Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.00.1307061912370.1025@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: So/aring
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 2013 19:15:09 -0400 (EDT)
So/aring http://lounge.espdisk.com/archives/1163 (best) http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/erhuandtro.mp3 Roughly fifty-three Cambodias constitute the area of China. The Chinese erhu is a somewhat complicated instrument complete with advertised fine-tuners, mutes, a variety of bows and strings, varying woods. The Cambodian tro so or tro sor is almost invisible on the Net; I haven't found any for sale, much less specialized strings. But the tro so has instantaneous response, as if emanating a clear light, and my fingers dance on the strings. The tro so bow is heavier and thicker than the erhu bow, and I delight in the weight and exactitude of the wood. The tro body is cylindrical, and the wood rests anywhere along the rim; on the erhu, the body is hexagonal (sometimes cylindrical, sometimes octagonal), and the light bow tends to flip over the 'corners.' I know this is a fault of mine, slowing me up, creating a rougher movement, although the erhu can be as sweet as you like. The tro so, on the other hand, has a broader tone, but one susceptible of amazing variation, and the tone doesn't imitate the violin; it holds its own. It's beautiful and I can soar on it. I'm awaiting the day I can do the same on the erhu, but perhaps a certain imperial history obscures my relationship, just as Khmer history transforms the tro so for me. It's confusing; I bring to both the collapse of an American Empire that's still busy poisoning the world, but no place is safe from itself and its originary violence. I keep all of this in mind as I move from one instrument to the other; the truth is, that the tro so is easier and lighter for me, and makes me happier - while the erhu remains a dark and complex challenge. The two seem so similar, and yet for me are as different as organ from piano, and I work on both with widely varying techniques and degrees of proficiency. Here are the erhu and tro so again, and here I am, again, lost in the music (as) we speak to one other. From Heidegger's Nietzsche, "Rapture as Aesthetic State": "We are not first of all 'alive,' only then getting an apparatus to sustain our living which we call 'the body,' but we are some body who is alive. Our being embodied is essentially other tan merely being encumbered with an organism." "Rapture is a feeling, and it is all the more genuinely a feeling the ore essentially a unity of embodying attunement prevails." "At the outset Nietzsche emphasizes two things about rapture: first, the feeling of enhancement of force; second, the feeling of plenitude." Yes, and force and plenitude constitute a lifting out of an instrument or a "merely," a billowing when the fingers move of their own accord, when history is lost and absolved in the fecundity of sound. This is where we are, when we are there, not among either language or a mis-interpreted Wittgensteinian silence - but among Rilke's angelic orders. Something doesn't "have to be said" about this under any circumstances, nor does the music "speak for itself"; the music does not _speak_ and is hardly programmatic or the ordered sequence of a song-form. An other immersion is occurring and it's this that I'm interested in, with both erhu and tro so, with one country roughly fifty-three times the area of the other, One and an Other, neither with capitals, neither capitalized, capitulated.