Ears and Mind
By Michel Galante
While ice-skating in Central Park, a man was hit in the head and knocked unconscious by a hockey puck. Hours later, when he woke up in the hospital, the doctor told him he would have a temporary ringing in his ears, called tinnitus, but that his hearing would return to normal. Somehow, the ringing in his ears made him hyper-aware of everything he heard, even though he was still in a daze.
This man, while not a professional musician, liked to sing in the shower, had many CDs, and often had a tune running through his head. He preferred to go to the movies rather than rent videos, because he loved the amplified sounds of footsteps, doorknobs turning, and car doors slamming. He often thought what a fun job it would be to be a Foley artist, in charge of overdubbing exaggerated sounds to create hyper-realistic experiences.
The evening after the accident, when listening to a violin concerto at Carnegie Hall, he noticed that the sound of the single violin soloist was more intense than the whole group of 16 violins. Naturally, there had been moments of contrast, when the orchestra occasionally became louder, and the soloist more quiet, but the general impression, the acoustic impression, was that the solo violin was more vibrant and present than all the section violins put together. This compelling impression lingered in his mind as he left Carnegie and made his way towards the subway station. It was the first time he could remember making an observation like this: there was a contradiction between what he saw and what he heard.
In the noisy underground environment of the subway, the man was drawn towards an intriguing sound in the distance. He saw a busker playing on steel drums. The rich and beautiful sound was so "blurry" that it took a minute to figure out that the musician was playing Silent Night. When the man's train came, he stayed and continued to listen, unable to pull himself away. The busker stopped playing the carol, to his relief. Shifting gears, the busker started playing a rhythm on a single note. A hypnotically complex sound of many voices emerged from that one note.
This evoked memories in our listener of his high school choir. The sounds made by the choir had been complex and harmonic, just like these drum sounds. It would have been very difficult, he thought, for anyone to pick out all the "notes" the musician was making. Yet some kind of chord was definitely emerging from the drums. He had heard of timbres like this: in part, they were collections of microtones. He was both puzzled and fascinated by this experience, as he had been by the violin concerto.
Upon hearing an announcement that the next trains were delayed, the man gave the musician a few dollars and ascended to the street. A taxi pulled up, and he got in. After noting the man's destination, the Chinese driver resumed his cell phone conversation. Idly listening in (not understanding a word), the man was struck by the cadences of the driver's voice, and recalled that Chinese is a tonal language. He mused about how hard it would be to learn a language where the same syllable said slightly differently could alter a word's meaning.
He arrived at home, got ready to sleep, and crawled into bed with his laptop computer. He pushed the button: "shung." The sound of the computer starting up was somewhat like a chorus, but clearer, cleaner, and more synthetic than the steel drums. Transfixed, he restarted his computer, just to hear the chord. He sensed that someone had "built" this computer sound. He held it close to his head, played with the volume, and tried it under the covers, upside-down. Finally, the computer chord was the last sound he heard as he drifted off to sleep.
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As in the above anecdote, it's my hope that listeners of all backgrounds - even those with no musical training - make their own acoustic discoveries, and then as audience members, come to expect a high level of curiosity, imagination, and inventiveness from contemporary composers.
Like our protagonist, today's composers are made aware of a diverse array of sonic stimuli, both musical and otherwise. Four areas in particular lead the expansion of our musical language: the influence of non-western music, the use of electronics, the study of timbre and microtonal harmony, and the musical use of noise.
This wide array has prompted many composers to delve into different paradigms of music: Austria's Georg Friedrich Haas develops rich orchestral timbres from instrumental ensembles, but is also mindful of stage traditions, as shown in his opera Nacht. Bernhard Lang spent countless hours at the mixer fine-tuning recordings and electronics, though he was trained as a jazz and classical pianist. In many ways, these bi- or tri-lingual musical creatures are the most fortunate. They are able to make comparisons between different musical worlds without being the product of a single training or background. We have nearly unlimited access to the musical instruments and techniques of the world, to computer music programs that anyone can download, and to every kind of audio and video recording.
This is not to say that innovation is the answer to all of our musical concerns: regardless of one's awareness of innovation, there will never be a substitute for genuine musical intention and skill. The point is simply that for all of us who love music, the opportunities, paths, and choices have multiplied exponentially.
For audiences, the riches and discoveries lie in the moments analogous to when our protagonist stayed to listen to the steel drums, and when the busker, in turn, communed with this single and genuine listener. Thanks to recent generations of composers, life can be deeper, more adventurous, more thoughtful, more creative. And by greeting these composers with open ears, music lovers will have the opportunity to grow in a way that can renew and enrich our lives as individuals and as a musical society.
Michel Galante is a conductor and composer. He directs the Argento Chamber Ensemble, which will be performing concerts on May 29 and October 27 at the ACFNY.
Thursday| MAY 29 | 7:30 PM
Concert
Argento-Ensemble
Morton FELDMAN, Beat FURRER, Michel GALANTE, Charles IVES, Fred LERDAHL, Arnold SCHOENBERG
AUSTRIAN CULTURAL FORUM NEW YORK
11 East 52nd Street
New York, NY 10022
Reservations required.
