For Music
In Memory of Peter Serkin
A vast humming.
… the ocean of Buddhas;
…the mind of enlightenment.
…harmonies
heard beyond hearing
A student took the renowned Tibetan teacher Rabjam Rinpoch, to hear a concert of Western classical symphonic music. At the end, Rinpoche asked: “Do you listen to this music horizontally or vertically?”
Night Rain at Kuang-k’ou
by Yang Wan-Li
The river is clear and calm;
a fast rain falls in the gorge.
At midnight the cold, splashing sound begins,
like thousands of pearls spilling onto a glass plate,
each drop penetrating the bone.
In my dream I scratch my head and get up to listen.
I listen and listen, until the dawn.
All my life I have heard rain,
and I am an old man;
but now for the first time I understand
the sound of spring rain
on the river at night.
Nine hundred years ago, Yang dreamed he woke as a storm broke around him on the river where his boat was anchored. But unsure of whether he was dreaming or awake, he listened, and a new understanding of rain came to him. Now, here, miraculously beyond such concepts as awake or dream, now or then, Yang gives us the presence of that moment again, and with it he shares a sense of sound not constrained by space and time. So simple, so complex. Even if we may be clinging to a single mind-stream, a single self, there are so many strands in this instant.
Polyphony, deploying many voices simultaneously, is perhaps the most extraordinary characteristic of Western classical music. Notated scores have made the extensive development of highly complex polyphonic music possible. And so we have a long tradition that continually finds new life in complex sound structures. As members of the audience, we listen not just for a melody or a rhythm, but we strive to open our ears to hear all the notes, all the rhythms, all the balances and dynamics within an evolving aural architecture that rises and vanishes in time.
“Gerald de Barri, a 12th-century Welsh churchman writing as Giraldus Cambrensis, made a famous description of his peasant countrymen’s communal singing: ‘They sing their tunes not in unison, but in parts with many simultaneous modes and phrases. Therefore, in a group of singers you will hear as many melodies as you will see heads, yet they all accord in one consonant and properly constituted composition.’ ”
This sensibility has also enriched our literature. Mikhail Bakhtin discussed the polyphonic aspects of Rabelais’ writing, and in his celebrated study of Dostoevsky, described literary polyphony as occurring when: “the voices remain independent and, as such are combined in a unity of a higher order… (thus) a combination of several individual wills takes place, (so) that the boundaries of the individual will can be in principle exceeded.”
This kind of attention lets us listen to not just one sequence of sounds or words, but several simultaneously. We follow interweaving melodies and thoughts, and find ourselves also in the unsuspected spaces between them. And there emerges a kind of sound (or language) architecture as notes (or written words) dissolve and others begin, then remain in the air for differing extents of time. Composers, performers, and authors give us passage into these structures, and we, the audience, join together as we explore them.
The natural expanse,
Free from seeking, cultivation, definitions,
Receives the awakened state
As a mountain receives the light of the sun, moon, and stars,
Receives blankets of snows,
Receives torrents of rain from clouds,
Receives the lifecycles of insects, worms, germs, birds, foxes, wolves, beetles,
Receives cold winds, spring breezes in oak, cedar, pine, maple, brushwood,
Receives cascades of melting water,
Receives avalanches of rocks,
Receives fire,
Receives hunters, pilgrims, merchants, lovers on the run.
Allowing goals to determine how we cultivate mind radically reduces the expanse, quality, and depth, as well as overall movement of what we understand, feel, see, know, share, etc. Choosing actions solely on the basis of their intended outcome is the root of our ecological catastrophe.
How crucial then to attend to the random, the puzzling, the strangely beautiful, the unforeseen, the irrelevant, the rejected, the peripheral, the ever-elusive, the flirty, the unconnected, the gap. How crucial to know that we cannot possess our experience.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of The World is an extraordinary, complex, and beautifully written book focused on matsutake mushrooms. This fungus, cherished and prized by Japanese and Koreans because its scent evokes the sadness of the end of autumn, grows only in devastated landscapes, particularly in the over-logged forests of Oregon. There they are harvested commercially by US Army vets seeking “freedom,” former Thai soldiers and Cambodian refugees, as well as old Japanese people for whom the mushroom and hunting brings back the folkways demolished when their families were put in concentration camps here. The book’s subtitle is “On The Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.”
Dr. Tsing writes of the complex biologies, histories, economies, and ecologies that intertwine in the matsutake mushrooms’ life, environment, value, harvesting. As she says: “Many histories come together here: they draw us beyond bubble worlds into shifting cascades of collaboration and complexity…rather than limiting our analyses to one creature at a time (including humans), or even one relationship, if we want to know what makes places livable we should be studying the polyphonic assemblages, gatherings of ways of being. Assemblages are performances of livability.”
The anthropologist Eduardo Kohn has written on how forests can be said to “think” since, within the jungle, the interplay of phenomena from the atmospheric, geological, biological, animal, and human realms are continually influencing each other, and in this way are producing a multiplicity of continuously unfolding meanings of these phenomena. Thus the forest is recognizably a mind, if not an exclusively human one. That is to say, its shifting forms of organization and awareness are not exclusively devoted to human purposes.
“Selves,” Kohn says, speaking of human and non-human beings in his study of the Runa of the upper Amazon, “exist simultaneously as embodied and beyond the body. They are localized and yet they exceed the individual and even the human…”
“This spirit realm that emerges from the life of the forest, as a product of a whole host of relations that cross species lines and temporal epochs, is, then, a zone of continuity and possibility… survival depends on many kinds of deaths that this spirit realm holds in its configuration and that make a living future possible.”
So, there is an infinite unfolding of musical sequences in innumerable simultaneous dimensions. We, in our speaking, singing, thinking, crying, laughing are ourselves living sequences of sound. Our attention, our hearing, our waiting, our silence extend the space in which sound is moving.
Each tone moves through time with its qualities: pitch, shifting dynamics, evolving colors, altering relationship with pitches before, after, above, below, near or far, and/or simultaneously. By the shift of relationship, each pitch is heard differently, and the spatial environment changes.
No pitch has its own unique history or fate. There is only the simultaneous and evolving multiplicity.
Such a complex and informative array of sound is not just a human artifact. Bernie Krause is a musician and acoustician who has spent the last fifty years recording the soundscapes of diverse natural environments all over the world. Patiently, he has listened to and recorded the rich and various polyphony of pine forests, jungles, seashores, deserts, swamps, rivers, open plains, alpine mountains. As he tells, the first time he began recording such an environment, “the captured ambiences — rich textures that infused the entire frequency spectrum with elegant structures, multiple tempi and soloists — intensified my experience of the habitat through their luxurious and subtle nuances.” All our music, from the simplest to the most complicated, has emerged from this ravishing and splendid display. Krause has made many thousands of such recordings which now, when he has returned to sites whose sound-life he formerly recorded, show a deepening sterile silence, the devastating effects of human interventions of innumerable kinds.
Recently this may have become more vivid to us, as the pandemic and radically decreased economic activity brought a halt to airplane, truck, and automobile traffic. Birds long silent were bright and audible; raccoons, foxes, coyotes sang at dusk. This was a fertile quiet, slightly disconcerting but calling to us in a deep way we had not quite forgotten. Listening, it seems, could carry us further. And now, even as traffic returns, the older stillness haunts us; makes us uneasy. Silence and the sounds from realms that are not ours are only hiding; we are waiting for their return.
Were we to explore without stopping, would it be possible for us to hear, to recognize as the sage Nagarjuna did so long ago, that “wandering in the pain of this cyclical illusion has nothing that distinguishes it from liberation. Liberation has nothing that distinguishes it from wandering in the pain of this cyclical illusion.”
It has begun, almost without noticing,
It seems sudden:
Time, so laboriously expended,
Vanishes.
A day is gone.
And, somehow, effort was expended to no end.
The sought-for transformation vanishes.
And so, at the end — evening:
What is being called “I” changes and doesn’t.
The world surrounding moves beyond its own
Thunderstorm, stop; sunburst, stop; light rain and the dense smell of green and trees,
Sounds of waking women, men,
Scents of soap, of burning wood, coffee:
The unsought passage.
Bells, pigeons clattering in flight,
Dream and awake
Wave on wave:
Unending and unbegun
Weaving
Music
Thank you.
_______________________
The above is an excerpt from Douglas J. Penick’s The Age of Waiting. You can find more information, or order a copy, here: https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/books#/douglas-penick/
Douglas Penick’s work appeared in Tricycle, Descant, New England Review, Parabola, Chicago Quarterly, Publishers Weekly, Agni, Kyoto Journal, Berfrois, 3AM, The Utne Reader, and Consequences, among others. He has written texts for operas (Munich Biennale, Santa Fe Opera), and, on a grant from the Witter Bynner Foundation, three separate episodes from the Gesar of Ling epic. His novel, Following The North Star was published by Publerati. Wakefield Press published his and Charles Ré’s translation of Pascal Quignard’s A Terrace In Rome. His book of essays, The Age of Waiting, which engages the atmospheres of ecological collapse, will be published in 2020 by Arrowsmith Press.