How a Composer Learned to Write Words

A composer learns early that sound is never only sound. A held note carries the silence before it and the silence it leaves behind, and the skill is in knowing which of those the listener will remember. To write like that for a lifetime is to be trained in one discipline above all others: to hear what is there when nobody else is listening.

That training is what Dear Wall brings to its subject. Fernando Nannetti’s carved lines look, at first, like disorder. To an ear trained on structure, they read differently: frames, returns, refrains and corrections. The book treats them as composition, and it asks what it would take to hear them as what they were.

Every composer knows that a piece is not finished when it is written. It is finished when someone hears it. For years a man wrote into stone with a belt buckle, and almost no one came to listen.

She did not answer with music. She chose words, and you can hear the composer in them. The sentences are long and gather slowly, the way the wall gathered, line by line, until you look up and find a structure where you expected static. The book is in four parts, like movements: the first holds the silence of a name never given, the last the silence of a nurse’s pen set down mid-line. Repetition works as it does in music: the buckle returns, the frame returns, the notebook returns, and each time it means more.

The wall itself becomes a score.

That is why she needed words. Music can move you without naming anyone. This story needed a name, and a page, and a reader.