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| Josh O'Connor and Paul Mescal in The History of Sound. (Photo: MUBI.) |
In The History of Sound Lionel Worthing and David White fall in love over a song. Drinking in a bar on a Saturday evening in 1917, Lionel (Paul Mescal) hears David (Josh O’Connor), a fellow student at the New England Conservatory of Music, play a plaintive folk ballad Lionel grew up with and drifts to the piano. David, an orphan who grew up in privilege in Newport, Rhode Island, is a competent musician whose passion for American folk obsesses him. Lionel is a singer whose gifts have taken him off the Kentucky farm where he grew up and all the way to Boston, and he knows at first hand most of the tunes David has been collecting in his brain. The night they meet, they play and sing until the bar closes; then Lionel walks David back to his apartment and they become lovers. After they graduate, David goes off to Europe to fight in the Great War while Lionel returns home to the farm and his family. When the war is over David takes a job as a music professor in Maine. He reaches out to Lionel, inviting him to join him on a trip through the forests and islands of the state recording music on wax cylinders to preserve it for posterity, and the two men pick up their relationship where they left off. But David is now prone to spells of melancholy, and after they leave each other at the end of their journey Lionel stops hearing from him. He continues to write monthly letters to him until he finally gives up trying, in 1921. It isn’t for years, after Lionel has become first a singer in a world-famous Italian choir and then, driven by his own unsettled nature, a choir director back in the States, that he finds out what happened to the man he fell in love with in that Boston bar.
