SOMEWHERE BETWEEN FLENSBURG, DE & KØBENHAVN, DK — When I started writing this post, my choice of song, “Interlude” by Leith Ross, felt a little bit too on-the-nose, too much of a cop-out; I wanted to reflect on, without the constraint of lyrics, my own “interlude” from my usual Copenhagen programming: Core Course Week.
However, my attempt to simplify my writing fell flat, and the lack of lyrics ended up making this Core Course reflection all the more difficult (hence the severely delayed blog post). I listened to “Interlude” on loop while trying to write, headphones switched to full noise cancellation mode to allow their vocals to fill my body. Part of what makes this blog concept so difficult is the endless search for the right words to convey why that specific song fits the story that I’m trying to tell. With lyrics, the process is still tough, but much more cut-and-dry; I’m an English minor, I usually know how to analyze words. Without lyrics, I’m grasping at water, desperately trying to catch the feelings of a melody into my hands to mold into narrative.
The fourth track on their debut album To Learn, “Interlude” is a slow build, with Ross’ vocals filling and expanding in the silence. There’s an intensity to the quiet gentleness of their voice, something hauntingly beautiful. Even though I had previously listened to the album on its release, I, in all likelihood, had skipped over the interlude to reach the other tracks with lyrics faster. It took some slowing down and intentionality on my end to listen to the song its its entirety. In one day, I listened to Interlude fourteen times, fourteen more times than I had before writing this. I realized that there was meaning to be found in something usually ignored.
Core Course Week is a unique constellation in the DIS universe. Around a month into the term, your other electives are put on pause, and for one week, you spend half the time in Copenhagen doing programming for your core course (guest lectures, local field studies, etc.), and the other half is your Short Study Tour, where you travel with your classmates and professor to somewhere in Denmark or a neighboring country as enrichment for your coursework.
While most of my friends were off to cities like Århus or Malmö, my professor insisted that all of DIS would be there and that he wanted to take us somewhere unique. So, my Cultural Diversity and Integration core course ended up in two tiny border towns: Sønderborg, Denmark and Flensburg, Germany, two places I had never heard of, places easy to skip over—much like interlude tracks like Ross’.
As the city sounds of Copenhagen faded into the nothingness of windmills and open space, the bus ride south gave way to a different kind of intensity, one that comes with sharing such intimate space and time with people I had only sat in a few hours of class with. It dawned on me that I was leaving something behind in Copenhagen, a new home and community that I would miss, even for the three days I would be away.
Most significant, though, was the intensity of silences that underscored the trip. As we walked from our hostel to the “downtown” area of Sønderborg, I joked with my newfound class friends that the place felt like a ghost town — Get Out-esque. Everything felt far too empty, especially in contrast to the city we had left behind. The snow and wind chased people out of the streets, the water from the Alssund Sound curling onto the cobblestone the most movement I had seen in town.
At the German Minority Museum, there was almost deafening silence during our visit, where we were inundated with Nazi paraphernalia, where the curation choices were intended to give us a “different” perspective on the German minority, a “neutral” take on what Hitler’s regime meant to the only officially registered “minority” in Denmark. What was left unspoken — the six million European Jews and five million others systematically murdered by the Nazis and its enduring global consequences — haunted the margins of the museum’s supposed objectivity. The space my teacher gave our class to process and puzzle out the significance of such silences was central to making that field study valuable, despite its intensity, just as “Interlude” gives room for silence.
To cross the Danish/German border, my teacher took us on the first hike I’ve been on since arriving in Denmark. After winding through the folklore-esque forest, we arrived at an unassuming bridge that demarcated the border between the two countries. The novelty and excitement of “crossing a border” buzzing through our class was quickly tempered by the apparent ordinariness of it all. And still, our teacher had us steep in the silence and reflect.
Here’s an excerpt from what I wrote that day:
Core course week was an exercise in many things — forced socialization with people I barely knew (that thankfully, worked out), Shazaming random Danish songs for bingo at a random Sønderborg bar, DIS-sponsored rum tasting — but most importantly, the trip was a meditation on silences and what to make of it. ♢
Songs of Copenhagen 
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