Home
Away
Far Away

 

The Quietude of Stockholm (1987)

Noises are the sounds we have learned to ignore.

--R. Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (1977)

In downtown Stockholm is a small park, the Kungsträdgården, perhaps fifty yards by two hundred, with a familiar assortment of benches, pathways, and plots of grass. By itself this bucolic urban oasis looks scarcely different from other small downtown parks around the world; but what is different is that, in several years of visits, I have rarely heard any of its patrons turn his of her radio loud, or play an instrument and make any other noises that might disturb the acoustic tranquility of one's neighbors. A centerpiece of this King's garden is a floor chessboard with waist-high pieces; and even as moves are made, the onlookers are all silent. To me this park epitomizes Stockholm's enviable quest for urban quietude.

Musicians I have encountered in the pathways of a downtown Stockholm subway station, but whereas public instrumentalists in New York's subways need amplification to be audible above the background roar, here was a young flutist playing solo Bach sonatas! Another time, directly on a subway platform itself, I came across a man playing an acoustic guitar. I always expect to find a ukulele player likewise knowing that gut strings can here be heard.

None of Stockholm's subways are noisy enough to forbid intelligent conversation; none require the earplugs or tissue usually necessary at home, not only to protect my hearing, but to save me from pain. Standing on a Stockholm platform, looking down the track, you can see headlights well before you hear the train, which becomes audible only as it actually pulls into the station. According to the writer Ludwig Rasmusson, at the subway station in Stockholm's Old Town, you can even hear the local rats!

On the streets of Stockholm, car horns are rarely heard, not because they are explicitly illegal--they aren't--but because it is "general policy," as one Swede told me, not to use them. Instead, Swedish drivers command attention from cars in front of them by flashing their headlights, which they tell me is just as efficient as a horn. Precisely because background traffic sound is so low, man-made street sounds suddenly become audible to anyone walking in Stockholm--high heels on pavements, babies' cries, street arguments. On certain midtown promenades without cars, you can even hear the rustle of leather clothing.

No airplanes invade the Stockholm sky, because the international airport at Arlanda is well out of town. There was a closer domestic airport in suburban Bromma until a few years ago, when it was closed down, in part because of its noise. Now all domestic flights must go to Arlanda. The only helicopters I saw in the sky belonged to the police. Instead, you occasionally see cruising above the city helium-filled balloons, reportedly belonging to ballooning clubs, their bulbs advertising something or other, their gondolas filled with perhaps a dozen people, completely inaudible from below.

In many Stockholm apartments are sets of double doors, sometimes separated by a foyer, sometimes directly behind each other. These double doors are placed not only between the floor landing and the living area, but often at the bedrooms as well. Then Swedish builders have a taste for concrete floors at least a foot thick. In many buildings I found elevators so quiet that the door separating them from the landing is not solid, as in my New York apartment house, but cage-bars that are acoustically open. (Appropriately perhaps, the Swedish word for elevator is Hiss!) The storm windows are often three panes thick, protecting against unwanted noise along with the winter cold. During a recent two-week stay, I was told that Hornsgatan, the four-lane street only a floor below me, was commonly regarded among Stockholm's noisiest thoroughfares. The notion never occurred to me.

I go to an open-air public swimming pool in south Stockholm, Eriksdalsbadet, where many young women are topless. Here I expected to find the ghetto-blaster so familiar in public recreation areas elsewhere; but the few radios are not loud enough to be heard beyond their immediate listeners. Here too the predominant noise is that of human beings talking, all disproving the assumption that liberation in one domain necessarily initiates barbarism in others.

The reason for me to visit Stockholm so often is that I produce sound compositions at its Electronic Music Studio, which is now along the waterside. I listen for harbor buoys and hear none. When we finish work late a night, I listen for the hum, the cantus firmus indigenous to all cities; but in Stockholm I hear only birds. I ask to interview a government official or agency in charge of keeping Stockholm quiet, but am assured: There is none.

One of these audiotape compositions of mine is about the unique sounds of my hometown, New York City, for which a fellow New Yorker and myself necessarily collected many indigenous sounds. A colleague introduces us to the chief of the sound effects department at Swedish Radio, who says he would like to purchase some of our New York City sounds. We are especially proud of our intimate recordings of subways, fire sirens, crowds and the screamers at the commodities exchange. Which ones do you want to hear first, we say? Let's begin, he replies, with church bells. We New Yorkers collapse in laughter, as we remember that, in Stockholm, the most common gross invasions of the quietude come, indeed, from church bells! You wouldn't believe Stockholm's acoustic horizon unless you heard it.

One section of my New York City\ composition portrays a crowded welfare office, where mothers are screaming at children who are screaming back. My Swedish technician tells me that, from his own experience, Swedes on line to collect welfare are, by contrast, absolutely silent, each too ashamed to say anything at all! Even Swedish children are remarkably quiet, and the only time I ever heard someone scream from one side of a street to the other in Stockholm I recognized the screamer as an American. Admittedly, the reticence of Swedes can be extravagant. A friend tells the story of being in a movie theater whose sound system was faulty. No one, however, including herself, took any initiative in complaining!

I ask my colleagues whether any sounds in Stockholm seriously bother them, whether any sound here forces them to use the aural protection many of us find requisite in New York? One thoughtful composer cited a certain pathway under an overhead subway track, but then added, "Of course, no one lives near it." Another swears that discotheques favored by teenagers must be noisy, but his knowledge is limited only to hearsay. A third cites construction sounds, especially for large buildings--a noise that not even Swedes, it seems, have found ways to reduce.

A fourth complained in general about sounds that suddenly disturb the Stockholm quiet--sounds that would hardly be noticed elsewhere, such as motorcycles or souped-up cars only on a certain street, curiously just outside the Studio's former location. A fifth reminded me that Swedes get boisterous when they get drunk, and that is perhaps the reason why they get drunk. (In this respect, they resemble American college kids!) The only sound offending me personally was an ambulance siren next to me on Hornsgatan, a wail that, given Stockholm, struck me as needlessly loud. Usually, Stockholmers complain about the sounds of modern technologies that cannot be escaped, such as cars zipping along a highway, though one added that an automobile true to the Swedish taste would be as quiet as a Rolls Royce.

The writer Ludwig Rasmusson reminded me that while Stockholm has always been quiet, it is not as quiet as it used to be. He cited the passage at the beginning of August Strindberg's novella, "The Red Room," where the great Swedish author on a certain hill in south Stockholm a century ago describes the sights and sounds of the city, including the rings of seven church bells. A century later, from the same hill, in a city that survived both World Wars unscathed, R. Murray Schafer and his colleagues installed their microphones and audiotape. "There were three church bells on the recording," he reports, "one of them almost inaudible." Rasmusson himself is completing a critical book about the growing noise of Stockholm. He laments that Stockholmers can't hear the sea anymore, and can't hear the breaking up of ice in springtime. "That's a big cultural loss, I think." Ah, yes, only in Stockholm can such acoustic complaints be credibly made.

It is possible that other Scandinavian cities are quieter than Stockholm. Helsinki, where once I spent a day, has similar qualities. Oslo reportedly does as well; but these are smaller cities. What Stockholm exemplifies to me, as a New Yorker, is the cultural achievement of a much less noisy city, with less acoustic pollution, demonstrating that the providence of quietude need not be a surprise amid the urban pleasures of sophisticated people.