Let the silence not stop, let the music return!

When my nonexistent grandchildren want to practice that very old thing of being proud of their grandfather by mythologizing some of his youthful exploits and ask me about the memories of that much-suffered pandemic and confinement that I lived in Barcelona in the twenties (as you can see, I won't be able to boast of having fought in an armed conflict, nor of having sprinted madly in front of the grays, nor even, poor me, of having helped proclaim the independence of our tribe...) I will tell them about something as platonic and unglamorous as silence.

Indeed, if I remember the time that has passed from last March to the present and think about this our small postmodern tragedy of confinement that we have cured with syringes with Netflix and courses on baking artisan bread on Youtube, the first thing that comes to my mind are not the images of collapsed hospitals, nor the photograph of our sad, poor and overwhelmed consellera Alba Vergés in the office, but the memory of a usually festive and rogue city like Barcelona plunged into the most absolute silence, into the most terrifying stillness.

I don't think there is a more raw and fatal image of fear than a city in silence. When I lived in southern New York, at night I was excited to walk from Wall Street to the Ground Zero to contemplate the hole that had been the base of the Twin Towers and that, at the beginning of the 21st century, formed a ghostly landscape of tunnels and excavating machines as distressing as the image of an intubated patient who seems to live calmly and carefree in the sweet dream of a coma. Saving the oceanic distances, this week I have had the same sensation walking through the Gòtic, a neighborhood every day closer to the dangerous desertification and the living death typical of those silent postcard corners ideal for taking a piss or taking a photograph of a graffiti to then share it with colleagues on Instagram. Also when I have wandered through the Eixample, a gouda cheese plagued with businesses for transfer, many of them restaurants and bars that will never open again, a tragic image of a Barcelona that has the sign offor rentnailed to its face, marked by an unsettling silence.

Also when I have wandered through the Eixample, a gouda cheese plagued by premises for transfer, many of them restaurants and bars that will never open again, a tragic image of a Barcelona that has the for rent sign nailed to its face, marked by an unsettling silence.

But Barcelona has not been the victim of a bombing, nor are we children of a kind of Leningrad from which we cannot use a single pebble. There is no mishap that is not cathartic, and the silence of the empty streets has also given us the experience of being able to walk through a city without noise, where the music of the trees, of the bell towers, and of our own walking configure a symphony until now covered by the horns and urban highways that, gradually, fill our lungs (and eardrums!) with the shit that will end up killing us. Silence can cause fear, but it can also become the substrate from which we can find a new way of listening to Barcelona that, without making us lose an iota of our Mediterranean character, does not necessarily involve the hubbub.If there's one thing I should thank the little yellow bug from Wuhan for, it's definitely for making me aware of noise pollution and how it still deprives us of the spontaneous sounds of the streets.

If Barcelona had adequate public transport infrastructures, especially in its urban center and in connection with neighboring municipalities, the city could decongest the unbearable traffic that colonizes our streets and that, many years from now, our descendants will conceive as a delirious anomaly. After the lockdown, in what we call de-escalation, many fellow citizens experienced the contrast between a quiet city and this kind of wild and stressful opera instrumented by the boom-boom of motorcycles, automobiles (and helicopters) that invade the urban space and that, as if that weren't enough, human beings complement with execrable habits such as shouting on the street on the phone with the vocal projection of a Wagnerian choir or cycling with a loudspeaker blasting at full volume those melodies played at weddings when everyone is already drunk and would even dance to some animalistic bellow. Barcelona doesn't have to be Oslo, far from it, but its militant Mediterraneanism could perfectly coexist with turning down the volume.

Barcelona doesn't have to be Oslo, far from it, but its militant Mediterraneanism could perfectly coexist with turning down the volume

The polyphony of a city is born from the sounds it spontaneously produces and that need silence to coexist in happiness, but it is also shaped by the music produced by its men and women. Barcelona's cultural history would be incomplete without the enormous amount of music that has been created in the city, whether in the realm of the cultured sound of composers who have developed their art there – such as the great Terradellas, Sor, or this year's celebrated Robert Gerhard (in 2020 we also commemorate the 100th anniversary of the creation of the Orquestra Pau Casals, an event that should prevail no matter what over the inconveniences of the pandemic) – or in the rich universe of popular music.It would be impossible, for example, to describe the atmosphere of modern Barcelona from the second half of the 20th century until the end of Franco's regime without taking a peek at places like La Cova del Drac, Las Vegas and later Don Chufo or the much-missed Zeleste, as well as the rise of folk and singer-songwriter music in the 2000s without saving venues in Gracia like Vinilo or Heliogàbal.

The cultural authorities of the country and the city have been terribly negligent not only in caring for musical heritage as a first-rate cultural value and a great factor in education, but they have also neglected urban music spaces as places for the production and promotion of musical art. Think of the cities you like most in the world, such as New York, London, or Paris: they would not be the same without their emblematic music venues, spaces that are not only receptacles of art, but have produced concerts and events that today no one would expel from the musical heritage of the West. In one of the few decisive cultural initiatives promoted by Ada Colau's administration, the Barcelona city council approved about a year and a half ago the category of Live Culture Spaces to protect venues that have a close relationship with their neighborhood environment and where there is a regular program of semi-amplified music, provided they complied with reasonable standards of safe capacity and acoustic insulation.

Think of the cities you like most in the world, such as New York, London, or Paris: they would not be the same without their emblematic music venues

I understand that the City Council, and it is to be celebrated, is working on the deployment of this regulation beyond the strictly legal sphere, and that it intends to accompany many venues in the city in the task of re-adapting their space to the new pandemic normal.Any city in the world, I insist, must have a wide, stable circuit of venues where one can not only enjoy listening to semi-amplified music but also, quickly and safely, convert into concert halls of any genre. Many times, Barcelona residents, due to the scarce care for musical heritage to which I referred earlier, have associated music venues with perdition, noise, and revelry. Given the moment of authentic emergency that our composers are experiencing, interpreters and technicians, we should remove this chip in the form of prejudice from the citizen's brain to make them understand that everything they like about other cities, such as going to a jazz concert in theBlue Note or theVillage Vanguardin Manhattan, it should be possible inBarcelona, a city with excellent schools and interpreters but with a third-world venue fabric.

Given the state of emergency in the music sector after the impact of Covid-19 on the country's sound life and in view of the immense generosity that our musicians showed during confinement (entertaining us for free with their online concerts), it would be appropriate for the city council to activate the turbo so that the city's musical life can return to normal and that everything possible is done to provide all the facilities in the world to bars that are not strictly musical but that, with some minimal variations in the arrangement of their infrastructure, could host concerts from time to time. The situation of our musicians is not alarming, it is a real emergency and, although we are aware of living in a country where rescuing the cultural sector is not among the priorities of public management, at least everything possible should be done so that some establishments in the city could become music bars, places that, I insist again, are not just receptacles for revelry and that, if programmed well, many years from now will have the same patrimonial importance as La Cova del Drac, Zeleste and so on.

It would be appropriate for the city council to activate the turbo so that the city's musical life can return to normal and that everything possible is done to provide all the facilities in the world to bars that are not strictly musical

Barcelona can be a Mediterranean city, silent and respectful of acoustic health standards and at the same time a place that does justice to the musical talent produced in its neighborhoods. If we think that the sector can survive only with the programming of large concert halls, such as the Palau or the Auditori, or we continue to promote a musical policy of lavish annual major festivals that do not profoundly transform the musical life of our city or create a more conscientious audience, we can end up finishing off a sector that has been close to agony for months.We long for tranquility, of course, but we also want to live in a city full of melodies. Let the silence not stop, but let the music return!