Oh, for the sweet sound of Silence!

As choirmaster Gareth Malone says he wears earplugs because Britain’s so noisy, QUENTIN LETTS begs ...

SIXTY-four years ago, an American composer, John Cage, ‘created’ a work called 4’ 33”. It consisted of nothing but silence. Cage’s piece instructed musicians to lay down their instruments and, for the next four minutes and 33 seconds, play not a note. They just had to stay there and look purposeful.

At the end the audience, having savoured every nuance of the ‘performance’, would clap and cheer.

for years I thought that 1952 effort the ripest baloney, but recently I have started to wonder if old Cage was on to something. Is there not nowadays a rarity value to peacefulness? Are we not reaching the point when one might be tempted to pay good money to hear the sweet sound of silence?

Choirmaster Gareth Malone might agree. Mr Malone, 41, who presented BBC TV’s The Choir, has disclosed that he now wears earplugs when he steps outside his house. He does so because Britain has become so infernally noisy.

‘Everyone plays music too loudly and it drives me insane,’ Mr Malone told Love Sunday magazine. He explained his ears were ‘the tools of his trade’ and he wanted to protect them from the ceaseless, exasperating, eardrumdenting din of modern life.

When I read of Gareth Malone’s outburst, my first thought was ‘leaf blowers’. Last week, I was walking across a London square when the cityscape’s background of ‘white noise’ was ripped by the roar of an electric leaf blower.

The blower was being wielded by a bored council workman who, in earlier decades, would have been equipped with a rake and brush to help him tidy the late-autumn leaves. They would have done the job better. As it was, his rackety machine just blew the leaves from one part of the square to another, making a fiendish commotion.

Gareth Malone is right. our public spaces are being wrecked by bangs and clang. Loud music, though indeed maddening, is not solely responsible.

Hand dryers in public lavatories blast away like Harrier jump jets. fruit machines in pubs play an interminable medley of bells and bongs and mini explosions to lure the impressionable.

The same pubs find it necessary to keep their sports channel TVs on, whatever the hour. Yack, yack, yack go studio anchors, their overemphatic voices adding to the stressy soup of aural pandemonium. Visit a cafe for a relaxing cuppa and you may find it impossible to concentrate on your Daily Mail crossword, such is the screeching and whooshing from the Italian- style coffee machine.

oh for the days of urns, which were so much quieter. The staff in coffee shops have to bawl at customers to overcome the racket from the milk frother and the clatter of cups and saucers. Who needs caffeine when there is such bedlam going on behind the counter?

If supermarket public address systems are not berating you about the bargain of the day — ‘pork chops at half-price in aisle four!’ — they are probably summoning another ‘colleague’ to the tills to cope with a surge of customers.

At Marks & Spencer food shops they press a bell to do this. Its shrill tone drills deep into your skull. And how often have you been driven to the point of violence by the automated check-out firmly telling you ‘unexpected item in the bagging area’. At every turn: clamour.

railway stations and airports have always been prone to blaring announcements, but these have worsened thanks to health and safety. first they tell you not to leave your luggage unattended for a second or it might be blown up by the bomb squad.

Then they tell you to beware of thieves. Cue another patronising, high-volume warning: ‘Do NoT become a victim of crime.’

The only crime I can think of when I hear that is vandalism: how I’d love to smash the loudspeakers with a hammer.

That dragging sound behind you on the street will be a wheelie suitcase. Traffic lights feel the need to chirrup at you when you can cross the road. Lifts have voices telling you not only which floor you are at but also what you can buy at the smellies counter today. SHuT uP!

Even buses now tell you the next stop. I can see this may be helpful to blind people, but it doesn’t half make a trip to town a nerve-jangling affair — and that’s before the crying babies, the school kids yelling at each other and the druggie dropout on the back seat playing rap music on a ghetto blaster.

The hymn Dear Lord And father of Mankind has a verse which begs the Almighty, ‘drop thy still dews of quietness till all our strivings cease’.

Dews of quietness: what a lovely image. Those lines capture the truth that noise winds us up until our inner rubber-bands are close to snapping. ‘Strivings’ is another way of saying work, stress, hassle, all sent into a dizzying vortex by audible uproar.

An egg farmer once told me that fast music encouraged barn hens to lay eggs at a quicker tempo, poor things. Maybe the same theory is behind the music played to us at so many shops and restaurants.

They want us to spend more. Shopping centres try to brainwash us with zippy tunes, never worse than when they are tinned Muzak.

At sports events, thumping chords mark every score, the intention being to whip up atavistic triumphalism in the fans.

This may have its place at a New York Yankees game where it somehow seems to match the upbeat atmosphere, but at a county cricket ground on a damp night’s Twenty20 game in Bristol it just feels unBritish and rather silly.

Sirens on fire engines, ambulances and police cars have never been louder. In the fifties (watch any Ealing comedy) a moderate bellringing on a police Wolseley 6/90 was sufficient. This became a neenaw and now we have Americanstyle horrors which mix whoops with high-decibel honking.

I suppose they are deemed necessary because so many motorists play deafening music in their cars and would otherwise not realise there was an emergency.

The more noise there is, the less we hear. ‘Listen’ is an anagram of ‘silent’ and the two are linked.

on Sunday, at How Caple church in Herefordshire, we will have our village carol service. Like thousands of services round the country we will start our candlelit worship with utter stillness.

This is followed by a single note from the organ before a child soloist sings the first verse. That silence, for me, is the most intense part of the service — the point when we hear most keenly the vulnerability of the Christmas infant.

Such moments of silent contemplation are increasingly rare. During the recent richmond Park by- election campaign in South London, I heard local residents describe the ordeal of living under the Heathrow airport flight-path.

‘It does my head in,’ said one woman as she talked of aircraft lowering their undercarriage a few hundred feet above her house. Each time they did so there was a grinding of cogs, a roar of wind resistance and a ‘clonk’ as the mechanism locked into place.

repeated scores of times, it soon became torture, said the woman.

ADVANCES in engineering may have made lorry engines quieter, but now they emit safety noises instead — a high-piched ‘beep beep beep’ when they reverse, accompanied by a strident voice saying ‘THIS VEHICLE IS rEVErSING!’

Inside vehicles, yet more squeaks and bingbongs, one to tell you the keys are still in the ignition, another to say the lights have been left on, a third to warn that you have not secured your seatbelt or closed the boot properly. All right, all right! The proverb tells us that empty vessels make the most noise (in Poland they say the noisiest cow gives you the least milk).

The ego is a trumpet. Those cars in summer which pump forth ludicrously loud bass beats are driven by braggarts. once we could have sought sanctuary in libraries, but now even they have given up on silence. I daily give thanks for the fact that my London club has a sign on the breakfast table which says ‘conversation not preferred’. The older I get, the more I understand my late father, whose temper would fray when he felt oppressed by noise.

Hell may be not so much a pit of flames as a darkened disco where house music never ceases. Nineteenth-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins spoke of his ‘whorlèd’ ear, by which he meant his senses being sent into a spin by tumult.

In The Habit of Perfection, Hopkins wrote: ‘Elected Silence, sing to me/And beat upon my whorlèd ear,/Pipe me to pastures still and be/The music that I care to hear.’

It may seem odd to think of silence as music, particularly when you think of the uplifting sounds Gareth Malone’s choirs can make, but is there not something melodious about utter stillness?

That may have been the point John Cage was trying to make. Increasingly I’d say he was right.