Listen to music close to the limits of what we can hear or tolerate.
Smetana’s First String Quartet contains a low tremolo, above which the violin plays a long shrill note, representing “the fateful ringing in my ears of the high-pitched tones which, in 1874, announced the beginning of my deafness”.
Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending features violin passages that climb higher and higher. By contrast, there’s a passage in the final adagio of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony where the high strings engage with an almost subterranean contrabassoon.
