The words of caution below, attributed to the composer, Johannes Brahms, are the kind of warning that can lift one’s spirits.

The world is so full of tunes
you have to watch where you walk
else you might step on them.

Can’t you see Brahms, arms clasped behind his back in what contemporaries described as a consistent gesture, walking in the hills outside his home town of Hamburg, Germany, or climbing mountains in Switzerland on vacation with his father? How many tunes there are to hear! The melody of the Alpine shepherd’s horn (said to become the horn call soaring over strings, like sun breaking through clouds, that transfigures the introduction of Brahms’ First Symphony finale)…the rustling of wind among tall grasses…the rhythmic crack of footsteps on hard-packed earth…

Some time back, when I bought Paul Winter’s album Common Ground, I was astonished by the account of the sources of certain parts of the music. Mr. Winter had recorded the sounds of a humpback whale, a fox, and an eagle. After he taped the animals in the wilds, he discovered in the studio that the sound of the eagle, the sound of the whale, and the sound of the fox, while at different intervals on the scale, were all in the same key, the key of D flat. Music found everywhere.

A couple of years ago, a piece in The New Yorker described a sound-and-light installation done by the composer John Luther Adams at the Museum of the North in Alaska. The installation was called, “The Place Where You Go to Listen.” And what you heard when you sat down to listen in this installation was raw data from the out-of-doors translated into music. Information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska was fed into a computer and transformed into musical sounds. Sitting on a bench in front of glass panels that change color according to the time of day and the season, you hear the harmonies that come from the earth and nature. The music of a day when the sun is out may sound like a natural harmonic series, with a brightness of music in a major key stretching out over four octaves. If the weather is overcast, the harmonies become more narrow in range. After the sun goes down, a darker, moodier set of chords—Adams calls this the Night Choir—are heard. Pulsating patterns in the bass—Adams calls these Earth Drums—are activated by small earthquakes around Alaska. (Adams’ CD Earth and the Great Weather has a track called “Place Where You Go to Listen.”) The sounds of the world…pieces of music.

This afternoon I had occasion to go out back of my house to throw some dead flowers into compost. I had already been thinking about Brahms’ quotation and Adams’ installation in anticipation of writing this blog later in the day. I found myself playfully lifting my feet higher than usual as I walked…Perhaps a tune was there on the ground in front of me. If so, I wanted to watch carefully that I didn’t step on it!