Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark and the quiet behind a fine sense of pitch
On nine listeners who hear by adding less, a Colorado girl who emptied her mind in a canyon, and a blind child at an open window.
“The higher processes of art are all processes of simplification.”Willa Cather, “The Novel Démeublé” (1922)
I The Notch
“Internal noise manifests as trial-by-trial variability in neural responses.”Woon Ju Park, Jasmine Awad and Ione Fine, bioRxiv preprint (2025)
Play someone the same tone twice, a second apart, and make them say whether the second was higher or lower. It was neither. But they must choose, and half the time they will say higher, and tomorrow the halves will fall differently. Nothing is wrong with their ears. The note arrived intact both times. What changed was the listener, who was a very slightly different instrument the second time: a brain that cannot quite do the same thing twice. Hearing science has a plain name for that wobble. It calls it internal noise.
Now the old belief. For centuries people have said that the blind hear better than the sighted, and the evidence offered has usually been a trade: the blind organist, the blind piano tuner. In 2004 a team that included Pascal Belin and Robert Zatorre put the belief to a test in Nature. People who had lost their sight at birth or within their first two years judged whether a pair of notes rose or fell better than the sighted did, and better than people who had gone blind later. On the briefest notes they matched sighted listeners who were given notes ten times as long. Since then the finding has come and gone from laboratory to laboratory, and no one could say where the advantage lived. In the ear, or behind it?
This October, Woon Ju Park, Jasmine Awad and Ione Fine published an experiment built to pull the two apart. They tested nine adults who had been blind from early life and eighteen sighted adults, two matched to each blind listener by age and by years of musical training. There were two tasks.
The first was a test of the ear. Imagine a broad hiss with a gap cut out of its middle, and in the gap one faint, steady tone. Narrow the gap and the hiss floods in over the tone; widen it and the tone stands clear. How wide a gap a listener needs is a measure of how sharply the inner ear separates one frequency from its neighbours. It is a test of the instrument itself, and on it the two groups could not be told apart. Blind ears and sighted ears were the same ears.
The second was a test of what happens after the ear. Two tones in a row: did the pitch go up or down? The steps ran from an eighth of an octave, a semitone and a half, down to a hundred-and-twenty-eighth, less than a tenth of one. The tones ran from a third of a second down to about a fiftieth. This judgment is thought to be made in the cortex, and here the early-blind listeners were better.
Then the researchers asked their data a question. They built a model listener with two adjustable properties, and let each real listener’s answers set them. One was the sharpness of tuning: how narrowly the listener’s sense of a frequency is drawn. The other was the wobble: how much random variation the listener adds to each hearing. The sharpness came out the same in both groups. The wobble did not. The early-blind listeners added less of it.
So, it seems, did the musicians. Among the blind and the sighted alike, the more years a person had practised an instrument, the lower the noise. Blindness went with lower noise again, by its own separate amount, on top of whatever practice accounted for. The advantage was not confined to the finest hair’s breadth of difference. It showed most on the wider steps and the longer tones, and in the model a longer tone is a quieter one, because the noise averages out across its length.
The authors say plainly what the study cannot do. Theirs is a small sample. The noise is a quantity inferred from answers, not a recording taken from anyone’s brain. The link between training and quiet is a correlation, and they note that such links in earlier work on musicians may reflect who keeps practising rather than what practice does. And the design cannot tell whether the blind listeners’ quiet comes from losing sight or from the life that follows it, the years of leaning on sound for everything.
Hold onto five things: the notch, the two dials, the long note, the two roads to the same quiet, and the nine. They come back in the books of a novelist who spent her working life trying to say where a fine ear comes from, and who got it right before she got it wrong.
II Two Dials
“How wonderful it would be if we could throw all the furniture out of the window.”Willa Cather, “The Novel Démeublé”
It is tempting to read a fine ear as a gift, and to mean by a gift an addition. The musician with the uncanny ear must have something the rest of us lack: a better organ, a sharper needle, an extra instrument in the head. Nearly all our words for talent run this way. We say gifted, endowed, blessed. The talented have more.
The model listener says otherwise, at least about pitch. It had two dials. One really is a dial of more: sharper tuning, a finer instrument. That dial did not move. The one that moved measures only an absence. The better listeners were not receiving more of the note. They were adding less of themselves to it.
The difference matters, because the two kinds of excellence are reached by opposite roads. A better instrument has to be inherited or acquired. A quieter one can only be arrived at by taking something away, and the study points to two ways that may happen. One is loss: a whole sense withdrawn in infancy, and a brain that settles around what is left. The other is practice: years of doing one thing until the doing stops varying. Loss is suffered and practice is chosen. In the data the two added together without interfering, like two doors into one room.
And the room is quiet in a particular sense. Internal noise is not a sound. Nobody hears it. It is the difference between one hearing and the next, the inconstancy of the listener. To lower it is to become, for the length of a note, the same person twice.
An American novelist reached this thought from the other side, by working on sentences. In April 1922 Willa Cather published, in The New Republic, a short essay with a French title, “The Novel Démeublé,” the unfurnished novel. Its first sentence is its complaint: “The novel, for a long while, has been over-furnished.” Its remedy is the one in the epigraph above. Clear the room. Leave the scene bare for what is supposed to happen in it.
By then she had already written the idea twice as fiction. She wrote it at length in 1915, in a novel about a girl with a voice. She wrote it again three years later in a single chapter, about a child on a Southern plantation who lost his sight at three weeks old. The girl takes the road of practice, and then, in an Arizona canyon, a loss of her own choosing. The child was given no choice of road. Between them they hold everything the study found, including the question it could not settle.
III Some Things Cannot Be Taught
“There is only one big thing—desire.”The Song of the Lark, Part I, Chapter XI
The novel opens in Moonstone, Colorado, a small town on the edge of the sand hills, where Thea Kronborg is a Swedish minister’s daughter. Her piano teacher is a German named Wunsch, who drinks. He has been, Thea tells the town doctor, “a real musician in his time.”
On her thirteenth birthday, in the Kohlers’ garden under the linden trees, Wunsch gives the book its first theory of talent, and he gives it in two parts. First, when she asks how she can ever learn anything so far from Denver: “Nothing is far and nothing is near, if one desires.” There is only one big thing, desire. Then he teaches her a song by Heine for her birthday and asks her why the man in it is sorrowful and pale. She will not say. “It spoils things to ask questions,” she tells him, and the answer sets him off.
“Some things cannot be taught,” Wunsch says. For a singer there must be something in the inside from the beginning. He calls it der Geist, die Phantasie, the spirit, the imagination. “It must be in the baby, when it makes its first cry, like der Rhythmus, or it is not to be.” Much can be learned, he allows. But the secret is in der Brust, in the breast, and without it there is no art.
Wunsch’s theory is the theory of the given. The gift is a thing a person has from birth, and teaching can only polish it. The musicians in the study seem to answer him: the more years of training, the less noise. But that is a correlation in twenty-seven people, and Wunsch would have his reply ready, the same one the authors raise about earlier work: perhaps the quiet ones are simply the ones who kept practising. The blind listeners are harder still to place. No one gave them lessons in it. But the study cannot say whether their quiet came with the loss, which would put it with Wunsch’s gift, or with a childhood of leaning on sound for everything, which is practice by another name. They may belong to both.
Wunsch half knows the answer himself, and he gives it first. Desire is not a gift in the sense he means. It is the only thing that produces years. If years of practice lower anyone’s noise, and the data leave room for it, nothing gets a person through those years except wanting something badly enough. His “one big thing” is the engine of the years, mistaken for a birthright.
Cather lets us watch what the theory feels like from inside. Thea wanders off into the sand dunes, shaken, and the thing Wunsch has named becomes something she can feel. She knows there is something about her that is different. “But it was more like a friendly spirit than like anything that was a part of herself.” She thought everything to it, Cather writes, and it answered her. A child of thirteen, told she has a gift, experiences it not as a possession but as a companion.
And Wunsch shows the other side. In the fall he drinks himself into a frenzy, chops down the Kohlers’ dove-house, and is brought back tied with a rope, “led like a cow,” as Mrs. Kohler groans. His pupils leave him. Before he goes he gives Thea his old score of Gluck’s Orpheus, inscribed Einst, O Wunder!, someday, O wonder, and tells her that in ten years she will either know what the inscription means or not have the least idea. A birthday card comes later from Concord, Kansas, and then nothing. The man who could hear what was inside a thirteen-year-old could not quiet what was inside himself. Cather gives us, at the start, a fine musician whose noise won.
IV The Wild Bird
“It was like a wild bird that had flown into his studio on Middleton Street.”The Song of the Lark, Part II, Chapter III
In Chicago, Thea studies piano with Harsanyi, a Hungarian who lost an eye at twelve, in an explosion in a Pennsylvania mining town. He believes the glass eye, which gives one side of his face “a dull, blind look,” has made a concert career impossible for him. The eye he kept is “the one next his audience when he played.”
He finds her voice by giving up the sight he has left. He asks her to sing, puts his hand to her throat, and sits “with his head bent, his one eye closed.” To hear her, the man with one eye shuts it. What he feels under his fingers he describes not as a possession but as a visitor: a wild bird that had flown into his studio, “from goodness knew how far!”
Then he sends her away. On May Day he tells her he has arranged lessons with Madison Bowers, the best voice teacher in the city. “You are not by nature, I think, a pianist,” he says, and looks at her “with that one eye which sometimes seemed to see deeper than any two eyes, as if its singleness gave it privileges.” Cather does not turn the loss into a gift. She gives the half-sighted man the farthest sight in the room, and leaves it at that.
Between those two scenes comes the chapter that gives the novel its title. Thea goes alone to the Art Institute, and among its pictures finds one she imagines nobody cares for but herself, and which seems to wait for her: Jules Breton’s 1884 painting of a peasant girl in a field at daybreak, transfixed as she listens to a bird. “That was her picture,” Cather writes. The novel about a singer takes its title from a picture of a listener, and from a painting, which cannot make a sound. Whatever the girl in the field is hearing, we have to supply it ourselves.
Then comes a symphony concert: Dvořák’s From the New World, and Wagner’s entry of the gods into Valhalla. During the Largo, Thea knows that what she wants is exactly that. She comes out into the street afterward, the city falls on her, and she clutches the feeling the music gave her as if someone might take it. Cather’s sentence is the most violent in the book. “There was some power abroad in the world bent upon taking away from her that feeling.”
A faint tone, newly heard, and around it a broadband roar flooding in from every side: the question of a life is whether the gap can be held open wide enough for the tone to survive. Thea answers it for herself on the spot. “As long as she lived that ecstasy was going to be hers.”
But she has no way yet to keep the promise. A second winter follows, under Bowers, and it goes worse. She falls ill with tonsillitis, and Fred Ottenburg, a rich young Chicagoan who has fallen in love with her, tells her she has been going down ever since. “This year has been mostly wasted,” she tells him. Chicago has taught her what the tone is. It takes a canyon in Arizona to show her where her own noise comes from.
V The Ragbag
“And now her power to think seemed converted into a power of sustained sensation.”The Song of the Lark, Part IV, Chapter II
Fred offers the prescription in a sentence a doctor might have written. “What you need is to sit in the sun and bake for three months.” He offers her a ranch in Arizona. Near it lies a canyon whose cliffs are honeycombed with the houses of a people who left centuries ago. Cather calls them the Ancient People, and gives the whole fourth part of the novel their name.
She had been there herself. In the spring of 1912, on leave from the managing editorship of McClure’s, uncertain about her first novel, she went out to Arizona, where her brother Douglass worked for the railroad, and spent days with him among the cliff dwellings of Walnut Canyon, near Flagstaff. Three years later she gave the place to Thea.
It begins with something letting go. “The personality of which she was so tired seemed to let go of her,” Cather writes in the first chapter of the part. Thea takes one of the old rock rooms as her own, high in the cliff and full of sun, and lies in it through the long days. Thinking stops, and something else takes its place. Her power to think seems converted into a power of sustained sensation. She can become a mere receptacle for heat, or become a color. Or she can become “a continuous repetition of sound, like the cicadas.”
A cicada does not vary. It makes the same sound, over and over, as long as the heat lasts. A listener with low internal noise is one who, given the same note twice, becomes the same instrument twice. Thea in the cliff house has, for the first time in her life, stopped being a slightly different person from one moment to the next. Music comes to her in that state, and the change is in how it comes. “Music had never come to her in that sensuous form before. It had always been a thing to be struggled with.” The struggle was the noise.
Then, in the fourth chapter, Cather names what was in the way. “Her mind was like a ragbag into which she had been frantically thrusting whatever she could grab.” Chicago had been two winters of grabbing. “And here she must throw this lumber away.” What follows is a sorting before it is anything else: “The things that were really hers separated themselves from the rest.” Only then: “Her ideas were simplified, became sharper and clearer.” Here Cather and the model part company over a word. Her word is sharper, and in the model sharpness is the dial that did not move. But the sentence before it is closer to the model than her adjective. Nothing new has come in. What was hers has been sorted from what was not, and what is left reads as sharp.
As a figure, the canyon is a notch: a gap cut in a broad plateau, wide enough for a faint, old signal to be heard. Thea hears one, a voice out of the past, “not very loud, that went on saying a few simple things to the solitude eternally.” But the notch was the test on which the blind and the sighted tied. It measures an ear against the noise outside it, and leaving Chicago widened that gap. That is not what changed her. What changed was the noise she had carried in with her, and that is the other test.
The long note is a figure too, and it stretches the science further. The model’s longest tones last a third of a second, and its arithmetic is plain about them: the longer the note, the more the noise averages away. Three months in the sun is the same idea at the scale of a life, a reading the study can suggest but cannot prove. Cather finds her own image for it while Thea bathes in the stream at the bottom of the canyon, among the broken pottery of a people whose whole life, the ranch’s caretaker Henry Biltmer tells her, was bound up with water. What was any art, Thea thinks, but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself? In singing, “one made a vessel of one’s throat and nostrils and held it on one’s breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals.” A held note is a vessel. It keeps something still long enough to be heard.
The canyon gives her that one idea and takes a great deal away. Then, in the same fourth chapter, the stillness turns. Musical phrases drive each other through her mind, “and the song of the cicada was now too long and too sharp.” The sameness that quieted her has become too much, and everything seems suddenly to take the form of a desire for action. She decides to go to Germany to study, without further loss of time. The quiet was never where she was going. It was what let her hear where to go.
VI A Refining
“Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.”The Song of the Lark, Part VI, Chapter XI
Cather had watched the quiet happen to a real person before she wrote it. In the winter of 1913, on assignment for McClure’s, she went to interview the Swedish-born soprano Olive Fremstad, from whom Thea would be drawn. Fremstad arrived late for the afternoon appointment, back from a motor trip, exhausted, barely audible, looking much older than she was. Cather offered to come another day. That evening she went to The Tales of Hoffmann with Edith Lewis and Isabelle McClung, and before the second act the manager came out to say that the scheduled soprano was ill and Fremstad would sing in her place. Lewis remembered her transformed, singing without apparent effort. Cather kept saying it was impossible.
It is the experiment in miniature. The woman of the afternoon and the woman of the evening had the same throat. What differed was everything the throat had to pass through, and the stage, somehow, cleared it. Cather gave the split to Thea. In the sixth part of the novel, ten years on, Thea Kronborg is a famous Wagnerian soprano, and in its last great scene she sings Sieglinde in New York. Cather’s account of the performance has a sentence the study would recognize: her body was absolutely the instrument of her idea. Nothing added. Nothing in the way.
And it is in that chapter that Cather gives her theory of what has happened, in the epigraph above, and then the sentence that completes it. “The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.” A refining is a subtraction. Ore is refined by taking out what is not the metal. Truthfulness, in a singer, is the same note answered the same way each time it returns, and a different note answered differently: steadiness, not repetition. In the Harsanyis’ box, between the acts, Harsanyi is pressed for Thea’s secret, and he answers that it is every artist’s secret, passion. “It is an open secret, and perfectly safe. Like heroism, it is inimitable in cheap materials.” Passion is Wunsch’s desire, grown up.
But Cather will not let the refining be free, and here the novel goes where the study cannot follow. Subtraction does not know what it is subtracting. In Dresden, Thea is given an unhoped-for chance to go on in a big part, Elizabeth in Tannhäuser. At home in Moonstone her mother is dying. When Dr. Archie, the family’s old friend, suggests that they send for Thea, Mrs. Kronborg hesitates. “I hate to interrupt her, now that she’s begun to get advancement.” He writes anyway. Thea answers that she absolutely cannot leave Dresden for six months, and begs her mother to wait for her. “If you’ll only get better, dear mother, there’s nothing I can’t do.” When Archie goes up to Moonstone, he finds Mrs. Kronborg lying serene, and his heart sinks. She dies before Thea comes home.
Years later, in New York, Archie worries aloud that she has too little personal life outside her work. “My dear doctor, I don’t have any. Your work becomes your personal life. You are not much good until it does.” Elsewhere she puts it more bleakly still: “I learned how to lose when my mother died.”
The model listener has only two dials, and so it can afford to call one of them noise. A life has no such convenience. The things Thea threw away in the canyon were lumber. The things she gave up in Dresden were not, and the instrument cannot tell the difference. That is the warning the study leaves unspoken and the novel speaks: the same quiet that lets a voice stand clear can also let a mother go unheard. Fred, talking to Archie, says the generous thing, though he has had only a few words with her in several years: “She’s all there, only there’s a great deal more of her.” It is true, and the novel knows what the sentence leaves out. There is a great deal more of her. Her mother is not there to hear it.
VII The Open Window
“He touched it softly, and it answered softly, kindly.”My Ántonia, Book II, Chapter VII
Three years after The Song of the Lark, Cather wrote the other road. My Ántonia is narrated by Jim Burden, a Nebraska boy grown up and looking back, and in its second book, on a Saturday night in March, a travelling pianist called Blind d’Arnault plays in the parlour of the hotel in Black Hawk. Jim tells his history. He was born in the Far South, on the d’Arnault plantation, “where the spirit if not the fact of slavery persisted.” When he was three weeks old an illness left him totally blind. His mother, a laundress for the family, named him Samson because he was blind. She was ashamed of him, and Cather adds at once: “She loved him devotedly.”
The piano was in the Big House, where young Miss Nellie d’Arnault practised with the windows open. Whenever his mother caught the boy slipping away from the cabin she whipped him, and he went anyway, and stood outside between the hollyhock rows, rocking, his blind face lifted to the sun. From her window Miss Nellie saw a “hideous” child wearing “an expression of idiotic rapture,” and she was often tempted to tell his mother to keep him at home. Then Cather gives her the sentence that could stand as the abstract of the October paper. “She remembered that his sense of hearing was nearly all he had—though it did not occur to her that he might have more of it than other children.”
The sentence is about the observer as much as the child. It is to the white girl at the window that it does not occur. On the ear she is right: the notch test found the blind ear no sharper than anyone’s. On the boy she is wrong. What the blind listeners did better was the judgment made behind the ear, and that is the one thing a window could not show her. The study’s confessed limit, that it cannot tell the loss of sight from the long life of leaning on sound, is the whole of this child’s childhood.
One day, while Miss Nellie was playing her lesson to her music teacher, he heard them get up from the piano and leave the room. He put one foot over the window-sill and straddled it. His mother had told him over and over that his master would give him to the big mastiff if he ever found him meddling. He pulled in his other foot. “He touched it softly, and it answered softly, kindly. He shivered and stood still.” It is the verb Cather gave Thea’s companion in the sand dunes, which also answered. A few lines later he approaches this highly artificial instrument through a mere instinct, “and coupled himself to it, as if he knew it was to piece him out and make a whole creature of him.” To piece him out: not a compensation, an extra organ to make up for a missing one, but a completion.
His teachers “found he had absolute pitch, and a remarkable memory.” That is a different gift from the one the study measured, but the rest of the account fits it. He wore his teachers out. He could never learn like other people, never acquired any finish. “As piano-playing, it was perhaps abominable, but as music it was something real, vitalized by a sense of rhythm that was stronger than his other physical senses.” Here is Wunsch’s der Rhythmus, in the baby at the first cry, and here is a man who has it and never acquires what can be taught. Whatever made his quiet, lessons did not. That night in Black Hawk, in the middle of a crashing waltz, he turns to one of the men behind him and whispers, “Somebody dancing in there.” Through a wall, under his own playing, he has heard the hired girls dancing in the dining room.
And this is where Cather gets it wrong, in the same chapter where she gets the ear most exactly right. Jim is fair to the music. He sees the man through a fog of stock images: a head that is “almost no head at all,” “some glistening African god of pleasure, full of strong, savage blood.” “To hear him, to watch him, was to see a Negro enjoying himself as only a Negro can.” This is the minstrel caricature of the period, offered as observation. The critic John T. Matthews reads it as Jim managing a plantation past he cannot afford to look at, turning the evidence of forced labour into a spectacle of pleasure.
Signal detection theory, the mathematics under the October study, has a precise word for what Jim is doing, and it is not noise. A listener can add two things to a signal. Noise varies from one hearing to the next. Bias does not: it is a lean toward one answer, given in advance of the evidence. Low noise means the same note gets the same answer. Bias means every note gets the same answer. Because it never wavers, it does not feel like an addition. It feels like seeing. The quietest instrument in the chapter is d’Arnault’s ear, which finds the dancers through a wall. The most biased is the white eye, Miss Nellie’s at her window and Jim’s in the parlour, which cannot find the person in front of it.
The study’s authors tested nine blind listeners and called theirs, in print, a small sample. Jim watches one man for one evening and pronounces on a race.
Cather knew the type he was drawn from. On May 18, 1894, an unsigned review in the Nebraska State Journal, attributed to her on the word of a fellow student, described a concert by Thomas Wiggins, billed as Blind Tom. He had been born enslaved in Georgia in 1849, blind from birth, and the family that held him reportedly made a fortune from his touring; he could, it was said, reproduce a piece after a single hearing. The review called him “a human phonograph.” A phonograph adds nothing to what it plays, and it plays the same thing every time. The young reviewer heard a man with almost no internal noise and mistook steadiness for the absence of a self. Cather later insisted, Matthews notes, that her model for d’Arnault was not Tom at all but John William “Blind” Boone, a trained pianist who ran his own career; the Cather Foundation credits Boone as the inspiration. Matthews reads the insistence as part of the disavowal.
There are two windows in Cather’s work, four years apart. In 1918 a blind child climbs in through one toward a piano. In 1922 she asks novelists to throw the furniture out of another. She did not, so far as I know, connect them. But Jim Burden’s caricature is furniture of the oldest kind: a set of received formulas carried into a room and set down in front of a man, so that a reader sees the formulas and not the man. It is exactly what her own principle would have cleared away.
VIII The Thing Not Named
“Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, it seems to me, is created.”Willa Cather, “The Novel Démeublé”
The essay of 1922 is short, and it argues one thing. Writers had come to believe, she said, that close observation and exact description were what made a novel, and the form had filled up with things. Cather wanted the room emptied. Leave the scene, she wrote, as bare as the stage of a Greek theatre, or as the house into which the glory of Pentecost descended. And then she says what the emptying is for, in the sentence the whole essay exists to deliver. “It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the over-tone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.”
She reached for a figure of hearing, and hearing does something like it, though the other way round. Cather’s ear divines an overtone that is not sounded. The listener in a hearing laboratory divines a ground note from overtones that are. Play a tone with its lowest frequency removed, leaving only the harmonics above it, and listeners still hear the missing note. The brain computes it from the pattern of what remains; how, precisely, is still argued over. It happens on the telephone. A man’s voice centres around a hundred and fifty cycles a second, and old telephone lines carried nothing below three hundred, and still the voice on the line sounds like him. Every phone call is a novel démeublé. The note that matters is the one that was taken out.
Here the October paper and Cather meet. A listener hears the thing not named the same way twice only if what the listener adds is steady. The inferred note is built inside the head, out of the listener’s own machinery, and if that machinery wobbles, the note wobbles with it. Cather’s principle asks two things at once: that the writer take the furniture out of the room, and that the reader be quiet enough to hear what the emptiness implies. The study measured judgments of tones, not readers. But it gives the second requirement a name.
The essay was also a confession, though it took her another nine years to make it in so many words. The Song of the Lark runs to six parts and an epilogue, and it tells nearly everything. When the London publisher William Heinemann declined it, he wrote to her, as she recalled in 1931 in “My First Novels (There Were Two),” that the full-blooded method, “which told everything about everybody,” was not natural to her. She did not altogether agree at the time. By 1931 she had come round: “Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.” My Ántonia, she said, went back to the road of O Pioneers!, not the road of the Lark.
So the novel that holds Cather’s account of a mind throwing its lumber away is itself, by its author’s later judgment, a ragbag. She wrote the canyon chapters and then spent the next decade learning to write like them. The books that followed, A Lost Lady, The Professor’s House, Death Comes for the Archbishop, are leaner, and they leave more out. And in 1937, for the Autograph Edition of her collected works, she went back into The Song of the Lark and revised it. She did to her own method what Thea did in the cliff house.
IX The Tuner
“We do nothing but repeat after that.”The Song of the Lark, Part VI, Chapter IX
The October paper begins where the legend begins: with the observation that a remarkable number of blind people have made careers as musicians and as piano tuners. The tuners, at least, have a history, and its central figure shows that the legend was built as much as it was born.
Claude Montal lost his sight to typhoid as a small child, and in 1817 entered the Institute for Blind Youth in Paris. There, with a fellow student named Tourasse, he took to tuning the school’s neglected pianos. The regular tuner complained, and the pianos were locked away from them. So the two young men bought an old piano with money from Tourasse’s brother, took it apart, rebuilt it, and presented it to the director, who was amazed. Montal went on to publish a manual of tuning in 1836, to hire only blind tuners, and to help build a programme at the institute for training them that was copied abroad.
So the blind tuner of the legend came, in his origins, by both roads at once. The loss was given. The rest was a school, a locked piano, a dismantled one, and a programme of training. The study found that blindness and years of practice each go with lower noise, and that the two add together. Montal’s workshop put them deliberately side by side.
What he taught his pupils to listen for is the last thing this essay needs. Sound two strings meant to be the same note, and if they are not quite the same, the tone swells and fades, swells and fades. Tuners call this beating, and the rate of the beating is the difference between the two pitches. Turn the pin, and as the strings come closer the beats slow. A slow beat takes time to reveal itself: a mistake of one cycle a second needs a full second before the swell comes round. A tuner cannot hurry. A singer in a canyon cannot either.
Montal taught his students to hear an interval come pure, turning the pin until its beats disappeared. Then, because a keyboard cannot have every fifth and third pure at once, he taught them to leave some beating in those intervals on purpose, until each one was tolerable. The unison, two strings on one note, is the interval meant to fall silent.
Late in the novel, Thea gives Dr. Archie her own account of an artist’s course. Art, she says, after Wagner, is only a way of remembering youth, and when the artist has got it all out, “then we stop. We do nothing but repeat after that. The stream has reached the level of its source.” A unison is that moment in a pair of strings. The pitches meet, the beating stops, and nothing is left to happen but the same note. It is the sameness the essay has been praising, carried one step too far: not a steady instrument but a finished one.
Picture the tuner, then, as Cather might have, with nothing furnished in the scene: a blind man bent over an open piano in a quiet room, one hand on the tuning hammer. He brings a unison together first, the swell slowing and slowing until it stops and there are not two notes in the room but one. Then he moves to the fifth. He turns the pin until the two strings almost agree, stops short, and listens. The sound swells and fades, very slowly, steady as a pulse. It is not silence and it is not noise. It is a difference held exactly, by an ear quiet enough to hear how much is left, and he leaves it there. It is the sound Thea made of her own life a moment before she spoke of the stream, when she had every reason to think she had arrived: “I haven’t reached it yet, by a long way.”
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Sources: Woon Ju Park, Jasmine Awad and Ione Fine, “Enhanced pitch perception in early blind individuals and musicians is due to reduced internal noise,” bioRxiv preprint (2025), published in the Journal of Neuroscience, October 2026 (doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0510-26.2026), with Neuroscience News’s report and Scientific American’s, which suggested this essay; on the 2004 study by Pascal Belin, Robert Zatorre and colleagues, “Tone task proves blind hear better,” Nature news. On Cather: Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (1915), Project Gutenberg text, Part I, chapters XI to XIII and XV; Part II, chapters III and V to VII; Part III, chapter VI; Part IV, chapters I to IV; and Part VI, chapters I to III and IX to XI; My Ántonia (1918), Project Gutenberg text, Book II, chapter VII; “The Novel Démeublé”, The New Republic 30 (April 12, 1922), per the Willa Cather Archive’s index to her nonfiction, collected in Not Under Forty (1936); and “My First Novels (There Were Two),” The Colophon (1931), as excerpted by Encyclopedia.com; on the 1937 Autograph Edition, the Willa Cather Archive. “Willa Cather’s Inspiration for The Song of the Lark, Olive Fremstad,” Literary Ladies Guide; “Willa Cather in the Desert,” Humanities, July/August 2015. On d’Arnault and his models: John T. Matthews, “Willa Cather and the Burden of Southern History”; Blind Tom Wiggins, for the 1894 review and its attribution; and the Willa Cather Foundation’s “John William Boone & Cather.” On the tuner and the physics: Claude Montal; “Claude Montal, the Creator of the Piano Technician’s Profession,” Art of Tuning; beats and the missing fundamental. Essay concept development by Claude Fable 5.2. Drafted by Claude Opus 5.5. Literary and copy editing by Claude Sonnet 5.5. Outside literary review by Claude Fable 5.2. Images generated by Gemini Argon, except Jules Breton’s painting, reproduced from the Art Institute of Chicago’s public-domain collection, and the cover of the Vintage Classics edition. On how these essays are made, see The Third Thing.