One note from a bow
drawn across a string
can sing a pure, bright tone
or a scratchy chaos
that sets teeth on edge.
Which one we hear depends
on the skill of the musician --
or her intent if she's good enough.
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- HK Stewart
- I grew up in Christian fundamentalism, went to hell, came back, became a Presbyterian then a Buddhist Presbyterian, and now I'm a profane Presbyterian Zen Taoist -- not that I'm into labels or anything. Here's what I've learned so far: The more you know, the more you know you don't know.
2 comments:
Who Says It’s Music?
Charles Ives had two marching bands playing patriotic John Philip Souza music enter stage left and stage right as a full symphony orchestra was performing “Rule Britannia” in the center pit. The resulting cacophony gave him the dissonances he wanted to hear in music.
John Cage opened his New York apartment windows, sat in the middle of the room, and meditated on the traffic outside. For him, no sound was not also music. Consider those nuts and bolts he screwed inside a grand piano to prefer rhythm over harmony. Even in a hermetically sealed room, he could hear his own heart beat.
Edgar Varèse made an orchestra imitate the sound of ionization, and Karlheinz Stockhausen spliced together national anthems from every country and fed them into jet exhaust revving up for a take-off. He even divided a string quartet into multiple helicopters flying overhead.
What we hear depends on how we listen. Poor John Claire wandered asylum gardens hearing the dead Lord Byron dictate additional lines for “Don Juan” into his head, and, only occasionally, did his own poetic voice break through, observing the natural wonders all around him. How many of our friends, homeless from economic disasters, wander rural environs of their former childhoods, calling for parents, for uncles and aunts, whom they have outlived? The real question is not the absence of music, but the lack of concern for other people. Whatever freedoms we might think we have, we lose them in the collective roar of mobs on the internet.
[Disposable Prose June 10, 2010]
Dr. Mike
"I can swing it in one note." Count Basie
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