There’s a certain summer sound you rarely hear in New York.
When I was a kid, you heard it all the time. Someone was playing a musical instrument, heard through an open window.
Often it would be from across a courtyard; it might be a piano, or saxophone. Sometimes it would be vocals, practiced by an opera singer. When I moved to my current home it was a performer of show tunes.
Rear Window is a masterpiece of certain summer sounds, as among other things you hear the composer practicing on his upright piano. The sounds are, of course, muted because they are not in the room with wheelchair-confined James Stewart, but what Hitchcock does brilliantly is capture the city lives of others, in an era before air conditioners, when you could hear the birds and the tinkling of a piano, as I did the other day while walking to the subway.
Sometimes summer sounds still survive.