Experiencing sound, p.17
Experiencing Sound, page 17
“Fidelity” is a strange word here. At first it may seem to mean something like “high fidelity” or clarity of sound. On reflection, though, it suggests that what we draw from the blur demands a certain fidelity from us. When someone says “please” or pleads, or pleads by saying “please,” we cannot stop with hearing what has been said. We have to do something and we have to stand by it. The act is mostly far from portentous; we can comply without thinking if someone says, “Please pass the peas.” But sometimes the stakes are much higher. Not every “please” is pleasing.
Hahn’s poem follows a tradition stretching from St. Augustine to Lacan in seeing the passage from infancy to fluency as the decisive moment in becoming human. It does so with a light touch, in part because the identity of the poem’s baby is a blur to which the speaker aims to give fidelity. Is the baby hers or her? Is it a particular baby or just the human baby? The poem nestles these ambiguities in the latent presence of the continuum that sustains its utterance.
But it is not hard to find texts that ask for a greater share of that presence, often to excess. They do not want to tap into it but to plunge into it. By going almost back to the continuum itself, getting as close to its “noise” as possible without relinquishing the event; by letting verbal “music” rival utterance, they make the division of being not merely discernible but unmissable. What ordinarily appears as a separation, if it appears at all, becomes an active threshold, a thoroughfare. The temptation here is to quote from Finnegans Wake, but Edward Lear’s “The Jumblies” will do just as well:
They went to sea in a Sieve, they did,
In a Sieve they went to sea:
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter’s morn, on a stormy day,
In a Sieve they went to sea!
And when the Sieve turned round and round,
And every one cried, “You’ll all be drowned!”
They called aloud, “Our Sieve ain’t big,
But we don’t care a button! we don’t care a fig!
In a Sieve we’ll go to sea!”
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue,
And they went to sea in a Sieve.
The sea sailed by the Jumblies is in one of its guises the sea of sound that turns round and round in Lear’s jumbled verses. And if somehow the sieve holds water, that is because the continuum of the sea divides into rhythmic language through the mesh.
And music? Just to keep up with Plato? Music can tell this story too.
The Adagio from J. S. Bach’s Toccata in D Minor, BWV 913, provides a fine-grained illustration, especially when taken together with its incorporation in August Strindberg’s lyrical drama A Dream Play, where the music is not only supposed to be heard but also to be read; the play text includes the first measure of the score. Strindberg creates a musical duel between an offstage waltz and an onstage performance of the Adagio by “ugly Edith,” for whom the waltz is the sign of the world that shuns her. Just how much she plays is up to the imagination of the reader or stage director, but play she does. She plays enough to reduce the waltz to silence and cause the people around her to listen raptly to Bach.
The music involved, twenty-five measures long, is framed by bursts of rapid passagework, the defining mark of the toccata, the “touch” piece, as a genre. This is the blur before the event and after. It is music in which the harpsichord necessarily jangles, so that the blur is as much a part of the framing segments as the notes are. The event, the movement proper, unfolds over the course of some seventeen interior measures. The first ten are devoted to the unbroken repetition of a plaintive melodic-rhythmic figure that fills each measure, now in the treble, now in the bass. The remaining seven measures turn to the figure’s displacement across the bar line and from there to its fragmentation and final dissolution into the closing frame passage. The music extracts the figure—a plea that nothing can appease—from the blur of passagework, then remains steadily faithful to it no matter how harsh it becomes (very), and then lets it slip back whence it came. The figure’s significance rests with this fidelity to its implacable mournfulness, or, in Strindberg’s case, to the “ugly” self that cannot be loved but will not be denied. Thus in this musical duel, “ugly Edith” prevails over the social and sexual allure of the waltz, but she still falls into despair—and stops playing—when a naval officer grasps one of the dancers around the waist and crying, “Come, quickly!” leads her away.
58
Minding the Senses
If you had been taking a walk and when you came back I asked you what you had seen, the question would count as ordinary.1 It would be an expression of friendly interest. Unless your walk had been very boring, you would probably have no trouble answering. But if I had asked you what you had heard, the question would seem strange. You would probably wonder why I was asking. And unless your walk was interrupted by some unpleasant noise or commotion, you might not know what to say. “What do you hear?” is usually a question about gossip or word of mouth, not about the results of listening to the auditory environment. “What did you see?” is a question about acquiring knowledge.
This needs to change.
Both Plato and Aristotle affirmed that sight was supreme among the senses, and Aristotle introduced a hierarchy of the senses in which sight claimed first place and hearing second. This order has persisted ever since, though not without challenges and interruptions. Especially since the European Enlightenment, which grounded its ideal of knowledge in tables, charts, diagrams, and catalogs, seeing has been the default model of knowing. Darwin even gave the primacy of sight evolutionary credentials, arguing that sight assumed its high place literally, as human beings evolved, assumed an upright posture, and took their noses off the ground. Vision, moreover, requires a certain distance, which can be extended from physical to social space. The highest power comes with the best view.
But knowledge comes as much though the ear as through the eye. The point in saying so is neither to reverse the first and second place in the hierarchy of the senses nor to create parity between the two “theoretical” senses, but to do away with the idea of hierarchy altogether. All human knowledge is composite. All human senses are conceptual. All human concepts are sensory.
Consider another walk, this time a real one. Sometime around 1843 Henry David Thoreau took a walk in the snow and published an essay about it. His “A Winter Walk” seems to answer the very question—“What did you hear?—that I imagined asking instead of “What did you see?” Thoreau actually answers both questions, but in a revealing order. Hearing tends to come first, setting the conditions for seeing. What is heard gives in advance the meaning of what is seen, or, more strongly, supplies the transcendental element that the particulars of sight alone could not provide.
The essay begins with sound. It is morning. Thoreau awakens to a fresh snowfall:
The wind has gently murmured through the blinds, or puffed with feathery softness against the windows, and occasionally sighed like a summer zephyr lifting the leaves along, the livelong night. . . . The floor creaks under our feet as we move toward the window to look abroad.2
Sound in the form, almost in the person, of the wind has drifted into the room with the effect, the intent, of drawing the room’s inhabitant outside. And the sound has helpers: the touch of feathery softness (though nothing is touched) and the sensation of already walking, of making the floor creak and so yield as we move toward the window where the snow lies “warm as cotton or down.” The room too is warm, filled with “snug cheer,” but the winter cold beckons as “trees and shrubs lift white arms to the sky on every side.”
As Thoreau passes through the winter soundscape, the soundscape translates into the landscape, always with the intimation of a vital, sustaining undertone pervading the whole. The landscape becomes visible in response to the hum of the world:
The thin and frosty air conveys only the finer particles of sound to our ears, with short and sweet vibrations, as the waves subside soonest on the purest and lightest liquids, in which gross substances sink to the bottom. They come clear and bell-like, and from a greater distance in the horizon, as if there were fewer impediments than in summer to make them faint and ragged. The ground is sonorous, like seasoned wood, and even the ordinary rural sounds are melodious, and the jingling of the ice on the trees is sweet and liquid. . . . The withdrawn and tense sky seems groined like the aisles of a cathedral, and the polished air sparkles as if there were crystals of ice floating in it.3
The sounds from afar resonate with sounds more near until sound is everywhere. The flow of vibration is both ethereal (pure and light) yet richly sensory (bell-like). The proliferation of sonorities becomes the medium in which the visible scene passes into the distance along the aisles of an imaginary cathedral. But the aisles, no matter that they are placed in the heavens, do not lead to a spiritual beyond but to the heightened here and now of the sparkling air, the visual translation of the jingling of the ice on the trees. The sparkling resounds.
Thoreau is best known, of course, as a freethinker and nonconformist, but perhaps his favorite way of presenting himself is as someone who knows because he knows how to listen.
59
LP: Longplayer
“Longplayer” is the name of a musical composition by Jem Finer for 234 Tibetan singing bowls. Its duration is exactly one thousand years. It has been playing in London since midnight, December 31, 1999, using recordings of the bowl sounds under the direction of a computer. When it ends at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 2999, it will start again. The work also exists in a thousand-minute version called “Longplayer Live,” performed with the bowls arranged in a series of concentric circles reminiscent of the Platonic-Pythagorean model of the universe, the origin of the fabled music of the spheres. Although the live version is obviously only “a fragment of an enormous continuum,” it contains every sound heard (but by whom?) in the uncut version. Its performance reflects the form of the music, which, says the Longplayer website, “works in a way somewhat akin to a system of planets, which are aligned only once every thousand years, and whose orbits meanwhile move in and out of phase with each other in constantly shifting configurations.”1 The music’s mode of being thus also corresponds with the span of the mythical Platonic Year, or Great Year, the time supposedly required for the planets and fixed stars to depart from and return to the positions they occupy relative to each other on any given day. (The Great Year in this sense is purely imaginary, but there is an astronomical version in which the earth’s axis traces a complete circular rotation once every 25,772 years.) In both cases a vastly extended, nonrepetitive pattern, having exhausted all of its permutations, ends by returning to its origin and at once begins again.
“Longplayer,” which is also a “social organism” according to the website, and is administered by a trust, bears comparison to the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages, some of which took centuries to complete. Like the cathedrals, the sound keeps on standing, indifferent to the passage of time. The metaphor of “standing” sound reflects the paradox that the music of “Longplayer” is both never the same and always the same. Never, because the music does not repeat itself; always, because the only timbre is the “singing” of the bowls, which remains continuous no matter how much it varies in itself. The music persists with the solidity of stone.
To my ear, “Longplayer” consists of three layers of sound: the striking of the bowls, the resonance between the strokes, and the persistent ringing of vibrating metals. The resonance is the link between the other layers, the place, in this auditory solar system, of the audiable. The only expressive “content” of the music, given its changing unchangingness, is the essential futurity of its sound, and by implication of all sound: an elapsing forward that is renewed with each bell-like chime struck from one of the multitude of bowls. Taken together, the bowls form one vast meta- or mega-bowl, consistent with the concentric circles traced in the music’s graphic score and materialized in the performance space of “Longplayer Live.”
“Longplayer” expands on the disposition, now some two or three centuries old, to hear natural or cosmic harmony in the fluting or chiming of metal or glass, from the timbre of the glass armonica to the random harmonies of wind chimes or the Aeolian harp. For some listeners in its nineteenth century heyday, the Aeolian harp exemplified not only the animation of matter by spirit but also the revelation of spirit through matter. The pleasing spontaneous sounds gave the illusion of a cosmic order underlying random events. Placed on a windowsill to catch the wind, the harp brought home the harmony of the world. “Music by the night wind sent,” wrote Percy Shelley in his “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” “Through strings of some still instrument . . . / Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.”
The absence of a human player was basic to this visitation. The harp, free of our imperfections, could not sound wrong. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who kept an Aeolian harp in his window, celebrated the instrument in these terms. Here is a passage from his poem, “Maiden Speech of the Aeolian Harp,” on the unwrapping of a new arrival:
Unbind and give me to the air.
Keep your lips or finger-tips
For flute or spinet’s dancing chips;
I await a tenderer touch,
I ask more or not so much:
Give me to the atmosphere,—
Where is the wind, my brother,—where?
Lift the sash, lay me within,
Lend me your ears, and I begin.
For gentle harp to gentle hearts
The secret of the world imparts.
Emerson wrote this poem in 1875. For the Irish physicist John Tyndall ten years earlier, the discoveries of science took the place of the revelation of secrets. Tyndall described the human body itself as a kind of Aeolian harp, the vibrations of which gave a wholly natural form to the ancient fable of cosmic harmony:
If you open a piano and sing into it, a certain string will respond. Change the pitch of your voice; the first string ceases to vibrate, but another replies. Change again the pitch; the first two strings are silent, while another resounds. . . . And thus is sentient man sung unto by Nature, while the optic, the auditory, and other nerves of the human body are so many strings differently tuned and responsive to different forms of the universal power.2
This version of Aeolian music figuratively comes in classical four-part harmony, courtesy of a classical four-part analogy: the voice is in tune with the harp strings of the piano as nature is in tune with the nerve strings of the body. Each of the underlying metaphors was widespread; in the era that favored it, the little box of resonance concentrated all of them in a single place. In succeeding eras, especially after recording technology had made sound into a portable object, the same effect could be achieved, if at all, only by installations designed to occupy large spans of space or time. Examples are literally widespread, from Aristides Demetrios’s gigantic Wind Harp Tower on a hilltop in San Francisco to John Grzinich’s installation “Powerless Flight” in a field near Tallinn, Estonia, to the home of “Longplayer” in a nineteenth-century lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf in London.
Another version of the idea behind “Longplayer” appears in John Cage’s ASLSP, composed in 1985 for piano and in 1987 for organ as Organ2/ASLSP (As Slow as Possible). Cage does not say just how slow “as slow as possible” should be. Given the mechanism of the piano, it is hard to stretch a performance of ASLSP beyond a little more than an hour. Notes on the piano decay; that can’t be helped. But notes on an organ can sound as long as the keys or pedals are depressed, so there is virtually no lower limit to the slowness of Organ2/ASLSP. There have been performances of eight, twelve, and just shy of fifteen hours. But the longest performance is slated to last 659 years. It began in 2001 in the Church of St. Burchardi in Halberstadt, Germany, on an organ built for the purpose. Sandbags sustain the notes and chords until they are changed by human hands at intervals of a year or two or sometimes more.
Unlike “Longplayer,” the Halberstadt version of Organ2/ASLSP presents listeners who do not happen to be present for a pitch change with a static, monolithic sound. At almost any moment in the performance’s span of centuries, the sound represents a totality that, again unlike “Longplayer,” cannot be realized microcosmically. “Longplayer” is effectively fractal; each segment that one hears exists in a self-similar relationship to the humanly inaudible whole. ASLSP is allegorical. Its audible segments act as signifiers of a whole that is less than the sum of its parts.
• • • • •
One more word on “Longplayer,” plus a reminiscence. One reason why that other long-player, the 33⅓-rpm long-playing vinyl record, revolutionized listening to classical music was its retrospective impact on its predecessor, the 78-rpm shellac disk. By making it possible to get long symphonic movements, sometimes whole symphonies, on one side of one record, the LP not only filled the gaps that 78s made in the music, but it also demonstrated, by the relief it brought from manual changes or disk drops, that one role of long-form music is to make the continuity of time present and perceptible and pleasurable. “Longplayer” does the same thing on a greatly expanded scale. In that respect, it is the LP writ large.
I first encountered these technologies as a child of four or five. My paternal grandparents had an old windup Victrola in their basement, together with a stack of shellac disks. I was enthralled by the mechanism, and also by the sound of the first music I recall hearing on it, the opening movement of Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. The music took up three disks, which had to be changed by hand. I was far too young to be bothered by the gaps; in fact, I enjoyed them, because changing the disks made me feel as if I were somehow making the music, personally putting its pieces together and keeping it going. The solid, heavy platters and the even heavier album from which they came helped make the music feel real. But some ten years later, when I first heard a symphonic LP—a recording of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony—I was taken aback by the sheer force of its continuity. The record was almost weightless and the music was all there! All I had to do was listen; the sound would take care of itself. That was the form of listening that the long-player introduced to the world.
