I’ve been working a lot in song lately. I’m finding there’s a lot that comes with that commitment. I wonder how it works to put it together here?
Recently, we found a free chamber-music concert in a local church. Arriving late, the trio already bent to their first piece, we quickly settled into the back pew. In the brief intermission that followed, we moved to the middle pews and waited for the next piece, the A-minor clarinet trio by Johannes Brahms. The players returned to the sanctuary to warm applause and took their seats; their smiles ripened into openness, their bodies tensed for the strike of the music. The cello broke the silence with a line that lifted and fell, at once poised and somehow confessional, confiding; the clarinet picked up the glimmering shape of the phrase and lifted it gently toward the rafters. The piano introduced a shadow-dapple, a skeining shimmer of notes, the volume glittered into a fulsome, generous tumult of musical discourse, and then it was revealed: a clearing where great, gossamer beings conversed, lofting together some remembered song in emergent, phenomenal concord, raveling a constitution beyond rehearsal or notation.
The music draped me in its lively gravity; it clung to me; it invited me to expand to the mullioned windows, to fill the gothic vaults with my own electrified perception. There weren’t ears for this; this was a matter for the body, for the whole self gone porous and constellated. I gripped my chin, rocked toward the edge of the pew; it felt like receiving a tumbling-forth of remarkable news, the issuance of some vital instructions. This presence hadn’t shown itself in the first piece, and as the next three movements of the Brahms trio unfolded, it fell away as if absorbed back into the shadowed quiets of the hall.
I sometimes feel a piece of music as a sort of interdimensional being, multivariate and vast, which we coax into passage through our own space and time. Like the perfect solids that wander through Edwin A. Abbott’s Flatland, only their shadows and outlines appear here, outlines that unfold in time, but have some crystalline co-presence that burgeons beyond our stricture. Here, it seemed as though they (and the players, their kindred avatars) had pulled us up into their spacious realm, outdoors of time and breath. The music both swept along and stood there, like a standing wave, the kind you find sometimes at the narrowing of a channel, the delta of an enlivened sea, roil-shouldered and impossible in its mobility. The music doing with the world what that water does with light.
Afterward, I browsed what recordings of the Brahms trio I could find available for streaming. They were beautiful. But the uncanny quality those players awoke in the sanctuary, the bounty of the dreaming world, was nowhere to be found.
Sing yourself to where the singing comes from—Seamus Heaney’s invitation, in the poem “At the Wellhead,” as he hears in his wife’s beloved voice the recollected music of an erstwhile neighbor, a pianist. As the notes had poured from her window, Heaney writes, they came out to us like hoisted water/raveling off a bucket at the wellhead. The wellhead: what I see here is not some fey, glimmering pool in an old tale, but a workaday bucket brought up from the mossy bottom. And yet there it is, or was: the source of all music. Right there, just then, just now, in the raveling of this water.
Roving through my browser tabs recently, I ran across the word Seiche. It’s a beautiful word, I think, a glamorous word, though I only dimly knew it had something to do with the tides. So I looked it up on Wikipedia; the entry had a metaphysical cast to it:
A seiche (/seɪʃ/ SAYSH) is a standing wave in an enclosed or partially enclosed body of water. Seiches and seiche-related phenomena have been observed on lakes, reservoirs, swimming pools, bays, harbors, caves, and seas. The key requirement for formation of a seiche is that the body of water be at least partially bounded, allowing the formation of the standing wave.
Seiches are often imperceptible to the naked eye, and observers in boats on the surface may not notice that a seiche is occurring due to the extremely long periods.
The effect is caused by resonances in a body of water that has been disturbed by one or more factors, most often meteorological effects (wind and atmospheric pressure variations), seismic activity, or tsunamis. Gravity always seeks to restore the horizontal surface of a body of liquid water...
Seiche-related phenomena. It’s pretty anodyne, I realize now—like those streaming recordings of the Brahms trio, the chart (but only the chart) of something once brazen and sparkling, now annealed, normalized, in its passage through Flatland. But at first reading, I’d heard a song in it, and I found the song, or a glimmer of it. I tried to catch it in the recording I’m sharing here.
Is it alive? When it comes to my own singing, I can’t tell. All I know is that the place where singing comes from was for that moment a liquid place. But it’s moved; it’s moving now.
That country crossed was what I could imagine,
and that little spit of answer is the shadow—
not the ocean which casts it— that I step next
into to be cleansed of question.
—Ed Roberson, “As at the Far Edge of Circling”
Where the singing comes from