Quiet

Lasr night I didn't switch the telly on, not the wireless or CD player either. I read some more Thomas Mann in the quiet of the evening.
You're lucky if you can find any but it's worth having. Usually I'd have some music on to read by. Usually I'd have the news on but it's funny how you don't miss that blundering buffoon chuntering on, saying either the opposite of what he said last time or will say next time.
I'm not the first to discover quiet and I realize the point of John Cage's 4.33, or some of it, is the extraneous sound one can't get away from. I once punctured out in the countryside when I was a cyclist and was surprrisded how quiet it was without the tyres on the road, the whirr of the gears and the wind in my ears but, once accustomed to that, I heard the vast birdsong and the racket they made. Not a racket, of course - gorgeous.
Silence is potentially terrifying but quiet is as valuable as it is rare. The reason I have so little of it is that, looking up at the bank of CD's, I think I ought to listen to them; I'm with Pliny the Elder in wanting to make use of my time by hearing something, like Paul Sinha's excellent monologue that was on R4 at bathtime last night. O, yes, I must have had the wireless on then but not afterwards.
I don't necessarily want to become all mystical about it and escape into a state of meditative non-being but less can be more.
However, one returns to sound soon enough. My attempts at music reviews often fall back on saying how long it will be before a disc is filed on the shelves and thus isn't on the 'playlist' any more. Isata Kanneh-Mason's Clara Schumann has done well. I default back to the Buxtehude Complete Works on a regular basis and there are still Mozart operas to listen to that haven't had much of an outing but it is necessary to look at what other options there are.
I don't know what I said about the Veracini Complete Sonatas (for violin) when it came out but, goodness gracious, rediscovery must be at least as good as the first time around. A contemporary of Bach, there's not so much between them that Bach should be regarded as the all-time maestro and Veracini never heard of.
Following last week's Cadogan Hall Prom of Weinberg and Bacewicz chamber music - bleak chambers though there's might be- it is similar with them, how Shostakovich is a prime candidate for Greatest Composer of the C20th while these two, who sound much like him, are perhaps only just finding some wider recognition.