Where we got our music

After about half an hour, the wind began to funnel down from the high southern pass, gaining force with each passing moment. A Venturi effect caused the gusts passing upstream through the narrow gorge to compress into a vigorous breeze that swept past our crouched bodies, the combined temperature and windchill now making us decidedly uncomfortable. Then it happened. Sounds that seemed to come from a giant pipe organ suddenly engulfed us. The effect wasn't a chord exactly, but rather a combination of tones, sighs, and midrange groans that played off each other, sometimes setting strange beats into resonance as they nearly matched one another in pitch. At the same time they created complex harmonic overtones, augmented by reverberations coming off the lake and the surrounding mountains. At those moments the tone clusters, becoming quite loud, grew strangely dissonant and overwhelmed every other sensation... 

[Our guide Angus Wilson, a Nez Perce Indian] took us a cluster of different length reeds that had been broken off by the force of wind and weather over the course of seasons. As the air flowed past the reeds, those with open holes at the top were excited into oscillation, which created a great sound -- a cross between a church organ and colossal pan flute... 

Seeing recognition in our faces, Angus then took a knife from the sheath at his belt and...selected and cut a length of reed from the patch, bored some holes and a notch into it and began to play...[Then] he turned to us and, in a measured voice, said: "Now you know where we got our music. And that's where you got yours, too."

from The Great Animal Orchestra by Bernie Krause

Thanks, Andrew Ray, for the reminder of this.

Photo by Edward S. Curtis 1911, wikipedia

A roar on the other side of silence

You only have to imagine being in a desert to realise the variety of sounds a microphone on the surface of Mars could record – and how they can be interpreted. First of all, the wind, whistling across the planetary landscape – how fast is it travelling? How often does it vary in speed or direction? What does a dust devil sound like? Or a dust storm? What about the crack of thunder associated with a lightning bolt? Or the variation in pressure during an electric storm? Once the wind drops, the gentle sounds that break the silence can be heard: the settling of dust grains disturbed by the wind.

– from What does the solar system sound like? by Monica Grady.

In a review of Trevor Cox's delightful Sonic Wonderland, I invited meditation on: the sound from black holes (B flat 56 octaves below middle C); reverberations through loops in the Sun's outer atmosphere; and a wind shuffling rock grains through the Martian air.

Sound waves from the great storm that is the red spot on Jupiter may be the cause of heating in its upper atmosphere.

A creative interpretation of the old idea of  the 'music of the spheres.'  , which I have come across thanks to Stephon Alexander's The Jazz of Physics is an interpretation of Johannes Kepler's The Harmony of the World by Willie Ruff and John Rogers.


Image via APOD

Deep song

Whale song has artistic elements beyond simple communication of information. For example, since each whale theme ends with consistent final sounds, the phrases can be said to “rhyme” in a way akin to human poetry. Is such ornamental courtship behavior just an illustration of the “male quality” valued by hard-line evolutionists? Or does it show that evolution, over thousands of years, is able to produce art if there are no serious predators around?

Edward Sapir quoted by David Rothenberg in Whales synchorize their songs across oceans...

Image by Mike Deal

'Engaging fully with the world, within time'

[In O nata lux] Lauridsen has masterfully balanced numerous different tendencies in the listener so that no single instance of melody springs univocally into the foreground.  The melody is effortlessly recognisable, but it also functions as overtones to other phrases, and as echoes of other phrases. It is part of the larger flow, and that whole flow is indicating possibilities of tones beyond itself. We find ourselves releasing our usual constraining focus of attention, our agenda-driving volition, our control over our attention in order to absorb the nuances that we cannot consciously trace out. As we do, the everyday gestalt structure of our perception is subtly but radically altered: the musical foreground and background blend together, and as they do, the distinction between listener and music as well seems to dissipate. The perceptual field temporarily suffuses what Merleau-Ponty called the "second background" of one's body. Then, when the flow of music holds back, we are brought with it into a momentary stillness of rare tranquility and openness to our surroundings, with an attitude of wonder — at least temporarily. The experience is precisely not escaping the changing natural world into an eternity beyond it. It is engaging fully with the world, within time.

'Tempos of Eternity' by Barbara C. Goodrich in Art, Aesthetics and the Brain (2015)


Photo by author

Musica universalis

The equations for atoms and light are, almost literally, the same equations that govern musical instruments and sound.

Frank Wilczek, A Beautiful Question (2015)

Wonder tracks

I am about to spend a few days off-grid on a small island, writing.  Here are ten pieces of human music linked to wonder [see footnote] that I could imagine taking with me:

1. Pygmy polyphony. People may have probably been singing like this for tens of thousands of years and perhaps much longer. They want the forest to be happy.

2. Shen Khar Venakhi from 11th century Georgia. The last line translates as "You yourself are the sun, shining brilliantly."

3. Miserere Nostri, Domine by Thomas Tallis. 

4. J.S. Bach — pretty much passim but let's say the Gigue from 4th Partita.

5. For a bit of OTT, the Dies Irae from Verdi's Requiem conducted by Riccardo Muti 

6. Even more OTT, Das Lied von der Erde by Gustav Mahler. Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod.   

7. The final scene of The Firebird by Igor Stravinksy.  

8. Once in a Lifetime from Remain in Light by Talking Heads. There is water at the bottom of the ocean. 

9. Become Ocean by John Luther Adams. Alex Ross has called it "the loveliest apocalypse in musical history."

10. For my family, What a wonderful world sung by Louis Armstrong.  

What would you take?


Footnote:

Any experience of wonder is, of course, historically situated and constrained in all sorts of ways. My list probably does little more than highlight my prejudice and ignorance. But all of us are, inevitably, situated — albeit in different places!  I'll go with a definition of wonder by the philosopher Martyn Evans:

an attitude of altered, compellingly-intensified attention towards something that we immediately acknowledge as somehow important – something whose appearance engages our imagination before our understanding but which we will probably want to understand more fully with time.

Tracks that didn't quite make my cut include music for Japanese flute, the fourth movement from Mozart's 41st Symphony, Artur Schnabel playing Beethoven's 24th variation on a theme by Diabelli, A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall by Bob Dylan and Um Tom by Caetano Veloso.  As a restorative after the Dies Irae, try Tutto nel mondo è burla.  My favourite Armstrong track is West End Blues (with Earl Hines), and the song my eight-year-old would like is Somewhere Over the Rainbow.

Songs of green wonder

Groovy tracks from the 1100s

O Nobilissima Viridatas by Hildegard of Bingen (listen here)  translates from Latin as follows:

O most noble greening power,
rooted in the sun,
who shine in dazzling serenity in a sphere
that no earthly excellence can comprehend.
You are enclosed
in the embrace of divine mysteries.
You blush like the dawn,
and burn like a flame of the sun.

Shen Khar Venakhi by Demetrius I (listen here) translates from the Georgian as follows:

You are a vineyard newly blossomed
Young, beautiful, growing in Eden,
(A fragrant poplar sapling in Paradise.)
(May God adorn you. No one is more worthy of praise.)
You yourself are the sun, shining brilliantly.

Image via wiki

Howls and sweet airs

The ambiguities of wonder experienced by European adventurers in the New World, writes Stephen Greenblatt [1], are shown in a passage from History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil by Jean de Léry. During his stay among the Tupinambá in 1557, de Léry witnessed a solemn religious ceremony which frightened and amazed him:

While we have our breakfast, with no idea as yet of what they intended to do, we began to hear in the men’s house…a very low murmur, like the muttering of someone reciting his hours. Upon hearing this, the women (about two hundred of them) all stood up and clustered together, listening intently. The men little by little raised their voices and were distinctly heard singing all together and repeating this syllable of exhortation, Heu, heu, heu, heu; the women, to our amazement, answered them from their side, and with a trembling voice; reiterating that same interjection, Heu, heu, heu, heu, let out such cries for more than a quarter of an hour, that as we watched them we were utterly disconcerted. Not only did they howl, but also, leaping violently into the air, they made their breasts shake and they foamed at the mouth — in fact, some, like those who have the falling-sickness over here, fell in a dead faint; I can only believe that the devil entered their bodies and that they fell into a fit of madness...

But then the mood shifts:

However, after these chaotic noises and howls had ended and the men had taken a short pause (the women and children were no silent), we heard them once again singing and making their voices resound in a harmony so marvellous [of] sweet and gracious sounds… At the beginning of this witches’ sabbath…I had been somewhat afraid; now I received in recompense such joy, hearing the measured harmonies of such a multitude, and especially in the cadence and refrain of the song, when at every verse all of them would let their voices trail, saying Heu, heuare, heura, heurare, heura, heara, oueh — I stood there transported with delight [tout ravi]. Whenever I remember it, my heart trembles, and it seems their voices are still in my ears.

[1] Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World, Stephen Greenblatt (1988)

More than just music

Feelings of weightlessness may be experienced when listening to Lumbye's Champagne Galop, Bob Marley's Exodus, or Bach's St. Matthew Passion…  

Metaphors employed by the informants include snowflakes (Bach), stone pillars (Mozart), an incense holder (Beethoven), and a red-hot toaster (Wagner). Listening experiences are compared to having lemonade in one's legs, being cut by a piercing laser beam, going on a rollercoaster, or being nailed to the bench…  

Other kinds of feelings include satisfaction, gratitude, perfection, love, solemnity, humility, admiration, patriotism, and sex…  

Music may prove important in connection with illness and death (e.g., funeral music), as well as with love…  

Music may prompt epiphanies that suddenly change a situation completely… 

Strong experiences when performing music…include (total) involvement, experiencing no fear, no time, no self, trance, collective touch, universal humanity...

from a review essay by Sven Bjerstedt of Strong Experiences with Music: Music is Much More than Just Music by Alf Gabrielsson (2011)

See also Syncopation, Body-Movement and Pleasure in Groove Music

On the negative side: Pathways to Music Torture


Image: Ad Parnassum by Paul Klee (1932)

"The more I listened...the more each note seemed sweeter than before"

No matter what I learn and how little I know, I will never give up the chance to make music together with the birds. To wing it, so to speak, and wait for what will cheep in return. Like all art, bird song works best when we let it play on. Like science, it is built on the music of endless previous generations, still evolving into new sounds, The music made the questions begin, but no answer will erase the gift of the song, some simple offering from human to animal and back.

from Why Birds Sing by David Rothenberg (2005)


Birds in Warped Time II by Somei Sato.

The title of the post is from The Progress of Rhyme by John Clare

21st century sublime

In a post on Rationally Speaking last year, Steve Neumann asked what can be sublime in the 21st century?

He argued that nature could no longer supply it, and "our feeling for the sublime, if it is to happen at all, will have to come more and more from culture." His chosen example was the music of...Led Zeppelin, and specifically their live performances.

But can the likes of Pagey, Percy, Jonsey and Bonso be the only trigger?

Turn back for a moment to Burke's 1757 treatise.  As an admirably concise video reminds us,  a feeling of the sublime is something that affects us viscerally despite the danger.  The sublime moves us deeply because it is tied to the possibility of pain. [1] When we experience the sublime we exercise the nerves that could save our lives in a genuinely threatening situation.

We may need those nerves when facing manmade effects in nature such as rapid climate change. For that reason, I'd say this sequence from Chasing Ice can arouse feelings of the sublime, as well as being scary.




Note [1] (added 4 December) "The physiology of fear and attraction [can be] so similar that we sometimes cannot tell them apart," writes Sy Montgomery.

The tree of song

Once there were seven Gond brothers who wanted to give away their property and mingle with the common folk. The Great God appeared in the youngest brother's dream and told him that their calling was to sit under the Saja tree and play music in praise of him. Now the Saja tree is the tree of song.

— from The Night Life of Trees (2006)

Into this wild Abyss, the womb of Nature

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft captured these sounds of interstellar space. Voyager 1's plasma wave instrument detected the vibrations of dense interstellar plasma, or ionized gas, from October to November 2012 and April to May 2013.

"The birds are the opposite of time"

The lecture ends, the musicians raise their instruments, and the crystal liturgy begins. Two birds start a predawn song they’ve sung since long before human time. The clarinet channels a blackbird; the violin, a nightingale. The cello skates about in a fifteen-note loop of ghostly harmonics, while the piano cycles through a rhythm of seventeen values, divided into a pattern of twenty-nine chords. This whirling solar system would take four hours to unfold its complete circuit of nested revolutions. But the movement lasts a mere two minutes — a sliver between two infinities.

— from a description of Quartet for the End of Time by Olivier Messiaen (1941) in Orfeo by Richard Powers (2014)

Landscape is the culture that contains all human culture

— Barry Lopez as quoted by John Luther Adams.


Image: Sunset in winter over Yellowstone Lake, Frank Walker, 1978, via NPS

A small but crucial part of everywhere

     Three movements of Symphony 41 pass by...And then the finale, its four modest notes. Do, re, fa, mi: half a jumbled scale. Too simple to be called invented. But the thing spills out into the world like one of those African antelopes that fall from the womb, still wet with afterbirth but already running.
     Young Peter props up on his elbows, ambushed by a memory from the future. The shuffled half scale gathers mass; it sucks up other melodies into its gravity. Tunes and countertunes split off and replicate, chasing each other in a cosmic game of tag. At two minutes, a trapdoor opens underneath the boy. The first floor of the house dissolves above a gaping hole. Boy, stereo, speaker boxes, the love seat he sits on: all hang in place, floating on the gusher of sonority pouring into the room.
      Five viral strands propagate, infecting the air with runaway joy. At three and a half minutes, a hand scoops  Peter up and lifts him high above the blocked vantage of his days...
      At six minutes into the amazement, the give galloping melodies align in a quintuple fugue. Lines echo and overlap, revealing where the music has been heading from the opening Do. They plait together too tightly for Peter's ear to make out everything that happens inside the five-way weave. The sound surrounds him, and Peter is immanent, inside it all, a small but crucial part of everywhere...

-- from Orfeo by Richard Powers (2014)