Letter to the Editor: We are deeply gratified that the Nashville Town Council is seriously addressing the issue of noise

Local Opinion X Editor, Please allow us to introduce ourselves: Nathan Montoya and Anne Vestuto. We are a semi-retired couple, and we are very excited to be purchasing a home in Nashville. We are moving from Madison, Indiana, where we owned and rehabbed a historic building on Main Street, operating a bookstore and living above the shop for 16 years. We both come from a deep background in music and art. Anne’s parents were visual artists, and her father taught art in the Brown County High School for many years. Nathan comes from a long line of professional musicians and music educators, earned a master’s degree from the IU Jacobs School of Music, and played in a band in New York City. He served 17 years as a professor in the Meadows School of the Arts at Southern Methodist University and is ending his fifth year on the board of directors of the Madison Performing Arts Foundation. When we moved to Madison, the community’s focus was on historic preservation and heritage tourism, with the development and success of Main Street businesses largely emanating from that. It was a peaceful, “hometown” environment with a local music culture thriving in several indoor venues and at the farmers’ market. However, in subsequent years, we have witnessed a gradual degradation of the quality of life in Madison. Noise from motorcycles, amplified outdoor buskers, and bars and other venues with open doors has gotten out of hand. A very comprehensive noise ordinance exists, but it is never enforced. The situation became intolerable for us as residents, and we decided to seek more hospitable surroundings. Given the natural beauty of the area, Nashville’s historic nature as an artist’s colony, and our personal history there, we settled on Brown County. Nashville struck us as a very livable community. In our initial online searches, we Googled “Nashville, Indiana and noise.” We were surprised and concerned that the “Peaceful Valley” was having issues with noise. At the time, a major factor in this was the volume of the music from the outdoor venue at Hard Truth Distillery. This led us to simply eliminate broad areas from consideration in our search for property. Our concern now is that what happened in Madison could happen in Nashville, that it could be derailed from its historic course. To quote The Eagles in “The Last Resort,” “You call someplace paradise, kiss it goodbye.” But one can hope otherwise. We are deeply gratified that the Nashville Town Council is seriously addressing the issue of noise. We hope that any ordinance or code forged will be reasonable for all and reliably and consistently enforced. We hope that music can be distinguished from noise. We hope that musicians can find the wisdom not to position themselves such that their music is perceived as noise. After all, a rose growing in the wrong place could be called a weed. We ask all parties to consider what social scientists refer to as the tragedy of the commons, which is the tendency of people to overuse a shared, finite resource until they spoil it. We so look forward to living in The Peaceful Valley. Nathan Montoya and Anne Vestuto Madison, Indiana Featured Local Savings