DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR?

The sense of sound begins with the beating heart of the zygote, contrapuntal to the beating heart of the mother.  Then her breath.  And the song of digestion.  The only way to get to absolute silence is with sound-canceling technology, because otherwise one hears one’s own body, even if you are nude to eliminate clothing friction.  

The earth itself rings like a gong and some places, many near mountains -- like Valier -- have a detectable hum.  Some speculate this is caused by a deep pressure among the tectonic plates that compress rock formations like quartz deposits, making them vibrate.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuRBM0i8mbI   Taos Hum

Psychologists trying to discover a way to make a situation unpleasant without doing physical damage resorted to recordings of a baby screaming.  They could hardly bear it themselves.  Here’s a very brief sound of a child screaming. It is meant to be intolerable, either brief or sustained, because the survival of children is crucial.  It demands response.

http://www.saunalahti.fi/klahdens/snd/child.wav  child screaming

To compensate for that unpleasantness, I hurry to offer a favorite hymn to fend off trouble.  Actually, it’s the tune that counts:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4rSAIts3MA  

from David Dodd in the Petaluma CA UU congregation: 

Hymn #1 in our hymnal is "Prayer For This House" (entitled, in the hymnal, "May Nothing Evil Cross This Door," which is really just the first line....). It's a beautiful hymn, with words by Louis Untermeyer (1885-1977), who, besides being an excellent poet, was an influential poetry anthologist in the early part of the 20th century, as well as a jewelry manufacturer. "Prayer For This House" is frequently used in house blessing rituals and building dedications, and its position as Number One is surely no accident. It's sort of a doorway into the whole hymnal. The tune is by Robert N. Quaile, a Methodist minister's son from Mallow, Ireland. He composed the tune in 1903. 

The more familiar Christian words begin “For All the Blessings of the Year.”  But it is the tune that makes it familiar, and it is the familiarity that is reassuring.

Smells are perceived by one-celled animals, but the same animals ARE vibrating in ways that would be perceptible only with instruments.  Vibrations permeate all of existence, our eyes see vibrations, our brains dance out alpha, beta, theta rhythms, we sing, we listen, we hum -- in both senses.  John Cage has alerted us all to the fabric of sound around us -- fridge going on and off, hissing radiator, rustling collapse of the hearth fire, dog thumping as he digs at a flea.  When I first came to Valier, I kept waking up because it was so quiet.  I was used to voices below the window, siren over on Broadway, doors slamming in the apartment hallway.  At night here the only sound -- except wind, of course -- is likely to be compression brakes on semi-trucks going through town.  

Sound must be close to the earliest of the arts, how could it not be?  

Percussion on just about any surface, including the body.  Clapping, stomping, slapping a bare belly.  (It is percussion to make fart noises with your underarm?)  Percussion from the kindergarten instruments of clapping blocks, dinging triangle or jingling tambourine.

Wind from puckered-up whistling to blowing through a tube or a reed.  English horn, clarinet, the human voice with its capacity to shape the air flow into vowels and howls, its glottal stops or hissing sibilants or pinching lips.  Tongue against teeth.  Digiridoo or if one of them is not handy, the tube off a vacuum cleaner will work.  And not all voices are human.  Elephants rumble so low they are not perceptible to humans.  That hoarse cry that’s so often used in English mystery night-scenes?  I thought it was a night bird of some kind until I was fooling around with google listening to animal cries.  It’s the cry of a female fox in season.  I can only say it’s a sound our pet foxes never made.

Twanging from African thumb-piano to a theatrical thundersheet, that big piece of sheet metal shaken backstage to imitate a storm.

Making strings vibrate, hearing cables sing.  If you knew how to listen, the Golden Gate Bridge would sing to you, quite apart from the wind whistling through.  Those cables must know songs.

Listening to animals, calling back to them, sweeping them up into symphonies, has been a speciality of Paul Winter’s for a long time.  He began with the wolf who sang with his clarinet and whose song became part of his Missa Gaea, his Earth Mass.  The religious nature of sound has been quite obvious and certainly welcomed by Winter.  Perhaps more than any other source he has recognized the need for liturgies that appeal to every human, regardless of nation or language.  The poor plagued continent of Africa, the one that seduces and exasperates us all, where percussion and twanging and keening voices still persist in spite of all the pressure to go electronicly modern.  This is the place of our origin, they say, and birds are the descendants of dinosaurs, and the only true American musical roots came here in the hearts of Africans trafficked centuries ago.  Well, for Paul Winter that’s an invitation.  Here you go, the beginning of a symphony.

http://www.flywaysmusic.org/flyways-music/videos/44-videoslisting/83-flyways-video-and-music-selections

And you’ll see in this video that the inevitable consequence of music is movement, whether it is the simple stamping of feet or the long soaring of wings.  Culture can only try to catch up -- at least our culture.  Some cultures are already there.  Their children babble, their old folks chant, they dance while they drum or twang.  Long wooden xylophones are set up alongside each other where the hammers fly up and down them.  You’re sad?  You don’t know what sadness is.  You’re glad?  Who has time to stop and consider it?  The rule of migration is to move on, to complete the cycle, to continue the millennia of vibrations.  Put pebbles in a pop can, throw sand into a hollow gourd, keep time, slap your feet on the earth.  Extinct?  Hardly!   Endangered.  Well, maybe.

But the cranes are flying!  Can’t you hear them?

BINDING SOUND TO LITURGY

During North American Indian Days everyone in Browning can feel as much as hear the big pow-wow drums over at the campgrounds.  Through the year at every honoring or funeral mass or major announcement a “rawhide band” of three or four hand-drummers may assemble to herald, accompany and dedicate what’s happening.  But this is the first time I’ve heard of “walking drummers” visiting every neighborhood in town to bless and smudge.  We certainly need it now that so much happens so quickly, much of it terrifying and disheartening.  Sometimes the good things (incoming money) are as dangerous as the bad things (incoming drugs).   Here’s the URL if you want to read the story and look at the photos.

http://cutbankpioneerpress.com/articles/2011/09/16/glacier_reporter/news/doc4e70c5e66a355991575989.txt

The drummers pictured in the Glacier Reporter included Shawn Bird Rattler, Wade Running Crane, Larry and Rich Ground.  They are defining themselves as “Crazy Dog Society” which is an ancient group whose charge was to protect the community, doing whatever it takes.  It’s about service to others, whether as warriors or as singers or even something more practical, like distributing food.  This impulse is strong among the Blackfeet or they wouldn’t be here anymore.

Yesterday’s blog post was looking at the bad, the “Confession of Sins,” so today I look at the good, “The Assurance of Pardon.”  They should be read together as a way of stretching consciousness from doom to hope.  

I like drumming because it is music and because it is simple.  One does not need some hundred dollar painted artifact suitable for hanging on the wall.  A stick, a finger hitting a table, a foot kicking a box -- rhythm is everywhere, rhythm is life.  The mother’s heartbeat is joined by the heartbeat of her embryo.  Light is rhythm; the colors are the songs.  Scientists tell us that instruments can detect the ringing of the earth, a long very low resonance, an immense gong.

When times get desperate, new heartbeats form, new ideas.  The internet is an instrument for detecting ideas.  Try the video below.  It is about people who take their violin bows out to play the barbed wire fences in fields or alongside prisons.  Or who translate the northern lights and seismic rumbles into symphonies.  They expand their own perceptions to find order and creation everywhere.   http://vimeo.com/15182524

Here’s the description of the accompanying website:   "The Reach Of Resonance" is a meditation on the meaning of music, which juxtaposes the diverse creative paths of four musicians using music to cultivate a deeper understanding of the world around them. Among them are Miya Masaoka using music to interact with insects and plants; Jon Rose, utilizing a violin bow to turn fences into musical instruments in conflict zones ranging from the Australian outback to Palestine; John Luther Adams translating the geophysical phenomena of Alaska into music; and Bob Ostertag, who explores global socio-political issues through processes as diverse as transcribing a riot into a string quartet, and creating live cinema with garbage. 

http://www.reachofresonance.com/   At this location are links to longer videos and more ideas and images.  There are two basic principles I see right off: there is always music hidden in both noise and silence, waiting to be called out; and humans are instruments who can expand their awareness even as they “play.”  (A word to consider carefully, take significantly but not seriously.)

I subscribe to several NPR summaries, but esp. the pop stuff I just wave on by.  This “big bird” song made me stop and listen.  It comes in part from ideas like “reaching for resonance.”    http://www.npr.org/2011/06/21/136056073/yellow-ostrich-echoing-drums-and-distant-drones ft=3&f=4703895&sc=nl&cc=sod-20110916   I guess I listened to it because I expected a Scots pipe band (drums and drones).  It’s totally unique but a concatenation of elements.

I’ve been discussing the elements of liturgy.  Here in this blog post I’ve stacked up enough elements for a liturgy (same root word as ligature) to bind together into an event of some kind.  Call it worship if you want to, but you don’t need God.  Think about my five steps: entering over the threshold, confronting evil, naming hope, exploring a concept (“God is a gong?”), and returning back over the threshold to the world.  How you combine these elements or others you might find is up to you.  Think about the rhythm of the sequence between one thing and the next.  Get clear in your mind where the people are and how to draw them along.

Then pick up your drum and walk.  Sing.  Invite others.  Enter the liminal neighborhood.  Will you walk alone?  Will you be a group?  Will you lead the people over the threshold or let them hear you approach and enter?  Will you ask them to sing oh-oh-oh?  Will you strike a gong?  Make a smudge to carry?  Should the people kneel with heads down low, hands at the backs of necks as though a grizzly might come along?   (It might.)  When you get to the center, will you dance, lifting your knees and flinging your arms like David dancing before the altar?  These things are so old, so child-like, so surprising.

My friend Leland Ground, brother to Larry and Rick, was in the original seventh grade class I taught in 1961.  We’re much changed, but there’s still a connection between us and he drops by now and then.  Earlier in his life, he was an evangelist far to the north and he’s still a dedicated Christian without feeling any contradiction with other religious modes.  When he comes to see me, he asks whether I believe in God.  I always tell him I do not, because I don’t want any anthropomorphic authority standing over me.  I believe in holiness and right behavior in order to stay in harmony (rhythm) with the world.  He accepts my answer.  

Then months later he will ask me again, hopefully,  “Do you believe in God?”  And I say,  “Define the concept.”  God would be flattered by Leland’s definition, but I still don’t believe in “Him.”  Leland is able to accept my account of the immanence of the Sacred, but I am unable to accept his approval of hierarchy.  We can walk together.  Leland is an excellent drummer.  That’s enough for me.  He wants more.  He still hopes I will begin to believe in God.  I honor his life.  I honor all life.  Just not God.  Go look at those vids of Siberian shamans Anonymous posted in comments a couple of days ago. 

Oh-oh-oh!   I’ve got bagpipe music in my head, not from a recording, but from a Highland Games when I was a teenager.  It was in some forested park and the bagpipers were wandering among the trees while they practiced.  Some were near and some were far.  None were playing the same tune.  All were walking.  Oh-oh-oh!