the gentle wood polish, or the over-watered African violet that had left a pale ring on its lid. The piano remembered each ding and scratch and loved them all. But housed as it was in this small, strange box, it could no longer change. It could only play the same piece over and over again.

I am not what I was, the piano said.

“Neither am I. Neither are any of us.” Beverly smiled then, brilliantly, a sudden shift to a major key. “Maybe we can choose to be something new.”

---

Beverly waited until 10 a.m. the next morning, well after breakfast but before people would start to get hungry for lunch. Many of the residents were out of their rooms at this time of day, socializing in the lounge or reading the newspaper or watching the birds at the feeder outside the window.

She’d planned it this way, but when she saw the upright, she nearly panicked and ran back to her room. What stopped her was Walt, sitting in his usual chair next to his walker, pushing his glasses up his nose.

“Are you finally going to serenade us, Beverly?” he asked, and Beverly tamped down her nerves and nodded.

She approached the upright the way she might approach a strange dog. But when she sat down on the bench, she felt nothing but friendliness coming from the instrument. She rested her fingers on the keys for a moment. Then she took a breath, and began to play her sonata.

Playing each of the movements was like reliving all of the best parts of her life. She was a child discovering the joy of pressing a key and making music; she was a teenager showing off just how accomplished she was at her instrument; she was a bride, a mother, a woman carving out time for her own creative life. While she played, she caught a wisp of salt in the air, a briny tang. She pressed the sustain pedal and felt it meet hardwood floor instead of carpet. A seagull cried, adding its countermelody to the piece.

The sonata brought Beverly’s past back to her, and in this place, her grand piano rose up from within the upright and met her fingers.

Hello! it called, its voice blending with the upright’s, teaching it how to speak properly. Here we are!

She was nearing the end of the final movement and realized the way she’d ended the piece wouldn’t work. It had seemed fine in her head, but now that she was here — now that she was actually playing — she realized that it was far too quick, too facile. It lacked the depth and complexity of the rest of the work. But she had no idea what to do instead. Where did one go from here? How did one keep composing a life, when the life one knew was over?

Then, behind her, she heard a cello.

It wasn’t an actual cello — Walt was singing, his right arm moving back and forth like a bow and his left straining to finger — but it was Lucille’s voice that came out of his mouth. The piano’s voice wove together with Lucille’s, two themes learning to combine. Someone else started to whistle like a flute; one of the oldest residents clapped her hands and they crashed like cymbals. Martha appeared in the doorway and laughed with delight; Beverly felt a blast of hot, humid air smelling of damp soil and citrus. Someone else warbled a note, and on top of Beverly’s hardwood floors sprouted an extravagant shag rug. The music built and built, and the walls covered themselves with oil paintings and watercolors; cacti and succulents emerged from the windowsills; an invisible dog snuffled against Beverly’s legs. Two parakeets burst into feathered existence on top of a curtain rod and added their voices to the general din.

Beverly had thought her piece was a sonata, but she was wrong. It was a symphony: harmonious and dissonant, legato and staccato, the softness of a single instrument playing a theme and an entire orchestra exploring it in exhilarating fortissimo. The residents sang and clapped and swayed, and the music, the glorious music, conjured their histories into being. In the center of it all, Beverly sat at her piano — little-girl legs swinging above the floor, becoming hose and high heels, becoming house slippers on top of carpeting.

And then, inevitably, the symphony ended — quite differently than Beverly had imagined it would, but it made sense; every prior movement had led to this final chord, this riot of instruments and voices, this chaotic and joyous mess. Beverly held her breath, waiting for the ocean to fade with the music.

But it didn’t. Nothing faded. The salty ocean breeze blowing through the window ruffled the feathers of the parakeets, who perched in Martha’s citrus trees. Walt buried his feet in the thick pile of the shag rug. Art covered the walls — beautiful oils and children’s scrawls, and all of it was glorious.

Outside the lounge window, waves crashed and receded. Beverly searched the waves for the slick, rounded back making a perfect arc above the water, for the spout rising like a fountain, clearing lungs for another long breath. She stared out over the ocean for the tail coming out of the water, until her eyes burned to see it just for an instant. To see it hover half in and half out of the ocean, like she herself had been living, all her life, with one foot in the world and one foot out.

Her life hadn’t ended. Not yet. It had merely changed.

“Maybe we can stay awhile,” she whispered to the piano.

---

The piano didn’t hear her.

Unbeknownst to Beverly, it had abandoned the upright while the final chord of the symphony still echoed through its strings. It couldn’t stay here. The upright already had a voice, and even though it was out of tune and unpracticed, it deserved the chance to learn to use it. But the piano couldn’t go back to the record player, either. Like Beverly, it had begun to realize how confining its world had become.

This was not what it was meant to be. It did not wish to end its days so diminished.

The piano’s body was still out there. Dustier than it had been when Beverly had cared for it, its keys a bit stickier. But it had been played, joyfully, by tiny fingers. And the piano missed its body so. It missed the way its curves amplified and enriched sound, the way its strings breathed when its lid was propped open.

We can choose to be something new, Beverly had said. But “new” could mean many different things.

When the piano and its body finally reunited, when it sighed through its strings and flexed its clawed feet — when it felt those small, clumsy fingers practicing halting chords — it heard the first movement of a new sonata.

---

Host Commentary

We’re in our first ever end-of-year fundraiser for Escape Artists right now—that’s our publisher, what also does Escape Pod, PseudoPod, Cast of Wonders and CatsCast, we’re on big happy family of excellent audio fiction. This year is our first year as a registered non-profit, which is opening up all sorts of avenues for us in making your donations go further than ever, so we’re trying out this annual fundraiser thing for size. We’ve got no lofty goals, no shouty milestones we’re aiming for, just… seeing how it goes when we lay out what our behind-the-scenes truths are, and all the many ways you can support us. I spoke last week about how subscriptions are the best possible way to do that, because not only are they income, they’re predictable income, something we can rely on and build around. The best way to do that is, as you might expect, our Patreon, at patreon.com/EAPodcasts—and this time of year is when we offer a discount on our annual subscriptions, so if that’s your usual modus operandi, this is your reminder to go check and renew, and if you’re newly considering supporting us, well, that’s the most cost effective way for you to get the most cool sh…tuff back from us, including access to our Discord, premium content, all the CatsCast episodes, and at certain levels, actual real-life honest-to-Smaug merchandise, like stickers and mugs. If you’re up for that, please pop over to

and have a browse of the different tiers there—and if you’re not in a position to chuck any money our way right, because times are tough and boy do we know it, then please spread the word, because if only a certain portion of the audience can afford to donate at any one time, then growing the audience works just as well as growing that proportion. However you can help us: thank you.

And now pay attention, for our tale is about to begin, and it’s talking to you from unexpected places…

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…aaaaand welcome back. That was BEVERLY’S SONATA by JENNIFER HUDAK, and if you enjoyed that, she has been here before in episode 585, GETAWAY–but also as the very first episode of our youngest sister, CatsCast, with The Cat Lady and the Petitioner, which you’ll also find on our website if you click her name on today’s post.

Jennifer told us this about Beverly’s Sonata: I wrote this story towards the end of 2020, when I was thinking a lot about how one can create a life when the life that one knew is gone. It seems obvious, now, how much of a pandemic story it is, but, as with most things, I didn’t realize this when I was writing it.

Thank you for the story and the thoughts, Jennifer. Music is such a very strange thing, when you consider it: it absolutely saturates our existences, to the point it’s strange when you can’t hear music. Every shop, every car, every telephone hold system. It doesn’t put calories in our bellies or explain anything to our conscious minds. It doesn’t appear on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, or get prescribed medically. And yet we need it so much we fill our worlds with it, come together from across the world for weekends dedicated to it, celebrate those who make it as the highest cultural heroes with all the rewards we are capable of giving them. We devote hours of our lives to finding more or learning to play it ourselves or even create it ourselves—this combination of frequencies that vibrate our ear drums and stimulate our nerves and neurons just so, but not random, never random—instead so structured along hidden lines in our brains that anyone can tell a duff note in a song they’ve never heard before, because music tells us that even in the new there is structure, even in the noise there is pattern—it is a big, chaotic, impossible universe, structures and forces beyond the comprehension of our small sack of neurons, and yet music gives us comfort that even in that there must be order, and that if we can grasp even the existence of that order then we are significant, we matter, even as one of 8 billion against time incomprehensible we are part of that structure and that symphony and we matter.

Music is something that shouldn’t matter: no-one would die of its absence. But we are what we do, not what we think, and what we do is make sure we are surrounded by music from birth to death; what we do is choose music for our funerals as the only way of expressing ourselves from beyond the grave; what we do is keep creating it endlessly, forever, despite there being more already than anyone could ever listen to in a lifetime, because we do need music. Perhaps we need it more because we don’t need it—because to have something for a purpose other than bare survival is a delight, is an expression and culmination of our higher faculties, is the very foundation of what it is to be human instead of just another great ape.

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As part of our 15th anniversary celebrations, we’re asking you to send in your favourite stories from our archive. This week, an anonymous tipster is recommending episode 348, “Testimony of Samuel Frobisher Regarding Events on Her Majesty’s Ship CONFIDENCE, 14-22 June, 1818, With Diagrams” by Ian Tregillis, saying: “The voice acting brings the author’s words to life, [and] the author’s words are transportive.” We also have Matthias Light suggesting Episode 133, “And the Blood of Dead Gods Shall Mark the Score” by Gary Kloster, saying: “It represents LGBT from a time when it was common.” Thank you both for the recommendations!