The Score for a Quiet Coast

The piece he had been writing for nine years was, by his own admission, the problem. Anders is a Norwegian composer of some reputation in the parts of Europe that take such things seriously, and the commission — a string quartet for a festival in Bergen — had become a weight he carried from city to city without setting down. He had a flat in Berlin. He had a cabin in Hardanger. Neither had worked. He came to Tenerife in February, ostensibly for two weeks, because a friend had told him the silence on the southern slope was different to any silence he would have heard.

He is still there. The quartet was finished in May.

## What the silence was

The first thing Anders understood, the first evening on the terrace above Guía de Isora, was that the silence of the south Tenerife slope is not the silence of a Norwegian forest in winter — which is absence, which is cold, which waits. This silence was full. It was the Atlantic breathing against the low cliffs three hundred metres below. It was the warmth coming off the basalt wall behind him as the sun went. It was, he would say later, a silence that had been composed.

He did not touch the score for ten days. He walked the terraces. He watched the cistern — a great stone tank, half-full of winter rain — and the way the wind moved across its surface. He listened.

## The farmhouse

The finca had been a working house — stone walls, pine beams, a kitchen that smelled of woodsmoke and figs. It had been rented to climbers and walkers for twenty years. The owner, an elderly Canarian woman whose family had grown vines on the terraces, was selling because the climbing guests had stopped coming and the dry-stone walls had started to fail.

Anders did not, at first, intend to buy. He intended to extend his fortnight. Then a month. Then, when the owner mentioned quietly that she would prefer the house go to someone who understood what it was, he made an offer he could barely afford and stopped returning calls from Berlin.

## What we kept

When we were brought in, Anders had one instruction, repeated three times: "Do not make it nice."

We understood what he meant. The temptation, with a house like this, is to prettify — to soften the rough render, to replace the dark stone with something lighter, to add the glass and chrome that signal "architectural renovation" to a certain kind of magazine. Anders had no interest in that magazine. He wanted the house to remain what it was: a working building on a difficult coast, made of the materials the island is made of.

So we kept the volcanic basalt. We kept the pumice-stone insulation in the cavity walls — a traditional Canarian technique, the porous volcanic material holding air, that the original builders had used and that newer houses on the island had forgotten. We kept the dark terrazzo floors. We restored the old water cistern as a reflecting pool at the edge of the terrace, because Anders had been drawn to it from the first day and had said, watching the wind on its surface, "It moves like the second movement."

What we added was restraint. A wide glass screen between living room and terrace. The kitchen, moved to the cool north corner. Four bedrooms behind, each looking to the sea or the volcano. Cross-ventilation paths reopened through the depth of the plan. The mechanical cooling was installed, as a back-up. In the years since, Anders has never switched it on.

## The discovery

The quartet was finished in May, on a morning when the alisio wind was strong enough to move the water in the cistern in long, slow patterns, and Anders, who had been stuck on the third movement for a year, sat at the desk in the north corner and wrote the closing sixteen bars in the time it took the sun to cross the kitchen window.

He told me later, on the terrace, that the piece had been waiting for the silence to have a structure. "In Berlin the silence was just silence. Here, the silence has a key. It has a tempo. It has a direction." He gestured at the basalt wall, at the cistern, at the sea. "The house gave me the score."

The festival in Bergen performed the quartet that autumn. The reviews described it as warmer than his previous work, more patient, with a final movement that "sat, luminous and unhurried, in a way that suggested the composer had found a new room to write from." The critic did not know how literally this was true.

## What stayed

Anders kept the Berlin flat, briefly. Then he gave it up. He kept the Hardanger cabin. Then he sold it to a violinist he had once quarrelled with. The terraces of the finca now produce most of the fruit he eats. The vines have been restored by an elderly neighbour who takes half the harvest as rent. The dry-stone walls, mended, hold the soil through the winter rains.

The score of the quartet is dedicated, in the published edition, "to a silence that was not silence." The cistern, restored, still moves in the wind.

Some places do not inspire the work. They become the work, and the work is unrecognisable without them.