Before February, we tended to equate silence with peace: camping trips, romantic walks, skies full of starlight. They are instances absent the daily transitory noise to which we have become accustomed, but they are far from silent. They fill our ears eventually with the foundational, permanent music of the Earth turning.

These instances were voluntary, sought out even. Our recent silence is imposed upon us. We escape it with TV reruns, news sources we agree with, Uber Eats and books we’ve already read – music requiring no thought, only recognition of the first few bars.

For years, my mother-in-law has been incoherent with dementia. Recently my wife and her sisters delivered to her an iPod and headphones, and immediately she hummed “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” and “Horse With No Name” in tune and even retrieved a few lyrics. Later, I pondered her momentary joy in recognizing music and her desperate lack of melody otherwise. I identified it as silence, but that seemed a too simple and maudlin view. Silence wasn’t what my mother-in-law encountered; it was not what confounded her past even age’s physical maladies. It was instead an assault of sound in which she could no longer find song.

The colossal fact arising from this virus is the same, and we are shockingly incapable of navigating it. Like a Grateful Dead solo, we figure to endure it, then return to “Touch of Gray” or “Uncle John’s Band” and sing along. But the solo goes on at volume 11 until it appears to be indecipherable noise. When my kids press me to listen to Lady Gaga or the Mountain Goats or Disturbed, I listen out of paternal love but prepare for a similar chaos from the speakers. But if I can permit myself to trust the unfamiliar a while, I discover not noise but musical experiences that did not exist before I permitted them to. Listening to new music requires a faith akin to religious, and it can deliver new epiphanies rather than simple comfort of those encountered long ago.

Following the horrors of the Black Death, Europe confronted the impermanence of its own existence, a problem religious hypocrisies and feudal barbarities had stupendously failed to address. Scholars returned to art, science, mathematics and literature, the classical tools. These were beautiful songs, nearly forgotten, though they were not new. What followed, however, was music of a different sort: calculus, astronomy, medicine, as well as new tools, the printing press and microscopes, and new notions of what being human might mean – freedom and ideological methods to provide it to individuals. And music. The tones and intervals Pythagoras identified with geometric patterns became symphonies of Puccini, Handel and Bach.

If we are going to draw from this new plague something other than relief at being spared, grief for those who were not and fear of pandemics to follow, we must discern from the experience not just the practicalities of turning this virus recognizable, but the music within its presence. There is a symphony in the sacrifice of health care workers, firefighters, police and grocery store workers, those at the warehouse and the corner market. There’s a minuet in sewing groups making masks for nurses. There’s a ballet in the phone calls my immune-compromised wife receives from people she hardly knows or has not heard from in years. And there are hymns in how we have looked out for one another, strangers and acquaintances and family, by denying ourselves simple luxuries we once thought rights. And in the awareness that now we cannot act for our own good without also acting for the good of others, and we cannot act selfishly without endangering ourselves is that familiar Pythagorean structure.

But this music is not all sweetness and wonder. We would do well to recognize the cacophony that obscures and threatens it: those who hoard toilet paper or billions of dollars, those leaders and institutions who employ the crude instruments of economic inequity, warfare and violence to bleat a lethal and senseless noise they insist is holy. Those with an utter lack of grace and decency. You see their commercials. We will get through this plague, they say, life will be back to normal by the Fourth of July (Easter it turns out was aspirational) then off screen they pray we don’t actually question the value of that normalcy.

Not silence but a new melody has been imposed upon us by this plague, one that can supersede the sometimes feckless soundtrack we accept as routine. History informs us returning to such ugly refrains rather than searching out an electric guitar and banging out our own tune leads to the most mournful of Dark Age lyrics: Bring out your dead.

My oldest son is a talented musician. His siblings love music as much but lack his gift. Each evening, though, they, too, practiced their instruments, first, committing a section to memory, then hunting time. And in a month, they had escorted sound from noise to melody. Nothing fancy, no trophies or plaques at the end. No stock bonuses. They recognized they would never be anything but passable as musicians. The music was the point, not their resume. So they played their instruments. It seems to me such acts of faith are where music, as well as character and decency, reside.