One day, it must have been between 1999 and 2006, I was alone at home in Victory Street, Hamrun when someone knocked on the door.
It was the famous composer Charles Camilleri, accompanied by a woman who turned out to be his sister, who had come from Australia.
They explained to me that they had lived in the house when they were children. Mro Camilleri explained how he used to sit on the stairs and listen to the Rediffusion set which was fixed high up on the wall facing the stairs.
The house is no more today. It was pulled down after we sold it.
I knew Fr Peter for far longer. He was one of my lecturers at the Royal University of Malta, fresh from his studies abroad. Later on, around 1980, I was sent on a mission to Milan, as president of the priests' society Christus Rex, to try and persuade him to come back to Malta.
He had gone to Milan after 1976 and was teaching at the Beato Angelico school there - a sort of a Sixth Form with special emphasis on art.
Others besides me were also trying to get him to come back. He came and masterminded the rebirth of the university apart from being the Nationalist Party administration's 360 degrees guru for many years to come.
This slim book is a short essay written some 40 years ago in a joint effort by the philosopher and the composer. The two were friends and close collaborators. In 1975 Fr Peter wrote an essay to complement Camilleri's Missa Mundi. Later they penned a dialogue entitled Mediterranean Music which was published by Unesco. Then they famously collaborated on three operas - Campostella (1993), The Maltese Cross (1995) and Elisabeth, or to be a Mann (2005).
The two have now died - Fr Peter in March 2012, Mro Camilleri in January 2009.
It is a philosophical excursus into the meaningfulness of noise.
"If silence is the opposite of sound, sound itself can be meaningful or meaningless (noise), depending on the context and the hearer. Of the tremendous number of sounds heard in the world by humans, only some are perceptible, namely those made by any object which vibrates with an oscillation of more than some 16 times per second, which is the threshold of human hearing. Even these perceptible ones are so numerous that human beings train themselves to ignore most of them. But, especially if particular attention is paid, many can be verbally classified (for example, thunder, voices, a military band, a train, a factory siren, etc.) Moreover, all these sounds made by nature, sounds made by the human body and its extensions, sounds made by mechanical and electrical technology. The three classes are not only in the order of their emergence in the world, but also of their predominance in the history of human (or, at least, Western) culture."
This paragraph also exemplifies one unfortunate trait of the book - it does not seem to have been properly subbed or corrected. At times, there is about a mistake on every page. I would not think the mistakes came from the two wise men, for they were meticulous persons. The Presentation at the beginning tells us that the improvements that Serracino Inglott made to the text in his own hand have been retained but other side annotations by the two authors have been deleted.
It is not clear who wrote what.
Western music has developed roughly on the following schema: In Classical Antiquity music was first conceived as an abstraction from speech. The close linkage of music to speech continued until the end of the Middle Ages although by that time the relationship between music and speech had been almost reversed with words becoming just one element within the musical totality.
In the Modern Era, after the Renaissance, a process started which generated the concept of music as a language of its own. But although music became largely independent of speech, it was still conceived as necessarily its structural analogue - it was thought of as the language of "feeling" as opposed to that of scientific knowledge.
The 20th century has witnessed the crisis of this concept.