Granite, sandstone and marble

"I call architecture 'petrified music.' Really, there is something
in this; the tone of mind produced by architecture approaches the
effect of music."

Goethe 1829.

It was the Sagrada Familia which began it, that ossified beauty, carved
out of the bones of insects. At first the noise was low, like a
creaking. Those who heard it did not hear it through their ears but
rather through their feet. We are too quick to forget that sound is
just vibration, a wave which moves fluid in our heads.

Fish in the sea hear through their entire body, the pressure waves
moving against them. Reptiles similarly. Snakes hear through the ground
they move on. We owe our human ears to the jawbones of reptiles. That
is where those three little bones in our ears came from, stirrup,
hammer, anvil, or as the Germans have it " Gehorknochelchen " - the
little hearing bones.

This is how it seemed, when Gaudi's building began to sing. Though the
sound was moving through, from the feet and thighs, rippling through
the belly before reaching the ears and mind.

And oh, what a sound it was.

Oddly, to those who were close-by, the noise was not altogether
pleasant, some later describing it as a choking, grinding noise close
to the sound of a car engine being jerked from Fifth to Third
inadvertently. The noise the cathedral made was something brand new,
something the world had never heard. A different quality of sound
altogether.

Those who were five, ten miles away, heard an entirely different sound.
Voices clamouring and melting into harmony so perfect that those who
heard it didn't even know they were crying until the saltwater blurred
their vision. The voices were clear and sharp and the music that
swelled behind them magnificent. Nobody could tell what language the
words were in, certainly not Spanish or French or Italian; but all who
heard it were clear.

The voices sang and although the words themselves made no sense, what
they were saying made sense of every mystery that had ever troubled
those who heard it, the sound was a tangible presence. Of course the
songs were about love and loss, what else is there to sing about
?

This is true, even for things carved out of rock.

Something about the music the building produced had a Monet-like
quality, close up it seemed to be mindless, but at the right distance
there was nothing about it that wasn't exactly right.

Other, older churches sang out too, covering the land in the noise of
buildings calling to each other. They sang up the coastline, tempting
the French churches to join in and they sang across the sea.

They sang across the sea to buildings that had been brothers until the
late Tudor times. They sang of love and loss, of regret and
forgiveness.

Once the old cathedrals joined in, Westminster, Canterbury, Yorkminster
and churches like Eskham built from pale stone a thousand years hence,
the whole of Europe rang with song and music.

Radio stations closed down. There was no sense in competing. At first
people wanted to find out from the news what was happening, why the
churches had started to sing back after years of being filled with
song. But then, people realised that this news was unfolding in the sky
in front of them. They had no need for a polluted muddled version. They
switched off their televisions and radios and listened as the buildings
sang.

Ships in the channel heard it best, as structures that had never met,
not even been hewn from the same stone, called love songs to one
another.

Music that Mozart may have groped for in dreams, sang by the finest
voices and a choir of song-birds and whales and the finest of humans;
chords from great instruments never imagined, these are the noises that
moved across Europe.

And then down, to the Pyramids, who answered with a deeper rumbling
song, patient but full of passion. The Pyramids had bided their time
longer than almost all.

There was a wonder that moved around in the air, Chicken Little could
have announced that the clouds had cracked and the sky falling and
nobody would have cared. If this was the end of the world, it was
beautiful and nobody really minded.

Every human in Europe had their answer - "how would you want to go,
when the time comes ? " - who could feel other than, just hearing this,
listening to the buildings serenade. Music that made those who heard it
feel solid as the churches that sang it, safe and permanent, full of
knowledge.

It couldn't last and it didn't. Three days later, the Sagrada Familia
fell silent, whatever songs within it once again frozen into the stone.
The others too and eventually even the Pyramids gave up.
The music touched all those who heard it, women who had been pregnant
during it gave birth to children who were beautiful and serene. All
hoped that the songs would come again but most were sure they would
not.

Thanks to Karl Wiggins, for exposing me to the quote, Goethe for saying
it, Stephen Jay Gould for some information on hearing (and also
something I couldn't work in, a nice link that Goethe also in his youth
discovered a hitherto unknown bone in the human jaw. )