Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1203291206350.14789@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: Music
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2012 12:08:56 -0400 (EDT)
Music http://www.alansondheim.org/92StY7.png Why do I constantly play music, jump from one instrument to another. This isn't a trivial question; I search out the sounds of things. But why instruments? Why this fakery? I look for the larger gestures. Secretly I know I get nowhere. Secretly I know, with my hearing and tinnitus, I'm a fraud. I'm desperate for correct positions. I repeat figures I heard in ragas decades ago: I can't do anything original! The fingerboards are mockeries. At this point I prefer the simplest, no frets, no markers, nothing but a potential field. The markers come later, muscle memory. They're never exact enough; sometimes they don't come at all. Then there are the flutes and other mechanical devices: I'm running all over them with my hands, my fingers, my mouth. It seems purposeless. On a Boehm flute it's hard to go out of tune but it's also hard to find something else to do. On simpler flutes, it's easy enough with the primary scale, but everything else - like circular breathing on a ken bau - seems to me impossible. I long for the days of the guitar - nothing but fakery and nuance, the frets constantly chatter to you, to each other, to the audience. Even there I remember Al Wilson telling me I had to keep the guitar in tune; I hardly knew what he meant. I learned by rote, I memorized the chords in order. I knew my eyesight was terrible, but it didn't deceive me: I could look at a complex or simple instrument with wonder: why on earth would one want ones hands or fingers or mouth to travel over this thing? And in certain patterns? The sounds seem remote from the image, although after a while they might as well be married. But remote. Here I am, moving my hands over taut strings, and something emerges in another dimension, or dimensionless (time be damned), that takes on a life of its own. It has nothing to do with what I'm doing; what I'm doing is faking, getting cramps, trying to remember what I'm doing in the first place. It has nothing to do with the appearance of the instrument, the decoration, the placement of the pegs, the weight of the thing in my hands, the sway of the bow. It doesn't float either, this emergent. I don't want to make too much of this. It's like this: I'm a fake, I pretend I'm a musician, at least now and then. But what emerges isn't fake, isn't real, isn't in tune or out of tune, has a problematic relationship with the strings or the fipple or the bow or my fingers, memory or whatever my mind brings to the table, takes from the tablature. What emerges is something being, being in the time it takes for its being, no more and no less, an ontology of the evanescent, an epistemology that has left the virtual long behind. And a secret: I know, playing a string instrument, I must let the sounds die out at the very end, I must do nothing to impede them. So there's a moment of building towards that, towards this openness, and it's only later, after the emergent seems already a memory, that I realize - that what's in my hands is a _thing,_ an object, beautiful though it may be, that is just _there,_ that has no relationship to what I just heard, what might have come from me, one or another way, but surely not from the wood, the metal, the strings, the fipple, the very organs of the object. Here are two secrets of music: one, you already know, the fakery, but the other, more serious, is that the ontology of music is zero, it doesn't exist, since nothing is parceled out through time, time renders music invisible, although the instrument itself is more than visible, it is assertive, it is a somehow connected and disconnected thing. The music is invisible and it is not even momentary, it is _not there,_ and will never be there, will never have been there, and there is no there there, in fact, there is nothing. So it is circuitry within you, it is all interior and refuses to die out with the end of the universe, for the simple reason that it was never born, was never _in_ the universe in the first place. When I play something, improvise, when I look down at the instrument after I have seemingly finished, I have a sense of astonishment at this disconnection between presence and appetition on one hand, and absence, emptiness on the other. This emptiness, and the potential rhythm of this emptiness, speak of and to a mockery, fakery of the universe itself, with all its pseudo-rhythms of lunar months, years, electron orbitals, beating hearts and the like. Rhythm's the byproduct of music which trembles materiality, as if there were an event traveling through the cosmos carrying its heart with it, as if there were a centering involved, which there isn't, which there absolutely isn't. You don't need it, and the farther you go the more you realize you don't need melody or harmony, you don't need notes or scales; you might think you need sound, but the sound's already there, so you can't really know if you need it or not. In any case, none of this has anything to do with the thing in your hands, which astonishes you, as I have said already, which appears to be a device of some sort, perhaps a machine, but one that does nothing more than tremble on occasion, and what is that about? For myself, I tender the machine, that is all I know, and I know little of that in fact, and the rest, the rest is make-believe; one of these days, I'll hit a really high note, and my face will bear upon it, the proper mixture of ecstasy and anguish... http://www.alansondheim.org/92StY7.png