"¡Yao!": Encountering Q-Pop

After reading this article on BBC Mundo by Alejandro Millán Valencia a few weeks back, I’ve had the pleasure of encountering the musical artist LENIN, stage name of Lenin Tamayo, the 23-year-old Peruvian singer who is at the forefront of Q-Pop (Quechua Pop). Having embraced K-Pop (Korean Pop) as a source of camaraderie as a marginalized youth in school, he now combines that genre’s sounds and aesthetics with Peruvian elements rooted in traditional, indigenous Andean culture: clothing, dance, customs, and the Quechua language.

Photo Source: https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/peruvian-singer-aims-to-introduce-q-pop-/7231045.html

According to a 2021 AP News article by Franklin Briceño, the Quechuan language lies at the center of long-standing tensions in Peru that have social, economic, and ethnic ramifications. Quechua had once been the lingua franca of the Incan Empire, but following Spanish colonization it became heavily discriminated against, outlawed in the 1780s following an indigenous uprising and intensely villainized during the atrocious civil war that began in the 1980s.* This prejudice has persisted and intensified to the point at which today Peruvian Quechua speakers have internalized “linguistic shame,” a mechanism that Ingrid Piller states is directly linked to the normalization and acceptance of oppression.** For this reason, LENIN’s macaronic songs, featuring lyrics in both Quechua and Spanish are a significant expression of cultural identity, a counterargument to the current state of the language and culture which celebrates love and fun, self-expression and cultural roots.

The song ¿IMAYNATA? hits a lot of these themes. The verses in Spanish drip with swagger and self-confidence, declaring in a declamatory style, “I live without fear of walking / Only love and freedom,” and “I tell you in Spanish, in Quechua, or in English / the language doesn’t matter one way or the other” (translations are mine or Google Translate). The pre-chorus in Quechua, however, is a slow build in a higher vocal register, resonating with a gnawing doubt, “What are you looking at / When your heart is dead?” The chorus, still in Quechua, has few words, all confidence, answering the question “¿Imaynata? [How do you do it?]” with syncopated exclamations of “¡Yoa!” and “¡Walk!” weaved through a somewhat pirate-esque riff.***

Valencia’s BBC article includes an interview in which Lenin expresses some of his views on singing in Spanish versus Quechua. He says that a language like Spanish is full of innuendo and double meanings, offering more room for hypocrisy. Quechua, on the other hand, has less equivocation and is more direct in the way that it connects the speaker to the world. In Lenin’s view, this means that a Quechua speaker has first-hand contact with emotions and nature. This comes across in the song KUTIMUNI which contrasts distorted, mechanistic, or anxious sections in Spanish with sudden shifts to luminous and tranquil parts in Quechua where one can almost hear the whisper of birdsong.

Photo Source: https://www.behance.net/gallery/144071069/Inca-Kola-Murales

Perhaps the most summational demonstration of the message of indigenous cultural revival and celebration is the song INTIRAYMI (which happens to be my childen’s absolute favorite to sing with and dance to). The title translates to “Sun God Festival” and is in reference to an Incan festival that celebrated the winter solstice, which has since been revived in several South American contexts. Lenin taps into the joy of this festival with a rousing Spanish/Quechua chorus: “It’s Inti Raymi / Let’s go dance / It’s Inti Raymi / Let’s go dance / Because the night is young / Everyone sing / Because life is one / It’s a festival!” His music video goes further with images of the sun / Inti, the offering of sacred cocoa leaves, performances of the ancient scissor dance mixed with modern break dancing, Aya Huma masks, a mural by Adriana Hiromi and Jade Rivera in the Barranco district of Lima that declares “Hagamos un Perú que nos dé gusto [Let’s make a Peru that gives us pleasure]”, and a crowd of young and excited people celebrating in the streets.

I’m still discovering the riches of LENIN’s music and especially look forward to exploring it with my children who can’t seem to get enough… Cuando Estoy Aquí and AMARULLAQTA deserve a listen. It also has me wondering about genre hybridity and minority languages. While a conservative approach to the matter of music + minority language tends to stick to strictly traditional styles, futuristic approaches consider how old and new might be combined to create something thrillingly alive. While some genres seem to require linguistic conformity to English, others seem well suited to and even encouraging of linguistic variety. Afterall, the genre of K-Pop (Korea) interacts not only with Q-Pop (Quechua), but also J-Pop (Japan), C-Pop (China), and T-Pop (Thailand). And heavy metal’s proclivity for sub-genrification and theatricality provides lots of room for linguistic variation; Swiss folk-metal band Eluveitie sings some of their songs in Gaulish, a nostalgically dark / darkly nostalgic act of cultural revivification. Perhaps there are other ways that hybrid genres can encourage singers in minority languages to imagine a future where, to quote LENIN’s song INTIRAYMI, “the sun comes every moment ever closer.”

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*Briceño’s article mentions an interesting incident in which Peruvian Prime Minister Guido Bellido delivered a speech to Congress in Quechua, prompting some strong reactions from those in power who largely could not understand him. Translated, his message was equally stinging: “We have suffered for five hundred years. We walked slowly through hills and snowy peaks to arrive here in Congress, and have our voice heard… It’s time to change. It’s time for all of our country’s residents to look at each other as equals, without discrimination.”

** This pattern of dehumanization is all too common in historical narratives of colonizers attempting to erase the culture of the colonized, often through linguistic shame taught to children in (often forced) school settings: Scottish Gaelic in the UK, Tahitian in French Polynesia, all Native American languages in North America, Spanish in California, etc.

***This is the song that instantly became a favorite of my kids as the chorus is very easy to sing and has such a sweet groove. Plus the Quechua word for “walk” is “puriy,” which we initially mistook for “booty,” and who wouldn’t want to shout that out while driving in the car as an elementary school kid?

The Child and the Book Conference: The Magic of Sound

Kicking off a rather full spring / summer of academic conferences, I attended a The Child and the Book conference May 15 through 17 in Podgorica, Montenegro.

Conference

This was my very first experience with The Child and the Book, an international conference launched in 2004 that provides a forum for the exchange of scholarly research on all things pertaining to children’s and young adult’s literatures. While I enjoy hearing talks on all manner of subjects, as a musicologist in children’s literature conferences I normally have to do a fair amount of sleuthing in order to find presentations that deal, however obliquely, with music. Not so this time, as the theme was The Magic of Sound: Children’s Literature and Music. I had the pleasure of experiencing a wide range of papers on things as diverse as the many musical afterlives of Lewis Carrol’s “Jabberwocky”, musicalizations of masculinities in Disney’s Hercules, analyses of the ear-worm song “What does the Fox say?”, childism in Javanese children’s songs, film adaptations of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, a close analysis of Fosse’s picturebook The Fiddler Girl, post-WWII pedagogical texts with fanciful illustrations that mirror (and are meant to teach) sheet music notation, gendered power dynamics in Disney ballroom dance scenes, and the sonic significances of Milton’s Paradise Lost. My own presentation “Casting the Spell: Musicalizing Fairytales and Märchenfrauen in Imaginative Children’s Music” took a look at the overlap in social and aesthetic significance between domestic piano music and literary fairytales, using examples of works by Renaud de Vilbac, Genady Osipovich Karganov, and Hans Huber. It was particularly fun to use a quotation by the indomitable scholar Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and then to chat with her about it afterwards! They also have a great early scholars collective called the Grow Reading Group that did a thoughtful and interesting session that connected academics navigating academia in the beginning stages of their careers.

One of my favorite presentations – “Female Fury in Picturebooks” by Rosalyn Borst – drew a line between the emotional expressivity of punk rock Riot Grrrl music and the Dutch picturebook Sofia en de Leeuw by Pelaez-Vargas, posing questions regarding the limits placed upon emotions, particularly “negative” ones like fury, when it comes to adolescent girls. This talk inspired me to consider whether music exists that offer young children (boys and girls) an opportunity to express their anger, not merely manage it or negate it. In my own research, publishers carefully controlled nineteenth-century piano character pieces to establish appropriate social and moral boundaries in instrumental music that might otherwise give children license for raw emotion; a piece that could be understood as “angry-sounding” due to its key, rhythms, dynamics, etc. would need to be specified through a descriptive title like “The Tempest” or “The Naughty Boy”. Outright naming and expressing fury does not appear to be a theme of children’s music today. Though one avenue seems hopeful: heavy metal music for children is absolutely a thing! A group like Hevisaurus from Finland has a lot of potential for releasing the child’s roar. Can you think of any songs for children that give vent to anger through the lyrics and/or music?

The crowning event took place on the final night of the conference in a crowded downtown bar. There we came face to face with the magic of sound itself as conference organizer and superhuman Svetlana Kalezic Radonjic mounted a stage with her rock band and sang for about four hours without a break. There’s nothing like a late-night rave to shatter your image of academics as boring and stuffy pedants. Dance moves were seen that cannot be unseen! It was an unbelievable amount of fun!

Locale

Another first for me was traveling to the Balkans. I stayed in a hotel called Carine in the middle of town, just around the corner from a wide space called Independence Square and the conference venue, the National library Radosav Ljumović. Although it rained quite a lot during my stay, I took time to explore the city of Podgorica on foot, particularly noting the unkempt, green wildness of nature, which contrasted strikingly with both murals and graffiti. In fact, “contrasts” seems a fitting word for the city’s kaleidoscopic sights as it transitioned almost seamlessly from fifteenth-century Ottoman alleys to Soviet brutalist apartment buildings, and from flowing rivers lined by lush forests to seedy pawn shops. At one point I saw within a single glance a combination of make-shift (aka sketch) carnival rides set up in a parking lot, the eccentric stone towers of an orthodox church, and the distopic shapes of Blok 5. Upon closer inspection of the church, the Orthodox Temple of Christ's Resurrection, I saw the beginning of a wedding taking place, as well as a group of local musicians ready to celebrate afterward with a drum and various brass instruments. The hotel included a generous breakfast – scrambled eggs, cheeses, meats, olives, salads, coffee – and I am now obsessed with a particular type of white cheese that I’ll have to seek out at the European Market here in Rocklin. I ate lunches and dinners out with colleagues from the conference and tried French fries with mayonnaise at the encouragement of a Belgian friend. I won’t lie… I kind of liked it.

I saw more of Montenegro on a cultural excursion planned for the morning following the conference. (Yes, the morning after our late-night rager. Thank goodness things were on “Balkan time” aka “15-20 minutes late” and I made it to the bus!) With the sun finally shining we made our way through the hills to the city of Budva on the coast. As we arrived I was pleasantly reminded of Santa Barbara in the coastal plants, animals, weather, and landscape. We dismounted the bus at a dock and boarded a large boat that took us out to the Adriatic Sea, dazzling us with stunning views of the wooded coastline dotted with stone chapels. It was during this voyage that I took about thirty minutes to carefully debone a fish for my lunch and had my first taste of bambus, a traditional and dubious mixture of red wine with Coca-Cola. I didn’t hate it… We landed at a fortress-port-city called Kotor, which is home to literally hundreds of (well cared for) stray cats, as well as the wonderfully winding cobbled streets of an old city that I adore. Here from the sea the mountains shoot up steeply into the cloudy sky (like Santa Barbara), and perched high above the town sits Kotor Fortress, accessible by a marathon of stairs, which, unfortunately, I didn’t have time to explore this trip. By chance I did run into a street vendor playing a sweet Dorian melody on a frula or wooden flute with the fipple hole on the bottom, resulting in a purchase that has augmented my personal woodwind collection.

International travel always includes adventures in language and I had some great encounters both en route and in Montenegro. I did some research before the trip and found out that the political and ethnic complexities of the Balkan region is in many ways reflected in the generic boundaries of various languages. Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian are all basically mutually intelligible languages, although to some the symbolic differences are more important than the linguistic similarities. As you might expect, Montenegrin is the official language of Montenegro (but only since 2008), however I found many more resources on Serbian online, so that’s what I worked on. Around town I was able to give greetings, ask for directions, order coffee, and inquire whether I could pay with a credit card. The most fun I had was with Ljubo, the genial man who ran the breakfast at the hotel; we chatted together about Podgorica, food, language learning, the weather, and California. I also talked a bit with two managers of a bookstore (who assured me that “srpski” and “crnagorski” are the same language) where I found a Serbian version of Hari Poter. It turns out that the Serbian word for Muggles is Normalca [normals]. On the trip back to the western hemisphere, I hung out with a Canadian friend from Norway and chatted a bit in German with the scholarly expert on lying and deception, Jörg Meibauer. I also thoroughly enjoyed watching the 2020 animated children’s film “Wolfwalkers” with music by Bruno Coulais on the lengthy flight home.

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Wonderful trip! The conference was rich with musical ideas and I truly loved reconnecting with old friends and making new ones. I’d love to go back to the Balkans again some time (Svetlana said to give her a call) and see more of the countryside. Doviđenja! See you next time in Rouen, France!

Publication Announcement: Textes & Contextes

You can now read another article of mine, a labor of love that’s been in the works for about a year now. It’s through Textes & Contextes, a journal connected to the Interlanguage Center at the University of Burgundy. The theme is “Lullabies: Historic and Cultural Circulations, Transmissions of the Intimate,” and considers the lullaby writ large as a transcultural and mobile expression of intimacy. My contribution to the discussion it entitled “Instrumental Lullabies and 19th Century Representations of Childhood, Girlhood, and Motherhood,” and examines lullabies that have been recontextualized several times over, not functional in their original care-taking sense, and not performed in adult performance contexts as art songs or virtuosic berceuses. These are instrumental lullabies that children practice and perform in their own homes, imaginatively playing out roles of childhood, girlhood, and (future) motherhood. I look at the dynamics of performance as self-regulation, the roles of mothers as domestic teachers, and adult mimicry in musicalized doll play. My final section looks at examples that have more problematic depictions of lullabies, both by female composers from the USA, Florence Newell Barbour and Juliet Adams, aka Mrs. Crosby Adams. The latter is particularly interesting for her pedagogical perspective which she articulated in a wealth of publications, journals, and letters. I’d like to make a larger project of her in the future.

This journal is online accessible so check it out here.

The Sacred Music of Harry Potter: III. Ghosting Music

Happy Winter Solstice, everyone! As you can see from part 1 “The Hogwarts School Song” and part 2 “Recorder Squeaks,” the technique of analysis I am borrowing from the Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast can lead in unexpected directions. Within the fictional world of Harry Potter, music lies on both sides of the Muggle and magical worlds; it is simultaneously ordinary and enchanting. In this post we encounter the familiar scene (if only from period movies) of an instrumental ensemble playing ballroom dance music for an old fashioned party… but with a twist.

Human / ghost ballroom overlap in “Once Upon a December” from Fox Studio’s 1997 movie Anastasia with music by Stephen Flaherty and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens.

Once again I will examine a musically descriptive text from the Harry Potter series using a modified lectio divina sacred reading technique as outlined below:

1. Context: What is happening in the story when this excerpt occurs?

2. Musicology [NEW]: What might this music sound like and what ideas are associated with it?

3. Metaphor: What imagery or associations does this excerpt suggest?

4. Personal: What personal memories does this excerpt recall?

5. Action: What does this excerpt motivate you to do in your life?

Today’s passage is as follows:

“As Harry shivered and drew his robes tightly around him, he heard what sounded like a thousand fingernails scraping an enormous blackboard. ‘Is that supposed to be music?’ Ron whispered."

“The Deathday Party” by Dan Waring.

1. Context

We are now on pages 131-132 (US version) of the second book, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Chapter Eight, “The Deathday Party.” Harry, Ron, and Hermione have been invited by Sir Nicholas de Mimsy Porpington (aka Nearly-Headless Nick), the ghost of Gryffindor Tower, to attend a party in honor of his five hundredth deathday on October 31.* Harry had felt compelled to accept this unusual invitation in light of the events of the previous day in which Nick, whose pride had been wounded by a rejection letter from the Headless Hunt, helped Harry out of a spot of trouble with Filch, the cantankerous caretaker. The next day Harry (bound by his promise), Ron (reluctant and hungry), and Hermione (enthusiastically inquisitive) walk past the doors of the Great Hall and the sumptuous smells and lively chatter of the Halloween Feast and make their way down into the dungeons. With every step they take, the temperature drops, engulfing them in an icy chill, their cloudy breath illuminated by ghastly black tapers on the walls which burn with a pale, blue light. They are greeted at the door of a large dungeon by Sir Nicholas himself, who solemnly ushers them into an incredible sight: “The dungeon was full of hundreds of pearly-white, translucent people, mostly drifting around a crowded dance floor, waltzing to the dreadful, quavering sound of thirty musical saws, played by an orchestra on a raised, black-draped platform.” In addition to this unusual ensemble and the spectral ballroom dancing, there is also a large table spread with a tombstone cake and rancid food. While overwhelmingly nauseating for the humans, ghosts can only hope for a mere suggestion of taste from this noxious fare as they pass their bodies – mouths agape – through the serving table. Lastly, perhaps most uncomfortable of all, this party has smalltalk!

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*As I began writing and researching this post we passed through October 31, Halloween, or, to use its rather older name, Samhain (pronounced [ˈs̪ãũ.ɪɲ] in Scottish Gaelic). Marking the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter, this Celtic festival is also considered a threshold day in which the veil separating this world from the Otherworld was at its thinnest, allowing for a brief connection between the living and the dead.

2. Musicology

Photo of Marlène Dietrich playing Jacques Keller’s toothless “singing blade” around mid-1950s. She started playing the musical saw while shooting the film Café Elektric in Vienna (1927).

The musical saw is literally a hand saw, a sheet of tapered metal with a handle. This tool is transformed into an instrument when a sawist clamps the handle between their knees (teeth facing towards them), grasps the small end with the fingers of one hand or by means of a specially made handle, and draws a violin bow across the flat edge.* That’s the general idea, but to make the saw actually “musical” is a whole different story. To make a specific sound, the saw must be bent into an S-shape, which dampens the frequencies of the curved portions while isolating the frequencies made by the flat stretch or “sweet spot” in the middle. By bowing in just the right position, the result is a warbling but piercing tone that is often considered voice-like yet disembodied. By manipulating the saw into a larger or smaller S-shape and moving the sweet spot up or down to thinner or wider portions of the saw, a skilled sawist can produce higher or lower pitches. Here is Brigid Kaelin giving a great tutorial from start to finish. Because the saw can be bent at extremely small increments, the instrument is capable of playing a continuous glissando, a smooth gradation of pitches much like a human voice.** This means a musician must overcome the rather daunting task of learning to know precisely where their desired pitches lay within this smooth and unmarked continuum.

The musical saw seems to have begun first as a folk instrument (South America? North America? Scandinavia? who knows?), later entering into more widespread use around the turn of the twentieth century. It appeared in popular contexts such as vaudeville shows in the US, movie sound effects such as the song “Give a Little Whistle” from Disney’s Pinocchio (1940), and USO concerts during World War II. Additionally, classical composers took it up beginning in the 1920s, where it could function as a dramatically unsettling sound effect, as well as an instrument whose glissando allowed it to play experimental, quarter-tone music. In the former case, it appears as spectral wailing in the séance scene from Franz Schenker’s (1878-1934) opera Christophorus oder Die Vision einer Oper (1925-29), grotesquerie in Dmitri Shostakovich’s (1906-1975) satirical opera The Nose (1928),*** and the otherworldly ascension of the dying Sphinx in George Enescu’s (1881-1955) opera Œdipe (1936). In the latter case we have pieces such as De Natura Sonoris, No. 2 (1971) by Krzysztof Penderecki (1933-2020), Divination by Mirrors (1998) for saw and two string quartets tuned a quarter tone apart by Michael A. Levine (b. 1964), and Dreams and Whispers of Posideon (2005) by Lera Auerbach (b. 1973). The delightful dancer-turned-sawist Natalia Paruz seemingly straddles all genres, performing in concert halls, recording movie sound tracks, and busking on New York City subway platforms.

Flier for the 7th Annual New York City Musical Saw Festival (2009).

In general, musical saws are performed soloistically, either alone or with the accompaniment of different instruments, expressing a single, disembodied voice. But in the story, what really set Harry’s nerves on edge was the sound of thirty saws playing together, producing a multi-layered chorus of disembodied voices that create a shimmering wall of wailing sound. There are only several contexts in which we might encounter this unique phenomenon. One of those is at a festival, such as the 2009 New York Musical Saw Festival. At this event they set a Guinness World Record when fifty-three sawists performed Schubert’s Ave Maria. As you can hear, the players and the sound are enthusiastic and gregarious. Another method is virtually through digital duplication and layering, where a single sawist records themselves multiple times and layers the tracks together to make an orchestra. Examples include Chili Klaus, a Danish chili pepper connoisseur, performing a schnazzy duet of “When You’re Smiling” with himself, and Brigid Kaelin making a recording of herself thirty times over playing an arrangement of “Happy Birthday.” This last example was made specifically with Nearly-Headless Nick’s Deathday Party in mind, and is perhaps the closest thing available to get a sense of what the children heard in that dungeon.

One final detail complicates this musical event: the orchestra plays not as concert music or as background music, but as accompaniment for ballroom dancers. They are specifically performing a waltz, a type of dance that has become inextricably associated with formality, grace, and prestige. Countless ballroom scenes in movies – from The Great Waltz (1938) and Cinderella (1950) to Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) and La La Land (2016) – create such an atmosphere as the dancers elegantly move in time to the steady 1-2-3, 1-2-3 of the music. Yet it is precisely the need for that steady rhythm that makes an orchestra of musical saws problematic. Unlike an instrument such as a violin or piano (which are both capable of sharp attacks when a thin string is set in motion by, respectively, a bow or a felted hammer), the musical saw has a slow attack and a more gradual blossoming of sound as the energy of the bow must travel the width of the metal sheet. I am doubtful that a musical saw could play with the kind of rhythmic precision necessary for a clear and crisp waltz. I am even more doubtful that an orchestra of thirty saws could do it, given the coordination required. Yet rather than point out a flaw in the story, I find this detail particularly interesting in light of my chosen metaphor…

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*Handsaws have also been used in other musical genres, notably ripsaw or rake n’ scrape which originated on the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Bahamas. In this instance, the player scrapes the serrated edge with a metal object (usually a screwdriver or a butter knife), creating a rhythmic grating sound that can be altered by bending the saw. Here is musician Lovely Forbes giving an explanation and demonstration. And here’s the band Bo Hog and the Rooters playing rake n’ scrape music with saw performed by Crystal Smith.

**Other instruments developed in the twentieth century also employed this continuous glissando effect, and likewise filled a sort of experimental-novelty-otherworldy-spooky sound niche. Most notable is the theremin, an electronic instrument developed by Russian inventor Leon Theremin in the 1920s, and which is the de facto sound of spooky aliens and ghosts, as well as appearing in orchestral pieces, and covers of jazz standards. More recently, sound designers have Frankensteined new instruments such as Mark Korven’s Apprehension Engine that uses continuous glissando among other effects (such as the woeful tone of the hurdy-gurdy!) to create truly nightmarish sound worlds.

***In the score, Shostakovich indicates the use of a “Flexatone”. There is some question whether he and other composers from the 1920s onward meant a musical saw, which was understood as an instrument capable of “flexing or bending a tone” or a different tremolo-producing percussion instrument that was patented around the same time called a Flex-a-Tone. See the Shostakovich link for a fuller explanation.

3. Metaphor

I read the theme of dissociation in this excerpt.

Death is one of the most ultimate forms of detachment. Through death a profound and deep rift is driven between those who have died and those who continue to live, separating us from engaging in those activities that engender relational meaning in life – shared time, shared space – leaving us with fragments and echoes, memories, photos, recordings. While the Harry Potter series devotes a good amount of energy into grappling with the reality and finality of this mortal rupture, the ubiquitousness of ghosts seems to overcome it with magical nonchalance. Ghosts – pearly white, cold to the touch, able to float through walls – are everywhere in Hogwarts, and interact as a matter of course with the living, enjoying both cordial and heated conversation (Sir Nicholas and the Fat Friar), delivering deathly boring history lectures (Professor Binns), maintaining secrets (the Gray Lady), and engaging in warfare (the Headless Hunt).* It would seem that the presence and behavior of these ghosts go far in negating Death’s Sting.

But what exactly is a ghost?

A scene from “The Innocents” (1961), an adaptation of Henry James’ 1898 horror novella Turn of the Screw, where ghosts and childhood innocence spell disaster. “He was there or was not there: not there if I didn't see him.”

In the fifth book (Chapter Twenty-Eight “The Second War Begins”), Harry, consumed with the desire to circumvent death and reunite with his godfather Sirius Black, corners Sir Nicholas and strives to understand: “You died, but I’m talking to you… You can walk around Hogwarts and everything, can’t you?” Sir Nicholas, hesitant and shamefaced explains that “Wizards can leave an imprint of themselves upon the earth, to walk palely where their living selves once trod… But very few wizards choose that path.” Instead, the majority will have “gone on”. He continues, “I was afraid of death… I chose to remain behind. I sometimes wonder whether I oughtn’t to have… Well, that is neither here nor there… I fact, I am neither here nor there… I know nothing of the secrets of death, Harry, for I chose my feeble imitation of life instead.” The ghost Sir Nicholas, and by extension every other ghost who attended his Deathday Party, avoided the painful and frightening mystery of death. They opted for an existence of numbness, a feeble imitation that grasps for the faded shreds of life’s familiarity, yet continually (eternally?) fails to hold on to anything of substance. Ghosts are the embodiments of dissociation. And the details of this Deathday Party bring this strikingly to the fore.

For the humans, this congregation of ghosts is sensorially overwhelming. They are too cold to the touch. Too busy for the eye. Too nauseating for the nose and tongue. And too discordant for the ear. Harry describes the sound as “a thousand fingernails scraping an enormous blackboard,” a simile that is both tortuously chilling and vindictively intentional. Yet from the perspective of the ghosts, their dissociation from existence has numbed them. In their “feeble imitation of life” they seek extreme stimulation in an (ultimately futile) attempt to reconnect. For all their intemperate frigidity, they remain unable to feel and be felt. For all their glowing luminosity, they remain transparent and insubstantial. For all their noxious and putrid food, they experience not one soupçon of flavor. The orchestra of musical saws serves a similar function.** For all the wall of wailing sounds, perhaps the ghosts only catch the merest whisper of a melody, only feel the merest trace of a waltz rhythm. And for all their dancing – without touching one another, without feeling the connection of their feet to the floor – the delight of dance fails to enliven their souls. Ron’s question “Is that supposed to be music?” goes beyond his signature petulance at encountering the unfamiliar, and rather prompts us to consider whether music – those creative acts that bind humans into relationship with one another – is possible for ghosts.

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*Ghosts are one thing, but people living beyond the grave in the form of portraits is another! Also, are the pictures in the Chocolate Frog trading cards sentient?

**It is possible that the pomp and circumstance of this party, including the musical saw orchestra, are also performative and symbolic. Sir Nicholas seems to be painfully desperate to appear like a successful ghost: prestigious, influential, learned, frightening. Even the physical characteristics of a musical saw speak to his desire to influence perception: music played by thirty serrated, toothy cutting tools certainly contrast sharply (pun intended) with the blunt axe that produced his botched beheading five hundred years earlier.

4. Personal

My current music room with Bruser’s book on the music stand. Ample opportunity to notice struggle and choose connection.

I am prone to dissociation. I learned from an early age that complex emotions and experiences could be dealt with through a certain level of psychological separation. As an adult I’ve come to realize that this strategy no longer suits me; as Brené Brown states in The Gifts of Imperfection (2010), “We cannot selectively numb emotions, when we numb the painful emotions, we also numb the positive emotions.” Knowing this about myself, I have ample opportunities to notice my avoidant reflex, and to consider truer and more whole-hearted actions. One such opportunity in which this happens is in my relationship to making music. I have been musicking in many ways over decades now, and while I can attest to what I would call a “golden thread” of genuine love between myself and my music making, there have been times when dissociation – from the music’s demands, from my emotional states, from life’s circumstances, etc. – have been a large part of my motivation. I can remember sliding onto the piano bench in order to create a wall of sound that signaled my familial or social unavailability, producing less of a musical experience and more of an accumulation of notes detached from meaning, my mind and body elsewhere.

It was not until later in my twenties that I came upon The Art of Practicing (1997), a book written by pianist, educator, and author Madeline Bruser that takes a soulful approach to exploring the potential for numbness. In the book she speaks about the musician’s propensity to valorize struggle. Playing music always involves eventual frustration, and many of us meet that frustration with the idea that we simply need to knuckle down and practice more, an activity characterized by repetitiousness, regimentation, and joylessness. Bruser wonders why we think such an arduous and authoritarian approach to music making in practice sessions ought to produce a musical performance filled with freedom, openness, and vivacity. Rather, she advocates for treating all musicking as an opportunity, first to notice our reactions to struggle. Do we move towards the mask of 1) overstated passion, 2) controlling aggression, or 3) expressionless avoidance? Second, we can take the time to pause, feeling the uncertainty and anxiety, and recognizing them as signs of our deep connection to ourselves as artists and as humans. And third, she suggests reengaging with openheartedness, vulnerability, and presentness. I very much appreciate this approach and its reminder of the value of music making as a profound act of connection, to the music, to ourselves, and to others.

5. Action

“Ghosting” in many ways feels like a proper response to a world that seems oversupplied with stimuli. The exhaustion that we all feel after years of doom scrolling through constant political infighting, environmental catastrophes, global diseases, social injustices, and mindless violence is truly real, to the point that researchers have coined the term Social Media Fatigue (SMF) in order to study it more closely, and papers are constantly being written on burnout in mothers, activists, educators, nurses, etc. How do we stay connected, yet protect ourselves from becoming overwhelmed? How might we utilize Bruser’s method for musical connection to carve out a selful and safe place for ourselves in other areas of our lives? How might we use this to cultivate wider networks of connection with others that bring music – both actual and metaphorical – to the world?

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NEXT: Phoenix Song I…

The Sacred Music of Harry Potter: II. Recorder Squeaks

Coming up on five years ago now, I wrote what was intended as the first in a series of posts on the intersections of music and J.K. Rowlings’ Harry Potter series, examined through the lens of the "Harry Potter and the Sacred Text" podcast. Much has happened since then. I for one finished dissertating and entered that magical time of post-doctoral soul-searching. My partner then began her own PhD journey in the area of Clinical Psychology; check her out here! The HPST podcast made an episode about every chapter from every book, started over from the beginning again with a new co-host, launched a “Women of Harry Potter” series, and soundly condemned Rowlings’ transphobic turn. And the world did a lot in that time as well. More and more Harry Potter movies of dubious quality keep coming out. Also global ultra-right politics is on the rise, as are the earth’s sea levels. Wars, coups, saber-rattling… Some grounding seems in order. It’s an opportune moment to return to this project.

Everything a hero needs.

As you can read from the first post on “The Hogwarts School Song” I will be examining a section of musically descriptive text from the Harry Potter series using a modified lectio divina sacred reading technique as outlined below:

1. Context: What is happening in the story when this excerpt occurs?

2. Musicology [NEW]: What might this music sound like and what ideas are associated with it?

3. Metaphor: What imagery or associations does this excerpt suggest?

4. Personal: What personal memories does this excerpt recall?

5. Action: What does this excerpt motivate you to do in your life?

Here we go:

[Harry] put Hagrid’s flute to his lips and blew. It wasn’t really a tune, but from the first note the beast’s eyes began to droop.

Mary GrandPré, illustration for “Through the Trapdoor” chapter (1998). Attention, chien bizarre!

1. Context

This passage is taken from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (US version, page 275), Chapter Sixteen "Through the Trapdoor" and describes an important moment in a tense situation: Harry, Ron, and Hermione, having resolved to foil Professor Snape’s (alleged) robbery of the Sorcerer’s Stone, have snuck out of their dormitories late at night and gotten into the forbidden third floor corridor. Here they encounter for the second time Fluffy, a giant three-headed dog owned by Hagrid, which has been kenneled behind a locked door for the duration of an academic school year. This terrifying, tripartite pup is the first in a series of obstacles put in place to protect the immortality-giving Sorcerer’s Stone, and stands guard over a trapdoor leading to hidden chambers below. Yet the three children come prepared; earlier that day they wheedled out of Hagrid the secret to the beast’s Achilles’ Heel: “Fluffy’s a piece o’ cake if yeh know how to calm him down, jus’ play him a bit o’ music an’ he’ll go straight off ter sleep.” Hagrid’s irrepressible penchant for divulging important secrets not only clues in the children, but had been communicated previously and inadvertently to (allegedly) Professor Snape, who could now use the information to bypass Fluffy and reach his prize. Upon arrival in the corridor, the three children see a harp lying discarded on the ground at the dog’s feet, clear evidence of the dark wizard’s machinations. Providentially, Hagrid had given Harry a whittled flute for Christmas that year, the perfect tool for such an important task, and within a few strains Fluffy is rendered incapacitated. The way is made clear for the children to plunge onward on their mission.

2. Musicology

“Orpheus saved his spouse with the sweet sound of his Citharian harp” by Dutch Jesuit illustrator Johannes Bolland (1596-1665). Spoiler Alert: the story does not end quite so salvifically… Here Orpheus plays a 17th-cent. lute rather than a kithara.

The trope of music calming the savage beast has a long history in varied discourses on music’s supernatural, supraverbal, and suprarational power, touching on such lines of thought as mystical sacred rituals, political propaganda, and applied music therapies. For instance, both ancient Chinese and ancient Greek philosophers mused (pun intended) at great length upon the power of music, contributing to the establishment of the doctrine of ethos, which claimed that music had the ability to speak directly to human emotion, alter personal characteristics, and effect the physical body like a sonic gymnasium. Kings and educators, take heed! Furthermore, various myths attested to the playing out (another pun) of music’s fantastical powers. In ancient Greek mythology, Orpheus was a kitharode, a virtuoso player of the kithara (κιθάρα),* a type of lyre by which he attracted the submissive and gracious attentions of forrest animals, streams, trees, and even rocks. Most famously, he employed his musical skills to convince Hades, the god of the Underworld to reverse the death of his beloved Eurydice, having first musically overcome such obstacles as Charon, the cantankerous ferryman of the river Styx, and Cerberus, the giant three-headed dog to whom Fluffy owes so much.

In order to infiltrate the “underworld” of Hogwarts, the witches and wizards in this story incapacitate Fluffy with different musical instruments which resonate with (yet another pun!) the particular cultural and musical context of Rowlings’ magical-medievalist Britain. The conniving dark wizard chooses to use a harp. Harps have a long historical and mythical presence in Europe, with images of triangular instruments depicted in manuscripts and stonework from as early as the 700s, its importation from the east occurring earlier. Early Celtic harps were strung with horse hair or metal wire and went by a variety of names such as cruit, clàrsach, telenn, and telyn. An Irish legend speaks of Dagda, the chieftain and high priest of the divine Tuatha dé Danaan people who possessed a harp that could alter people’s minds and change the seasons. (Here’s a “Stringdom” YouTube channel video featuring the playing and speaking of Elinor Evans.) In Rowlings’ book, the children discover the harp discarded on the floor, simply a visual indicator of past musical activity. However, in the film they encounter the instrument standing upright on a foot, plucking out a sweet song automatically and without human, physical touch through a magical enchantment.**

The protagonists, on the other hand, use a flute to charm the trapdoor’s guardian. That Christmas, Harry had been gifted “a roughly cut wooden flute. Hagrid had obviously whittled it himself… It sounded a bit like an owl.” I would argue that the most likely type of flute in this situation would be an end-blown fipple flute. End-blown: the instrument is held by both hands pointing away from the mouth when played, the hands covering and uncovering finger holes to alter the pitch. Fipple: the player blows into a narrow windway or duct that directs their breath at just the right angle to split against a sharp edge (the blade or labium) and make a sound. These kinds of instruments are exceedingly common across the globe, including musical traditions such as the seasonal Norwegian seljefløte, the enormous Slovakian fujara, the mellow Native American plains flute, the circular-breathed Thai khuli, the double-barreled Balkan dvojnice, the one-handed Basque txistu, and even the most noble American Weenie Whistle. Hagrid’s home made, wooden flute reminds me of a Hungarian furulya I own, simply made from soft elderberry wood with six holes and a fipple on the underside. Traditionally such an instrument would have been made and played by peasant sheep herders. Just right for lulling a monster to sleep.***

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*It is likely that this word derived from Persian sihtar, meaning three (si) + string (tar), which is the same origin of the Indian instrument sitar. Subsequently, we get many musical instrument words from kithara, including gittern, zither, and guitar. Here is a recording of an improvised song by Aphrodite Patoulidou and Theodore Koumartzis on a modern “Lyre of Orpheus” at the Seikilo Museum and Cultural Center in Thessaloniki.

**This gave the film’s composer John Williams the opportunity to compose the piece “Fluffy’s Harp”. (What will these Muggles think up next?!) The tradition of the self-playing instrument is common in mythology and folklore; for instance, Russian, Ukrainian, and Mari stories regularly reference gusli samogudy, magically auto-playing zithers, such as the story of “Most Noble Self-Playing Gulsi” that Prince Astrach manages to steal from the castle of Deathless Kashtshei.

***Alternative flute types (side-blown, rim-blown, panpipes, etc.) are comparatively more difficult to produce any sound at all, let alone a pleasant owl-like tone. Instruments such as the Colonial-era fife, Indian bansuri, Andean siku, Arabic ney, Japanese shakuhachi, and Mongolian tsuur all require an enormous amount of practice and the development of specialized facial muscles. #swol

3. Metaphor

I read the theme of preparation in this excerpt.

The Harry Potter series is in many ways a journey of growth. The “childhood” of the first three books – with their modest length, narrative forthrightness, and relatively simple characterizations – makes way for the “adolescence” of the final four books – longer, moodier, darker, more ambiguous – as they follow the growth of the main characters from age 11 to 17. As the stories progress we come to learn what the characters bring to each new challenge and how they utilize their skills, emotions, minds, and experiences. This is particularly true for the titular character, Harry Potter, who we find out comes uniquely prepared to confront and triumph over extraordinary foes. The realization, cultivation, and utilization of this power is one of the main dramas of the story, starting with Hagrid’s brusque “Harry, you’re a wizard” and culminating in the answer to the question of who is master of the Elderwand. In some cases, Harry realizes that he is naturally endowed with aptitude, such as his ability to skillfully fly a broom with no prior training. In others cases, it is Harry’s past that shapes who he is: perhaps his flying skills have much to do with his deceased father’s aerial accomplishments, encouraged by his godfather Sirius in the form of a toddler-sized broom stick when he was 1. The importance of Harry’s preparation becomes all the more intense when considering his life-or-death struggle with Lord Voldemort – “neither can live while the other survives” – whether the embodied face of Book 1 or the brutal terrorist of Book 7.

What prepares him for his encounter with Fluffy? Several important strands come together at this moment. First, he is armed with the friendship of Ron and Hermione (but not Neville), who bring their own skills and energy to the enterprise. Second, he has a wealth of information, wheedled out of Hagrid, gleaned from books, remembered from Chocolate Frog cards, overheard in eavesdropped conversations, intuited from the working out of facts. With this information he not only has a plan for getting past Fluffy, but also is fueled to desperate, heroic, white-hot action. Third, he has the support of magical items, most importantly his father’s invisibility cloak, which was returned to him with the timely encouragement to “use it well,” as well as a wand to open locked doors. And fourth, he has the benefit of previous experience sneaking through the castle in the dead of night.

Major Pied Piper vibes happening here!

But one important aspect of Harry’s preparation goes without mention, a skill that, had he not possessed it, would have spelled complete and utter ruin. I’m talking about Harry’s musical training! Think about it. The only way to survive not being mangled and devoured by a three-headed beast is to “play him a bit ‘o music.” So he picks up a whittled flute almost as an afterthought, stands in front of the voracious creature, takes a breath, and plays. True, “it wasn’t really a tune,” but whatever it was had enough musicality in it to render the animal incapacitated. Imagine yourself in that situation. Could you have done that now? Could you have done that as a sixth grader? If so, where did you learn to properly hold a flute? To cover the holes? To know the fingerings well enough to get out some notes? To have diaphragmatic breath control to play soothingly and not squeakily? I would venture that your success is almost entirely due to your preparation because of recorder class in elementary school.* The recorder is an end-blown fipple flute with eight finger holes and a tapered bore, first documented in Europe during the Middle Ages and reaching its apex during the Renaissance and Baroque eras. In America, if you played one in third or fourth grade, you probably played a plastic one; if you were fancy it may have been a transparent plastic in a vibrant color! The unfortunate stereotype of recorder class, at least in America, is that of a squeaky, shrill, cacophonous melée, traumatic for teacher, student, audience, and instrument alike. Yet it seems that Harry was paying attention in class. He possessed enough skill to pass a very high-stakes test with Fluffy in the third floor corridor. Few would think of “Hot Cross Buns” as preparation for vanquishing a magical obstacle, yet without it, our heroes would have been utterly lost.**

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*It should be mentioned that Hermione takes over for playing from Harry, suggesting that she too had the previous training at her Muggle primary school. Additionally, Harry seems to have had some sort of vocal training because he grabbed the flute merely thinking “he didn’t feel like singing.” I can’t see him singing freely at the Dursleys despite Vernon’s appreciation for “Tiptoe Through the Tulips;” perhaps his school had a children’s choir?

**Few of us got to experience the recorder’s full potential in elementary school. But it’s not too late! Grab your recorder wherever it is and learn to play “Hedwig’s Theme” from the YouTube tutorial of the fabulous, engaging, and accomplished Sarah Jeffrey of Team Recorder right now! It just might save the world! And to hear what another professional recorder player can do, check out Anninka Fohgrub in the Bremer Barockorchester’s performance of Georg Philipp Telemann’s Concerto for Flute and Recorder in E minor. The Presto finale at 12:38 is one of my all time favorite pieces!

4. Personal

Recorder class was not offered in my elementary school growing up. California is particularly notorious for its lack of support for arts programs in public school. As this January 2022 EdSource article by Louis Freedberg explains, despite state law requiring schools to provide “instruction on dance, music, theater, and visual arts,” these programs are inexorably dying, marginalized in favor of quantifiable subjects such as math and reading, and eviscerated by COVID restrictions. Low-income schools are less likely to be able to support arts programs, leading to wide socio-economic and racial disparities concerning which children engage regularly with art in the course of their early education. Perhaps this year’s Initiative No. 21 “The Arts and Music in Schools - Funding Guarantee Accountability Act” can help turn the tide. Rapper and producer Dr. Dre, a supporter of the measure, explains, “I’m all in on giving kids more access to music and arts education because creativity saved my life. I want to do that for every kid in California.” What might regular access to the arts do for all the state’s children?

Yours truly at (maybe) 6 and (maybe) 12. Probably the same plastic Yamaha soprano both times!

Even without recorder class at school, I actually did learn the recorder, but at home. I grew up in a musical family and an activity like playing a recorder in my bedroom seemed extremely normal. I remember playing (alone) through a book of duet arrangements of Anna Magdalena Notebook pieces by J.S. Bach. What better way to engage both body and mind in technical challenges, sometimes even encountering beauty? Could I have guessed that my efforts were in any way preparing me for something? By all accounts, no. Looking back, however, I can see that playing the recorder did prove foundational for me, laying the groundwork for my life’s richly multifaceted journey in music. The recorder led me to the piano and then beyond that to other instruments and sounds and people and courses and books and conferences. And I have taken many opportunities to return to the recorder even now, performing on it in the Folk Orchestra of Santa Barbara, giving live demos in college survey and history courses, and writing about it in blog posts on Harry Potter.

5. Action

We never quite know what will be important as we grow through life. What ought we focus on? What should we do with our precious time and energy? The world will tell you, of course. There are so many voices vying for authority, so many experts telling us how we measure up or fall short. From standardized tests to growth charts; parents, pastors, principals, and police officers; from guidance counsellors to Tik Tok influencers. We all want to be prepared, to feel that we have done whatever we should have done to be safe, successful, happy... To avoid disaster. But what if we had a wider belief in what being prepared for life meant? What kind of preparation from your life’s past have you received for life’s present? No matter how marginal. No matter how childish. Are there any surprises? How might we be more open to trusting that we are right where we need to be, learning what we need to learn, doing what we need to do? What would that do to the way we fill our time, treat our children, structure our societies?

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NEXT: Ghosting Music…

Giving and Taking with Ukrainian Ethnic-Chaos

In the Winter and Spring of this year, I was teaching two overlapping classes: “Survey of World Music” at Westmont College, and “Introduction to Music Studies: Music and Society” at UCSB. Then the Russian-Ukrainian War broke out, and despite the analysis by Kurzgesagt Labs that war at a national scale is no longer in fashion, this one seems full-blown, atrocious, and persistent. In response, I developed some lectures and projects for my courses that considered the intersections of music and culture to contextualize the current conflict. In my deep dive of Ukrainian history and music – which included some fascinating topics such as guilds of blind bandura and lira players (kozbars and lirnyks); nationalistic-minded, bourgeois folklorists such as Mykola Lysenko and their cultural agendas; Soviet power struggles over the arts and their own cultural agendas; and Project Polyphony’s contemporary recording of polyphonic singing (gurtoyoe penie) – the most wonderful thing to come out of it all was the band DakhaBrakha.

Image credit

DakhaBrakha means “give and take” and is a musical quartet featuring Marko Halanevych, Iryna Kovalenko, Olena Tsybulska, and Nina Garenetska. According to their website, the group seeks to create “a trans-national sound rooted in Ukrainian culture,” expressing a musical and performative character that is at once theatrical, eclectic, and powerful. They see themselves as cultural ambassadors, both for the international community, as well as fellow Ukrainians who continue to search for a unifying national identity. They call their musical genre “ethnic-chaos,” a perfectly apt name, given the melange of instruments and uncompromising hybridity of their pieces. The backbone of their instrumental sound consists of a cello (played by Nina in a unique tuning and originally bought at an antique shop) and drums (played by Olena). Vocally they typically contrast the voice of Marko (which runs the gamut from gravelly throat singing to Bobby McFerrin-esque falsetto) with the core three-part gurtoyne penie polyphony of Iryna, Olena, and Nina (all three have backgrounds in ethnomusicology and have done field work). But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Each song is somehow its own entity. Here are a few that stand out to me.

Sho z-pod duba: This piece is a gem! Nina’s pizzicato cello groove is joined by Olena and Iryna on the drums and then Marko adds syncopated jabs on a saxophone (on album recording) or accordion (in live concert recordings). The music stops and Marko lets out sort of call to attention in scat: “Boppy boppy bibala doppy!” (It is this feature which has my kids requesting that we listen to the “Boppy boppy” song.) The groove continues, now with the three women singing the words to a folk song called “From Under the Oak”. It cryptically tells the story of Ivanko who leads his horse to water but cannot get it to drink. In frustration he beats the animal, only to have a Balaam’s donkey situation in which the horse pleads for mercy. As enigmatic as the words are, the overall vibe of the music is consistently upbeat, jaunty, and energetic, returning to the “Boppy boppy” exclamation and bursting with percussive riffs. Perhaps the horse knows better than Ivanko and has its own source of water and happiness?

Kolyskova: A lullaby called “Oh dear cat” opens this piece. The words have the quality of a folk riddle, casting images of a cat, a cradle, a child, the colors gold and white, and always the question of whether one “has enough”. The song is rendered simply and intimately. Recorded sounds of a crying infant are added to the mix, as well as a slowly rocking piano riff in the bass register before Marko sings English words in his falsetto range, weaving a tapestry of a silvery moon just out of reach and fragments of “there’s a time for everything” from Ecclesiastes. Nina’s cello enters with a melody while scintillating piano strikes echo from the upper register like nighttime stars. More lullaby lyrics arrive adorned in a different, more wide-ranging melody and sung with a slightly more urgent vocal quality. These lyrics, while still soothing, confess the care-giver’s fear, expressing the worry caused by caring for children in the midst of the precariousness of poverty. Seemingly out of nowhere another far-off voice begins, putting words to what had previously been an instrumental, pentatonic countermelody, but now energized with a bouncy vocal style that puts me in mind of Chinese folk song. All these elements weave in and out of each other, ending with the crying baby and solo lullaby.

Vanyusha: Beginning nightmarishly with an atmospheric combination of harshly whispered maledictions, a raw sustained synth tone reminiscent of a piercing headache, and menacing glissandi on the amplified cello, this piece eventually finds its feet with a rather urgent cello groove overlaid with a darabuka rhythm that sounds like a cantering horse. Iryna’s vocal line has a monotone or restrained quality, although the agitation begins to mount through a dramatic rendering of the words. The lyrics tell of a man named Vanyusha whose cruel mother wrote to him telling him that his wife Kateryna had wastefully squandered all of his possessions while he was away. He comes home and beheads her, only to realize that his mother had lied. He then beheads his mother. Following Iryna’s solo rendition, the ballad is repeated as the tempo increases, this time with Olena singing a strident countermelody and, eventually, Nina wailing a descant over the top. This brutal piece fades away into the same frightening mist with which it began.

Oy za lisochkom: “Behind the wood” starts in sepia as it were, the folksong sung a cappella as though recorded on the field in the early 1900s and played back on a crackling LP. An accordion with a tango-ish quality and drums establish the groove as two contrasting melodies — women with a poignantly soaring one, and Marko with a jumpy, declamatory one — take turns. The cello has a rhapsodic quality here, sustaining long notes and indulging in ornamentation, putting me in mind of Kayhan Kalhor playing the kamancheh. The piece ends with a sudden spike of energy, the drums working double time, the accordion punching out tone clusters, and the cello going off the rails with sounds reminiscent of a chicken being plucked.

Image credit

Last week Jess and I had the very great pleasure of hearing DakhaBrakha live in Sonoma. Already loving the music, it was incredibly powerful to see the performers in the flesh, to experience their impressive light and visual display, and to hear them speak about their belief in a free Ukraine. For an encore they played Baby, one of the all-time favorites of my son for its wicked harmonica sections. “Baby, show me your love…” Hopefully we can catch them again when they come back to the Bay Area next year.

Listen to My Trumpet by Mo Willems: Emotion, Communication, and Relationship

As a parent of young children, it has been a pleasure to fall into the picture books of Mo Willems over the past few years. (As a family we made a tradition of eating pizza on Friday nights during COVID quarantine while watching his HBO special “Mo Willems and the Storytime All-Stars Present: Don’t Let the Pigeon Do Storytime!” (2020). Must have seen it about thirty times!) His works deftly and often poignantly explore the wide range and wild variability of human emotion, whether his subjects are frogs, squirrels, geese, dinosaurs, or (occasionally) humans. Rather than pigeon-hole (pun intended) emotions into strict ethical categories, he incorporates them within a relational narrative in which characters practice inter- and intrapersonal communication, giving voice to the richness of emotional experience.

Listen to my Trumpet!

by Mo Willems

Hyperion Books for Children (2012)

Picture: The Elephant & Piggie series (2006–16) chronicles the varied adventures of best friends Gerald the Elephant and Piggie the Pig in twenty-five books. Willems depicts all the characters in these stories in a simple style, replete with circles and ovals, lines and angles, bold outlines and solid colors. Usually appearing on a blank, white page, these characters have a sketch-book immediacy and simplicity, a characteristic that Willems uses to intentionally invite children to participate as co-creators, especially in activity books such as “We Are in an ART-ivity Book!” (2017) and Kennedy Center “Lunch Doodles” on YouTube (2020). Remarkably, the simplicity of these drawings provides the canvas upon which to depict astounding emotional details through facial expressions, body gestures, motion lines, written sound effects, and the size and style of font in the text boxes. On every page, every character is part of the emotional narrative, expressing and reacting to real-time events. “Listen to My Trumpet!” includes only Piggie and Gerald, as well as a golden trumpet and a wooden, three-legged stool. Piggie’s love of her gleaming trumpet is made clear by her ebullient face, quivering excitement, and the loving hug she bestows upon the instrument.

Text: There is no narrator throughout the Elephant & Piggie books, which are driven by monologues or, more often, dialogues. As each character talks, their words appear in a specifically colored speech bubble like a cartoon strip (gray for Gerald, pink for Piggie, etc.). Many pages contain no talking at all, allowing the illustrations to move the story forward, whether the characters dejectedly walk off the page, romp joyfully in the rain, blush with awkwardness, or simmer with jealousy. Willems takes his time, devoting a large number of pages to the moment-by-moment unfolding of the story. In “Listen to My Trumpet!” the dialogue of the two friends begins with generous amounts of exclamation points as Piggie enjoins Gerald to listen to her give a trumpet recital. As the noisiness of her performance crescendos, Gerald increasingly expresses himself through thought bubbles as his feelings of tension and discomfort increase.

Music: The moment that Piggie begins to play her trumpet, Willems gives it voice in the form of brash, orange text bubbles, shaped with sharp edges like fiery explosions, and connected by jagged, lightning bolt shaped lines. Using an enormous, thick, black font that looks as though the letters are being shocked by an electric eel, he presents the clamorous tones of the trumpet through onomatopoeic syllables. Willems’ imaginative “voicing” of the trumpet has a wonderful playfulness to it (reading it out loud to children is a blast!) and puts me in mind of a sort of overlap between the scat vocables of Ella Fitzgerald and the trumpet improvisations of Wynton Marsalis.

“LISTEN TO MY TRUMPET!” Copyright © 2012 by Mo Willems. First published by Hyperion Books for Children, a division of Disney Publishing. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Gerald’s reaction to the sound of the trumpet is one of discomfort, a feeling only intensified by Piggie’s continued excitement and belief that her performance is going well. Contrarily, Gerald privately thinks “That is not music” and compares the sound of Piggie’s trumpet to his Aunt Molly with a cold. What’s more, the sheer force of the trumpet’s sound has the ability to physically knock Gerald around, pitching him repeatedly off of his stool and eventually tossing him like a leaf in the wind during Piggie’s “big finish”, a scene as hilarious and overblown as the comedy short “Overly Competitive Trumpeters” by Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele.

“LISTEN TO MY TRUMPET!” Copyright © 2012 by Mo Willems. First published by Hyperion Books for Children, a division of Disney Publishing. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

This sort of physical buffeting is a common occurrence in the Elephant & Piggie series, however usually the roles are reversed. Gerald, who occasionally displays a rather choleric, irritable disposition, expresses himself through outbursts of emotion and, given his larger size and elephantine resonance, Piggie more often than not is bodily tossed about by Gerald’s powerful sighs, cries, exclamations, and sneezes. Significantly, their friendship withstands such storms, mainly because they give each other the benefit of the doubt and take time to move through uncomfortable emotions towards what is actually being communicated between friends.

But now wielding her trumpet, Piggie turns the tables, inundating Gerald with wave upon wave of powerful sound. Yet, as she makes clear before, during, and after her performance, the forcefulness of her playing is expressive of joy, of wanting to share something special with her best friend. It is this that causes Gerald the most consternation, especially when Piggie presses him for his honest feedback. After demurring several times, complimenting her on the shininess and loudness of her instrument, Gerald chooses to tell the truth, stating, “That was not music… Sorry…”. As explored in my post on “The Arrival” by Shaun Tan, noise is the critical category in which Gerald places this sonic experience; it is all loudness and power, confusing and chaotic, with none of the clarity, beauty, or tunefulness that he expects of musical performance. In fact it is more akin to the trumpeting of a sick elephant… which is closer to what Piggie was aiming at in the first place: “You think I am trying to make music?” she says. “I am trying to speak elephant! I want to be like you.” Her aim was never to make sounds that one would characterize as music, but rather to use an instrument to speak the language of her friend.

“LISTEN TO MY TRUMPET!” Copyright © 2012 by Mo Willems. First published by Hyperion Books for Children, a division of Disney Publishing. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

“Listen to My Trumpet!” hangs upon a simple generic miscommunication. Piggie completely disregarded the rules of “correct” trumpet playing from the start, and it is only by working honestly through a variety of powerful emotions (joy, nervousness, fear, confusion, worry, and shock, to name a few) that they discover the richness, the “musicality” of their relationship. Both characters had to figure out how to “listen” and to be willing to co-create new rules for the interpretation of sounds. How is the concept of “listening to music” overly prescriptive, moving too quickly to judgement at the expense of relationship and communication? How could the concept of “music” allow us to discover new ways of “listening” that provide a forum for truly hearing one another?

Publication Announcement: Sacred and Secular Intersections

My latest publication is out! After a bit over a year the edited volume Sacred and Secular Intersections in Music of the Long Nineteenth Century: Church, Stage, and Concert Hall has been published through Lexington Books. The project came about through the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music in a project that sought to consider the “sacred” as a musical topic that crossed historical and cultural boundaries in rich ways. My chapter was entitled “The Sacred Looking Glass: Imaginative Children’s Music as Syncretic Nexus.” First considering the baseline of Isaac Watts’ pedagogical perspective on children’s music as a way to instill doctrine in their hearts and minds, I shift to sacred topics in instrumental children’s music used in domestic settings, which effectively overlapped and complicated the sacred and secular. I analyze a wide variety of pieces by composers throughout the western word (three of whom happen to have the first name Alexander), considering the stylized quotation of sacred songs, depictions of children in the act of prayer, images of church services and ringing bells, and moralized musicalizations of angels and demons. Due to costs, I could not include any sheet music examples in the text, but the majority are quite findable online. The editors, Effie Papanikolaou (Bowling Green State University) and Markus Rathey (Yale University) were great to work with and provided a wonderful place for a wide variety of scholars to add to this conversation; in the words of one reviewer, it’s “a rich feast indeed.”

More information and reviews here.

The Sleepers Shall Rise

This last academic year I have had the personal and professional pleasure of working with Dr. Grey Brothers as the accompanist for Choral Union, the freshman choral group he founded and directs at Westmont College. Years back as an undergrad, Grey was my choir director, voice teacher, and musicology professor, and this year he retires from Westmont to (presumably) spend more time with his impressive collection of berets. In honor of my friendship with Grey and in commemoration of his time at Westmont, I composed a piece entitled “The Sleepers Shall Rise” for Choral Union, which was premiered at the Vocal Chamber Concert in April.

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Lyrics

George MacDonald

For the text of “The Sleepers Shall Rise” I used a four-stanza poem by Scottish poet and mystic George MacDonald (1824-1905):

Illustration by Arthur Hughes of the elder Princess Irene at her spinning wheel for the 1908 edition of The Princess and Curdie.

“The stars are spinning their threads,
And the clouds are the dust that flies,
And the suns are weaving them up
For the time when the sleepers shall rise.

The ocean in music rolls,
And gems are turning to eyes,
And the trees are gathering souls
For the day when the sleepers shall rise.

The weepers are learning to smile,
And laughter to glean the sighs;
Burn and bury the care and guile,
For the day when the sleepers shall rise.

Oh, the dews and the moths and the daisy red,
The larks and the glimmers and flows!
The lilies and sparrows and daily bread,
And the something that nobody knows!”

— George MacDonald (1883)

This enigmatic poem appears within MacDonald’s children’s fantasy novel The Princess and Curdie (1883), the sequel to The Princess and the Goblin (1870-72). In Chapter 8 “Curdie’s Mission", the young protagonist, a miner boy named Curdie, makes his way to the highest tower of a castle which he knows to be the workroom of the elder Princess Irene, an uncanny and mysterious “wise woman” character who has summoned him. (MacDonald has a penchant for these powerful yet unsettling female figures, from the good fairies of his fairy tales to the Wise Woman of The Double Story (1875) and the title character of At the Back of the North Wind (1868-71).) Curdie finds her at a spinning wheel, which flashes with light as it turns, impressing upon Curdie through its rhythmic movement a soul-stirring, emotional transcendence that he struggles to make sense of.

“Then the lady began to sing, and her wheel spun an accompaniment to her song, and the music of the wheel was like the music of an Aeolian harp blown upon by the wind that bloweth where it listeth. Oh, the sweet sounds of that spinning wheel! Now they were gold, now silver, now grass, now palm trees, now ancient cities, now rubies, now mountain brooks, now peacock’s feathers, now clouds, now snowdrops, and now mid-sea islands. But for the voice that sang through it all, about that I have no words to tell. It would make you weep if I were able to tell you what that was like, it was so beautiful and true and lovely. But this is something like the words of its song...”

Highly influenced by German Romanticism, MacDonald writes in a way that is simultaneously overwhelming, musical, childlike, and even alienating. The first stanza uses metaphors of spinning and weaving – a folk culture activity with enormous symbolic capital in Romanticism – and metaphorically connects them to the shifting, spinning, swirling phenomena of stars, clouds, and suns. The spiritual import and mysteriousness of nature continues into the second stanza as MacDonald anthropomorphizes the ocean, gems, and trees who are in the process of developing, growing, evolving. Actually it is unclear whether it is the natural world that is “becoming” or whether Curdie is merely becoming more aware of something that has been there all along. In the third stanza, MacDonald the preacher comes to the fore by focusing the processes of growth within the human soul, with a nod to the restorative Psalm 126:5 (“Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy”), and a characteristic emphasis on the holiness of laughter. In these first three stanzas, the final line speaks of the time or day “when the sleepers shall rise”, which reminds me of one of the central themes in MacDonald’s last major work of fiction, Lilith (1895). In the final stanza the poem erupts into a childlike list of objects; while it appears almost nonsensical, it can be interpreted as vitally meaningful, suggesting deep connections in a series of evocative images. The poem remains open-ended to the end, replacing the last line about waking from sleep with a “something that nobody knows”. (This reminds me of German poet Friedrich Klopstock’s Das Rosenband (1752) which states “I felt it well, and knew it not” [Ich fühlt' es wohl, und wußt' es nicht.]). As the narrator of Curdie and the Princess states, the words of the poem are a pale reflection of the deeply affective experience that Curdie is having in the presence of Princess Irene, and their literal meaning is almost ancillary to the expression of their power.

My Additional Stanza

My setting of “The Sleepers Shall Rise” includes an additional stanza inserted between MacDonald’s third and fourth verses, which I wrote myself:

“In the rainbow’s nest lies the key of gold
To the land of the shadows grey.
Oh, dear brothers, oh sisters, love is the whole
For those who believe and obey.”

I sought to match MacDonald’s elusivity, in part by stitching together several themes from his other writings. The reference to the “rainbow’s nest”, the “key of gold”, and the “land of the shadows” come from one of my all-time favorite MacDonald fairy tales, The Golden Key (1867), which begins with the simple lines: “There was a boy who used to sit in the twilight and listen to his great-aunt's stories. She told him that if he could reach the place where the end of the rainbow stands he would find there a golden key.” From this simple beginning, MacDonald sends two child protagonists into a dazzling world of mystical symbolism that moves beyond time and space.

The line “love is the whole” was lifted from the first line of Love is Home (1855), a five-stanza poem which rhapsodically addresses Love, finding it everywhere, particularly the diversity of nature and the longings of the human heart. The first stanza begins, “Love is the part, and love is the whole; / Love is the robe, and love is the pall; / Ruler of heart and brain and soul, / Love is the lord and the slave of all!” Again, we see MacDonald’s penchant for uniting dichotomies: part-whole, life (“robe”)-death (“pall”), heart-brain-soul, lord-slave.

Lastly, for MacDonald the concept of “believe and obey” was vitally important, though perhaps easily misconstrued. In many ways they signal his view that true maturity or progress necessitated a return to the simplicity of childhood, to a state of being that merely believed in the reality of a loving God and that merely obeyed whatever “still, small voice” prompted actions that brings that love to space and time. Such an idea crops up often in his children’s fantasies and pseudo-autobiographical novels, and is presented on the one hand scathingly in his Unspoken Sermons (1885), especially “The Truth in Jesus” from Series Two, and on the other hand in a disarmingly elementary dialogue in the poem Willie’s Dilemma (1855).

Illustration “Foamless Sea of Shadows” by Ruth Sanderson from 2016 edition of MacDonald’s The Golden Key.

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Music

Folklike Tune

I wanted the music to have a face-value simplicity to it, but in a way that leaves the door open to mystery and suggestibility. Each verse therefore makes use of a lullaby-like tune in 6/8, which appears with subtle variations each verse. For all the MacDonald stanzas the tune is in the Dorian mode, minor and with a rather Pirates of the Caribbean-esque lowered seventh, but shining with unexpectedly bright major IV chords like flashes of light glancing off of Princess Irene’s spinning wheel. It is at the penultimate verse (of which I wrote the poetry) that the mood of the piece changes, as though a key has been turned and the rainbow is shining with new, never before seen colors. Here I use the warmer Mixolydian mode, nestling the melody in the altos before fragmenting with staggered entrances at the words “Love is the whole”. The final verse shifts back to Dorian, but now modulated up a whole step and delivered in a more pressing and rhapsodic manner.

Spinning Wheel

The image of Princess Irene using her spinning wheel as an accompaniment to her singing provided inspiration for my conception of the collaborative piano part. There is a rich history of pianistic depictions of spinning wheels, such as Franz Schubert’s 1814 Lied “Gretchen am Spinnrade”, Albert Ellmenreich’s pedagogical standby “Spinnliedchen” (ca. 1863), and Scottish composer Erik Chisholm’s “Spinning Song” from his 1944 collection of preludes “At the Edge of the Great World”. At the onset I imagined the wheel oscillating as if in slow motion, drone-like open fifths rocking slowly between the right and left hands. The writing becomes more dynamic in subsequent verses, with rolling eighth-note arpeggiations in the second verse, and dizzying sixteenth-note filigree in the third. In the fourth (Mixolydian) verse the piano shifts from spinning motion to static blocks: pillars of sound that take Ossian-like strides to new vistas. The final verse returns to the energy of a spinning wheel in full force, the open fifths of the beginning now “power chords” that pound out the “something that nobody knows”.

Gaelic Waulking Song

I have a deep appreciation for folk musics, and decided to intersperse my music with a Scottish Gaelic song entitled Mhòrag ' s na horo gheallaidh [vo:rag sna horo ʝauLɪ]. (Here is a performance by Clannad. Note the variations in words.) This is a waulking song, a work song typically performed by groups of women who sang it while sitting in a circle beating and rotating newly woven tweed against a table to shrink it and make it waterproof. I saw the song as a fruitful connection to MacDonald’s Scottish provenance and complimenting the symbolism of Princess Irene at the spinning wheel as another example of music and storytelling through pre-industrial, female labor. In general waulking songs are highly rhythmic so as to coordinate the movements of the workers, feature vocables such as “horo” or “him ò”, and are sung in Gàidhlig (Scottish Gaelic) with solo verses and group refrains. The lyrics of Mhòrag as they have been written down are enigmatic, describing cattle herding, lamenting separated lovers, and possibly signaling an encoded reference to Prince Charles during the Jacobite Uprising. For this composition I used only the refrain – or sèist – working off of a 1998 edition from a collection by Deborah L. White. The melody appears between verses in “The Sleepers Shall Rise”, coalescing from fragments in the piano to a stirring choral rendition after verse three.

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It was a joy to create this piece, and to work with Grey and Choral Union to bring it to life! I uploaded a full performance of the piece from the Vocal Chamber Concert to my musicking page. Enjoy!

Publication Announcement: GKJF "Klänge"

This autumn you’ll be able to read my latest peer-reviewed publication in Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für Kinder- und Jugendliteraturforschung [Yearbook of the Society for Children’s and Youth Literature Research]. The journal’s theme is “Klänge” which translates to “Sounds” (and also happens to be the title of an important 1913 poetry + woodcuts book by Wassily Kandinsky), and provided the perfect context for presenting my research on the socializing pressures of imaginative children’s music. My article is entitled “The Guiding Hand: Hidden Adult Authority in Children’s Piano Music” (pp. 51–65) and provides cultural context and analysis of pieces by Robert Schumann, Cornelius Gurlitt, and Théodore Lack. I here extend ongoing research that I first presented at the IRSCL Congress in Stockholm, particularly in consideration of the pianistic dramatizing of the French bogeyman figure Croquemitaine. Because it is accessible online, we were able to include links to performances so you actually hear the “sounds” of the music.

Read here!

The Arrival by Shaun Tan: Musical Walls and Bridges

Attending the 2019 Congress of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature was an utterly amazing experience. Both Stockholm itself and the Congress located in Norra Latin—a historic high school now turned conference center in Norrmalm—offered me a continuous deluge of warm collegial camaraderie, stunning urban and riverside views beneath an overcast sky, scholarship that advocates for the marginalized in all its forms—and coffee, lots and lots of coffee… There were so many things about the trip that offered me a chance to feel at home. Yet, of course, I wasn’t home, and the trip also constantly reminded me of my foreignness, from pedestrian-car interactions (no stop signs!) to prices in krona, and from the sight of cathedrals and cobblestones and the letter “å” to the unremitting child-consciousness of Swedish culture. This is why for my first post-Stockholm post, I decided to explore a children’s book that deals more intensely with the concept of foreignness.

The Arrival

by Shaun Tan

Hodder Children’s Books (2006)

Text: None! This is what one might call a wordless graphic novel, each page filled with pictures in various orientations. I had heard of this book before, though never read it, and then it came up in a keynote presentation on the second day. While browsing a book display during one of our frequent fika coffee breaks, I saw the recognizable cover picture accompanied by a single unexpected word, “Ankomsten”, the Swedish translation of “The Arrival”. For a moment I felt like the quizzical man on the cover, staring at a little alien creature, considering the odd mixture of familiar and unfamiliar that a foreign word can conjure.

Picture: The pictures are arresting, powerful, and intricate, rendered in muted tones and depicting a fantasy/futuristic setting that nevertheless references turn of the century America, specifically the experiences of immigrants passing through Ellis Island. The basic idea behind the book is that there is a man who leaves his family and travels to an entirely new metropolis, a place where absolutely everything is unfamiliar, strange, and foreign. He—and we as readers—struggle to make sense of this new place as the character seeks food, shelter, work, and above all human connection. Gradually and with the help of kind people he comes to understand the ways and codes of this place, reminding me of a George MacDonald quote from Lillith: “The only way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home.” It is a timely, challenging, and moving book, important for children and adults alike to engage with.

Music: This book entrenches readers in the complex and painful process of learning, specifically of learning to navigate through and within an unfamiliar culture. Music, as an expression and carrier of culture, appears twice in the book and vividly communicates this shift from confusion to understanding. The first picture below depicts the arriving man’s first encounter with this new world. 

The man is confused at this point in the story, and we are thrust with him into the middle of an alien world. The invasive protocols of immigration services, the goings-on of bustling people in the streets, the appearance and behaviors of new animals, everything is overwhelming to his senses. The street musicians appear ominous: rendered in very dark hues with dower faces and surrounded by rat-like birds, the otherworldliness of the instruments they play—which include a space-age violin and an accordion with a serpentine tuba bell—is palpable. The concept of “noise” is useful here, as is an oft quoted definition by Anna Tsing: noise is the “awkward, unequal, unstable creative qualities of interconnection across difference” (Tsing 2004, 1). The oddity of the picture and the imagined music—some of which seems to be visibly shooting up out of the tuba bell into the sky—is meant to create a wall of noise. Unsettled by difference, the man has no opportunity to come to grips with its discomfiting significance.

[Aside: Tan’s imagined world of organological difference is actually remarkably similar to our own world. Modern western culture has a very limited notion of what instruments are “normal”, and in the margins of time and space lie instruments that display the human capacity for imaginative music- and/or noise-making. Below: A) a French piano accordion from 1880s on display in MIM Phoenix, B) John Matthias Augustus Stroh’s mechanically amplified Stroh violin invented in 1899, C) Adolph Sax’s trombone à pistons from 1876 on display in MIM Brussels, E) a ca. 1900 harp-guitar by Cesare Candi of Genoa, and F) Linda Manzer’s 42-string Pikasso guitar of 1984.]

The next musical encounter in The Arrival offers fresh possibilities for the newcomer on his journey towards musical and cultural understanding. After befriending a family and learning their own traumatic story, he is invited to dinner. Shared food, conversation, and laughter lead to an after-dinner musical concert, and a new relationship to this culture’s music. We see each member of the family happily contributing to this delightful Hausmusik experience. The father plays a miniature version of the street musician’s trumpet accordion, the mother plays a turnip-shaped ocarina with glowing orb of musical warmth, and the son sings—with his Pokémon lizard!—while strumming on a four-stringed circular guitar reminiscent of a Chinese ruan. 

The newcomer’s relationship with this family offers him a bridge toward understanding the meanings of music in this foreign place. Within the safety of a warm domestic setting he is able to draw near enough and to sit still long enough to listen with open ears and to ask questions of the performers in order to approach understand. Tan’s two images of music in The Arrival illustrate the contextuality of whether we interpret something as noise or as music. Relationship opens the door.

Du Iz Tak? by Carson Ellis: Satie and Time

I’m starting a new series of posts dedicated to exploring references to and uses of music within children’s literature, specifically picture books. Music functions richly within the intermedial dynamics of picture books, which Perry Nodelman describes as an art form demanding constant alteration between two modes of communication—visual and textual— and “as a result of these unusual features, [they] have unique rhythms, unique conventions of shape and structure, a unique body of narrative techniques” (Nodelman, 1988, viii). Adding music to this unique textual and visual genre provides yet another mode of communication, which both compliments and complicates an already wonderful genre. Let us begin!

Du Is Tak?

by Carson Ellis

Candlewick Press (2016)

Picture: This is a visually gorgeous picture book. Ellis frames up an insect-sized scene of an old log, and lingers there for the entirety of the book while seasons shift, adventures ensue, life is lived. The passage and cyclicality of time are of foremost importance: a single green plant provides the dapperly dressed invertebrate characters with many opportunities to experience the gamut of life’s emotions (puzzlement, excitement, leisure, horror, joy, letting go); a flamboyant caterpillar disappears into a cocoon in the first pages, metamorphosing near the end, and is followed by a second caterpillar at the close; and shifting seasons bring about changes to the foliage and landscape, most dramatically in the cleansing blankness of a winter’s snow.

Text: Ellis pairs these pictures with a delightfully innovative conlang (constructed language) of her own devising. (It appears to be nominally Germanic in syntax and phonology.) Readers are invited to speak “nonsense words” that are given meaning by the pictures. This technique highlights the nonverbal (shall I say “musical”?) power of communication through such things as gesture, intonation, addressee, and context.

Music: The bulk of the action happens in scenes of daylight. Yet three panels present us with a nocturnal version of the world: muted and dark colors, a starry night sky, and an absence of all characters apart from a single grasshopper perched upon a branch of the log directly over the caterpillar’s cocoon. In his [four] arms he holds a violin, which he plays introspectively, head bowed, eyes closed. Ellis employs a common technique: a string of musical notes emanates from the instrument and into the air. Remarkably, the notation symbols are not random (most examples are!). In the first two night scenes Ellis uses an eight-note rhythmic pattern made up of grace notes, eighth notes, quarter notes, and half notes that then repeats. Additionally, she provides a general melodic contour that gives enough information to show us that the notes are a quotation of a real piece of music: Gnossienne No. 1 by Erik Satie.

The second night scene with grasshopper and Gnossienne No. 1.

Erik Satie (1866–1925) was a French composer who was influential for his avant-garde experiments that modernistically challenged musical tradition and expectations. (He wrote minimalist background music which he termed musique d’ameublement (“furniture music”), included cheeky/ironic/impossible/overly dramatic narrations (in-score texts) in his music, and took as his programmatic subjects such things as the social lives and adventures of sea cucumbers.) Satie constructed his own cryptic term “Gnossienne” in three (perhaps seven?) compositions that share several generic characteristics: slow tempos, no barlines (known as “free time”), unconventional forms/melodies/harmonies, and strange in-score texts.

In the first two night scenes, Ellis’ grasshopper plays the opening theme of Gnossienne No. 1. I find the music hovering, yet heavy, improvisatory, as though playing with and reacting to half-remembered fragments. Follow along to a recording with sheet music performed by Klara Kormendi.

1. The third night scene directly follows the second. In the face of the decaying flower, we witness the dramatic release of the transformed caterpillar, which bursts out of its cocoon as a dancing moth. Eyes closed, she is the introspective one now, absorbed in the soaring exuberance of her dance. The grasshopper is on his feet, leaning forward eagerly, eyes wide and fixed upon this wonderful sight. He continues to play, but his tune has changed to match the sweeping gestures of the moth: twenty-five eighth-notes concluded by a dotted quarter note.

The third night scene with grasshopper/moth and Gnossienne No. 3.

Again, Ellis quotes Satie, this time Gnossienne No. 3. The third theme (fragment?) of this piece builds up momentum in a cascading sort of way, and bears the mysterious in-score text “Munissez-vous de clairvoyance” (“Acquire clairvoyance”). The grasshopper seems to be in the process of “seeing clearly”, standing as it were upon the overlap between life and death, gazing at the resurrected Muse, reifying the power of the moment with music that is both free of time and full of repetition. Listen to the performance by Daniel Versano starting at 0:35.

Ellis masterfully communicates through the richness of the picture book genre. Her static frame allows us to notice fine details and dwell upon growth and decay, life and death. Her invented language prompts us to find significance within/beyond/despite words. Music is hidden in this picture book, frozen as a string of symbols leaping from a grasshopper’s violin, yet the quotations of Satie’s haunting compositions, once deciphered, invite us to imagine unheard melodies that bind together memories, emotions, and meanings in new ways. May we all have eyes to see clearly and the courage to play our song in all of life’s seasons.

Hallå, Sverige!

This summer the Roys will be saying “Hallå, Sverige!”—pronounced [haˈloː sværjɛ], we will have to practice!—as we travel to Sweden. I submitted a panel proposal to the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL) 2019 Congress and it was accepted! I and two other musicologists who are doing pioneering work on music and childhood/children will give papers on the theme of “The Sounding and Silencing of Musical Childhoods;” more on that soon!

Princess Tuvstarr in the Field (1913) by Swedish illustator John Bauer.

I am getting more and more excited about this trip, not just because the IRSCL will undoubtedly be an amazing experience, but because I know very little about Sweden and it gives me a wonderful opportunity to delve into its music, language, literature, and myths. By far the most compelling thing I have found recently is Rosenbergs Sjua (Rosenberg’s Seven), a musical ensemble comprised of four female vocalists and a string quartet. Their second album, R7 (1999) consists of arrangements of Swedish folk songs that are singularly riveting and haunting.

Vocal Polyphony

The driving force behind Rosenbergs Sjua is Susanne Rosenberg: singer, composer, musicologist, and professor in the Royal College of Music, Stockholm. Her arrangements for R7 reflect her mastery of an eclectic variety of singing styles ranging from Swedish folk to Baroque to jazz, as the singers create amazing textures ranging from playful to epic to lyrical. The sixth track “Pris Vare Gud”—a nineteenth-century hymn text written by Johan Olof Wallin—begins with a layering of an improvisatory motif that creates a sort of drone for the mournful melody. Alternately track two “Min Bröllopsdag” alternates between tight harmonies in homorhythm and polyphonic scatting.

Kulning

Another sound that adds a certain northern wildness to R7 is kulning, a vocal technique practiced since ancient times in Scandinavia—primarily by women—as a means for calling livestock in from their grazing pastures in the mountains. Different melodic shapes and timbral colors echo and clash with high-pitched intensity throughout track seven “Jorid Lockrop” and offer a visceral example of female vocal power. This is apparently the function of kulning in Karin Rehnqvist’s composition for two singers and percussion, Puksånger/Lockrop (1989), which Rosenberg premiered. (The link in the recording is not professional, but the rawness speaks for itself.)

Fiddling/Riffing

The string section of R7 simply rocks! In addition to several instrumental dance tracks (four “Artos Julpolska” and thirteen “Nattöga”) which feature a wealth of idiomatic ornamentation, many of the songs are grounded in heavy, syncopated riffs worthy of a metal band. Listen to the first track “Leja Tjänstepiga” or the epic tenth “Balladen Om Liten Karin”. (The whole effect reminds me of the amazing instrumental arrangements of folk songs by the Danish String Quartet in their Woodworks (2014) album.) The contrast between voice and string in R7 —both equally strident at times—has a sort of hi-fi brutality that I prefer when it comes to modern arrangements of folk music.

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Your suggestions for further reading/listening as we look forward to Sweden are welcome! Ha det så bra!

PhD Attained!

I am pleased to announce that last week—Wednesday, December 12 at 8:21pm—I completed the last hurdle between me and attaining a Doctorate of Philosophy in Music from UCSB!

• The signatures have been given.

• The forms have been filled out.

• The fees have been paid.

• The online surveys have been completed.

• The dissertation is absolutely enough.

I feel so happy at bringing this monumental achievement to it’s conclusion! I’m thankful to all who have supported me in my journey and look forward to new horizons!

Boom! (I understand the pun, but it’s not in the best taste given the Procrustean Bed of proofreading that I just put into my dissertation.)

Holiday Blessing: Samin Nosrat, Good Tidings, and "Feuch"

The holidays are here, and with them are all the familiar sights, sounds, smells, and tastes. Between last weekend’s pre-Thanksgiving hosted lunch with my parents (lemon chicken, roasted potatoes, green beans, cranberry relish, herb rolls, and pumpkin pie), the bags of aromatic delectables from Apple Hill sitting here on the counter (fritters, donuts, and Fujis), and Jess and Kathy brainstorming potential dessert and vegetable options online (I believe a pumpkin pie à la Zoe Bakes is in the works), I’m feeling the love. Because I’m off from work this week, my mind seems particularly open, and I made a wonderful connection about three seemingly unconnected things.

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Samin Nosrat

Jess and I have been enjoying Berkeley-based chef Samin Nosrat immensely. Jess has her cookbook, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, on the shelf (which strives for a freeing sense of wabi-sabi through Wendy MacNaughton’s hand-drawn illustrations), and the Netflix documentary of the same name provided a beautiful, inspiring, and informative investigation of her four foundational cooking concepts. She contends that mastering salt, fat, acid, and heat is not merely a matter of following a recipe, but part of a larger practice of learning to hone and trust your senses.

Samin Nosrat cooking while smiling! Yum!

An interview she gave on Discourse entitled “Engaging the Senses” extend this idea into her philosophy of cooking, in which she sees the kitchen as a place where all people can be welcome because everyone can use their senses.

I think it’s about engaging the senses. That’s something my cooking really focuses on: using your senses to become a better cook. Cooking really does engage all of your senses — at least, good cooking does — but for the most part, I feel like I’ve spent the last fifteen years honing, above all, my senses of taste and smell. —S.N.

Because everyone has the capacity to improve their senses, Samin contends that anyone can cook. This viewpoint transforms the kitchen from something potentially shameful to a place where humanization and amateurism invite participation from all. I love this idea and see many parallels to the ways that I understand musicology, language learning directing choirs…

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Good Tidings

My Providence School choirs are in full Christmas music tilt. I’ve taken the traditional “Nine Lessons and Carols” service that has been done in the past and changed it to allow for more instrumentalists and different choral repertoire. I’m calling it “Come to the Cradle: A Service of Lessons and Carols”, and the great majority of the music focuses on various aspects of the postpartum manger, especially the visitation of the shepherds.

Christina Saj, Shepherd

This had me reading through the second chapter of Luke for inspiration; if you’re familiar with Linus’ King James monologue from the Peanut’s Christmas Special, one scene goes something like this:

8 And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

9 And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

10 And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

However, I tend to read the Bible in different translations, especially non-English ones; I find that this sort of alienated reading is a practice that breathes new life into old stories in humbling and challenging ways. As I read through Luke 2:9-11 in my Scottish Gaelic translation, a certain word popped out at me…

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“Feuch”

The Gàidhlig translation that I own, Am Bìoball Gàidhlig 1992, is written in a somewhat archaic style (both ABG and KJV begin almost every sentence with the word “and”/“agus”), and the imperative verb “feuch” (pronounced IPA: [fiax]) pops up twice in that section of Luke 2, corresponding to the KJV “lo” and “behold” that I underlined above. I looked the word up in the LearnGaelic Dictionary and found that it is particularly rich in meanings:

1 feel! (test by feeling)
2 taste! (test by tasting)
3 try, attempt!
4 test!
5 behold, look, lo!
6 reconnoitre!
7 rummage!

The spirit of this word extends far beyond the observational (and archaic) sense that I get from “lo” and “behold”. “Feuch” is dynamic! It involves the senses of touch, taste, and sight; it is messy and exploratory; and it implies a learning curve without any actual guarantee of success.

An illustration by Scottish-born artist Jessie Marion King (1875–1949) from the book The Fisherman and His Soul.

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The angel commands the shepherds to “feuch”, to engage deeply and bodily with the good news of the Savior’s arrival, pushing the boundaries of the known and hoped for. Luke the narrator challenges his readers to “feuch”, to rummage and reconnoitre through their minds to understand the palpable intensity of a supernatural encounter that entered reality from seemingly nowhere. And Samin reminds us to “feach”, to seek our way towards a sensitivity to the smells and sounds of cooking and the human connection that such an activity brings.

This holiday, may we all be present to what is immanent, simple things, true things.

Incredible.

Just about fourteen years ago I was a sophomore in college. The latest Pixar movie The Incredibles had just come out and I was eager to join the group of friends who were heading down to the Metro 4 Theater on State Street that evening to see it. I was bummed when I found out that a girl I liked wasn't going to come—some sort of Gospel Choir leadership meeting—and even more bummed when she expressed her own disappointment at missing this outing. I told her that I'd watch it again the next weekend if she'd like to come. So that next Saturday she and I boarded the Westmont shuttle—or as the carless kids called it, the Shame Shuttle—and passed some down time people watching on State Street. We watched The Incredibles and loved it: a well-told family drama about identity, desire, and authenticity, set within the thrilling context of the superhero genre, supported by incredible visuals and stylish music. That night we lay beneath the cloudy November sky on the soccer fields, our conversation swirling.

Possible Eric Tan art. Link

This evening I went to see The Incredibles II, the much anticipated sequel, and had the pleasure of going with that very same girl, who's obviously now a woman, my wife, and mother of my children. In the intervening fourteen years neither of us are quite the same. We've had our own adventures, told our own stories of identity, desire, and authenticity: home, work, schooling, learning, failing, choosing. No Shame Shuttle tonight, just our well-worn CRV, which has gotten us across the country and back, has been the site of some amazingly meaningful conversations, terribly growthful arguments, and currently has two children's car seats strapped into the back, littered with the detritus of childrearing. It's largely because of our two wee ones that this date marks the first time that my wife and I have been to a movie theater in over three years. It was a powerful experience. This sequel seems to have grown up along side us, exploring themes of parenthood, childhood, and vocation, touching upon multiple strands of human relationships, offering poignant probings of questions of power, of powerlessness, and of self. We're both rather shaken up. Wider perspective. Deeper echo.

I'm thankful for these memories and stories, these deep reminders of who I have been, sharpening my awareness of who I choose to be. 

Baby/Piano Juggling: One-Handed Music, Pt. 1

Felix, my robust five month old, is quickly exceeding my ability to hold him with one hand. For the first few months I could easily tuck him into the crook of my elbow and sit quite nicely at the piano doing what any pianist-father would do: play piano music using only my left hand! Now that my son is healthfully growing (97th percentile), I fear for the muscular integrity of my spine in such a position, so I’ll reminisce about my brief stint in this interesting category of music.

Life-size Felix…

According to Dr. Hans Brofeldt’s exceedingly informative website “Piano Music for the Left Hand”, this kind of music rests upon several interesting cultural factors. First, the invention of the sustain pedal allowed for a single hand to sound like several; technology opened up new musical possibilities. Second, the impetus for writing music of this sort could either come from the physical loss or injury of a hand—such as Paul Wittgenstein (1887–1961) who had his right arm amputated after sustaining a bullet wound to the elbow in WWI—or from what Brofeldt calls “musical-intellectual gymnastics” in which a composer simply limits their composition to a single hand to see what is possible. The two pieces that I’ve enjoyed are from the latter category.

Scriabin’s Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2

Alexander Scriabin (1871–1915) wrote Opus 9 in 1894 and it consists of a Prelude and a Nocturne for left hand alone. I was drawn to the Nocturne for a variety of reasons, such as the piece’s remarkable playability with a single hand, the lavish beauty of the Romantic style (Scriabin, like many Russians, was simply gaga over Chopin), and the (impassioned) lullaby mood which perfectly suited the lulling of an infant. But most of all, at the time Felix cried consistently at a steady Ab pitch, which happens to be the first note of the piece! (My friend Alissa Aune—who has perfect pitch—suggested that I get him up to A-440 with a little pinch… I would not recommend this. It does not work!) I like this rendition by Martina Filjak that I found on YouTube. The camera starts in a way that really has you wondering how many hands she is actually using. It’s only when it moves later on that you see the left hand’s dexterity (pun intended).

Reinecke’s Sonata

Carl Reinecke ((1824–1910) wrote Sonata für die Linke Hand alleine, op. 179 in 1884. Out of the four movements I was most attracted by the second, marked Andante lento with its tuneful melody interspersed with pianistic filagree. Reinecke wrote the words “Ne menj rózsám a tarlóra” at the start of this piece, the title of a Hungarian folk tune. (Reinecke’s setting of the tune is looser than, say, Bartók’s grammaphone recording, which is pretty standard as far as nineteenth-century folk song use goes.) Takeo Tchinai plays the whole sonata, with movement two starting at 4:45. Once again, the melody starts on my son’s Ab! (Check out lefthandpianomusic.org for more quality recordings of interesting pieces, including a one-handed fugue by Kalkbrenner!)

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My resilient first-born, Penelope, with her own baby at the piano bench. Scriabin sheet music on the stand.

I’m finding these pieces to be a really boost to the left hand ego… A real shot in the arm, so to speak. #toosoon Has anyone had experience working on these? If so, what have you been doing with your free hand?

Winter's Lullaby

Yesterday the stillness of Santa Barbara, wrapped in the brisk and earthy air that follows a bout of rain, was punctuated by the sound of the pounding rotors of military helicopters. Every hour or so one would thunder across the blue, winter's sky. And every time we were brought back to the present reality of shock at the terrifying events that have come to call this season.

In the first weeks of December, California's largest wildfire on record came plundering across several counties, engulfing homes, causing massive evacuations, and sending up sun-choking clouds of smoke that descended upon our cities with ghostly blankets of ash. From San Louis Obispo where we escaped to keep our children out of the fumes, we received word that the evacuation zone had reached our house; I drove back that day, the yellow-dead sky thick with quiet urgency, and loaded the car with a hasty selection of valuables, closing the door on the rest for perhaps the last time. The smoke followed us north and eventually we decided to seek hospitality from relatives further afield, ending up in Roseville, above Sacramento, checking the news compulsively only to hear that the fire would likely burn on until Christmas.

Our house survived. We returned from a month spent in other people's guest rooms to a home that seemed odd in its familiarity. We spent the holiday in Pasadena, driving past hills that looked moon-blasted, charred trees blackening both sides of the coastal 101 highway. When we returned to Santa Barbara I spent an hour in a breathing mask with a push broom, scrubbing away the soot that covered our walkway and carport as we moved towards life shaken and hopeful.

Two days ago it rained. In the middle of the night avalanches of turgid mud tore through the hills of Montecito. Houses, streets, cars, people, gone, replaced by wreckage and sludge. Highway 101 closed. Westmont College evacuated. The sight of first responders and rescue dogs and muddied survivors and devastation vivid on the news. And helicopters, rumbling piercingly through the sky, bringing in supplies, transporting the injured, and seeking out those still stranded before the chill night. 

Those are streets I have walked many times, now impassable wastes. Those are people I have conversed with, now drenched with devastating loss. Those are people I have known, now missing in the dark.

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This was not how I envisaged this season. The warming, lulling carols of Advent and Christmastide were conspicuous in their absence, save in the form of the Quadriga Consort's two winter albums as the soundtrack to my solitary return to Santa Barbara. Late at night in northern California I found myself mulling over one of my favorites, a Scottish Gaelic carol sometimes known as Tàladh Chriosda or Christ's Lullaby. Its melody rises and falls with a comforting ease and stark beauty. Its words describe Jesus from the point of view of his mother, Mary. This imagined mother's perspective is conspicuous for its unremitting combination of intimacy with awe, circling around the mystery of the incarnation just as Mary cradles and fondles the Holy One of Holy Ones in her arms. But she also expounds upon the experience of the Holy Family, a harrowing story of tumult: a mandatory relocation issued by the ruling colonial authorities, rejected from familial hospitality, Mary delivering her first child alone and friendless in a barn, and later a midnight escape from the genocidal soldiers of a malicious tyrant. This is no idealized cherub-Jesus, no placidly docile, haloed caricature of infancy. This is a baby born to the life-threatening and heart-breaking challenges of human existence.

"O hard-hearted Herod / Your plan will not be victorious / Many are the mothers you left wretched / When you vehemently pursued the death of my little one."

This is a mystery to me. I walked around the block today with 3.5 month old Felix in the front carrier as black helicopters fly desperately and purposefully in the distance.  I thought about Jesus born to the rush and tears and pain of homelessness and rejection and devastation. Of the fragility of his existence, the vulnerability of mortality, the tears and words and sighs and laughs and cries that would accompany his short life. I picture him walking beside me, hand shielding the wintery sun from his eyes. Or him knee deep in mud, keenly following a rescue dog into the wreckage of a house. Or him at a counseling center, anguished people haranguing him for news, screaming directly into his face until they are hoarse, or crumpling into sobs across from him at a card table.

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Not One Is Alone / Shepherded by Beth Allen. Her stirring art can be found here.

I do not know if this is comforting to me. Perhaps it is too soon for comfort. I do know that it is something deep and close and fervent. I cling to that.

"Neither holy angels nor men will understand / Until the last day of the world / The extent of your mercy and love / Coming to take a human body."

The Sacred Music of Harry Potter: I. The Hogwarts School Song

For the past decade my wife, Jess, and I have cultivated an evening ritual in which she prepares dinner while I read a book out loud: the sights, smells, and sounds of stir fry, enchiladas, soup, and barbecued kebabs mingling with spirited performances of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Madeline l'Engle, J.R.R. Tolkien, and George MacDonald. One author who has received special attention is J.K. Rowling. Her Harry Potter series has received no less than seven complete and enthusiastic renditions in ten years and we are currently knee deep in Book Four for the eighth time! The books are like old friends and have been a rich source of comfort, entertainment, thoughtfulness, and extemporaneous nonsense.

Unknown artist. Dumbledore would own a combustable bird...

This year I've also been enjoying a podcast entitled "Harry Potter and the Sacred Text". The co-hosts Vanessa Zoltan and Casper ter Kuile, graduates of Harvard Divinity School, ask us to consider what might happen if we were to take the Harry Potter series and treat it with the same seriousness and devotion as when we read a sacred text. What might a piece of fiction reveal or teach, convict or inspire if we were to approach it with the expectation that by engaging with it we engage with something sacred? I find this project fascinating, whether or not I agree with their various readings, and it has inspired a whole new host of conversations at home.

For a while I have been interested in blogging about the role of music in the Harry Potter books. In the spirit of the Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast, I'm going to try this out by selecting a music-related excerpt from the books and reading it through the lens of a sacred reading technique. I'll be using lectio divina, an ancient Christian practice that follows a four-step process of reading, mediating, conversing, and praying to enter into a sacred text. I'll be using the altered format that is employed in the podcast along with my own additional step:

1. Context: What is happening in the story when this excerpt occurs?

2. Musicology [MINE]: What might this music sound like and what ideas are associated with it?

3. Metaphor: What imagery or associations does this excerpt suggest?

4. Personal: What personal memories does this excerpt recall?

5. Action: What does this excerpt motivate you to do in your life?

Here goes!

You may recognize this first passage as that poster on the wall of every junior high band room.

"Ah, music," he said, wiping his eyes. "A magic beyond all we do here!"

Unknown artist. Anyone else discomfited by the thought of hot wax dripping from thousands of floating candles? I guess that's why you wear the pointed hats!

1. Context

This quote appears in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (US version, page 128), Chapter Seven "The Sorting Hat" and is spoken by the headmaster, Albus Dumbledore. It is the start of another academic year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the new students have been separated into their houses by the Sorting Hat and are sitting at their various House Tables in the enchantedly open-aired Great Hall. The customary feast that celebrates the start of term has been voraciously consumed, the golden plates magically cleaned, and Dumbledore has given out announcements both perfunctory and mysterious. As a benedictory gesture the headmaster leads the student body in a performance of the Hogwarts school song. Uniquely, the students were not taught the music to the song either by rote or by notation; after writing the words to the song in the air with a golden ribbon, Dumbledore declares, "Everyone pick their favorite tune and off we go!" Rowling continues, "Everybody finished the song at different times. At last, only the Weasley twins were left singing along to a very slow funeral march. Dumbledore conducted their last few lines with his wand and when they had finished, he was one of those who clapped loudest." After this Dumbledore delivers the excerpted quote and then excuses everyone to bed.

2. Musicology

Technically the musical event that Rowling describes is an instance of aleatoric polyphony. Polyphony is the simultaneous sounding of more than one distinct melody. For instance, in "Ihr aber seid nicht fleischlich" from Jesu, meine Freude by J.S. Bach (1685-1750) five different melodies vie for your attention, each entering one at a time with the same theme before doing their own thing. This type of texture is more challenging to listen to than, say, a song with a clear melody over a clear accompaniment, and you may need some practice for your ears to make sense of it all. The good new is that, in this instance, and likewise for countless other examples of polyphony written in a certain idiom (ie tonal music), the challenge of listening to individual voices simultaneously is lessened by the fact that everything occurs within a stable harmonic and metric framework. This means that the dense texture actually has a solid and carefully crafted harmony that controls the vertical aspect of the pitches and a solid and carefully crafted meter that controls the horizontal aspect of the rhythm. Put more simply, it all lines up.

However, there are some extremely conflicted instances of polyphony, especially from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (ie not tonal music), where this harmonic and metric framework is lacking. Chaos reigns supreme! Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) depicts pandemonium with a creepy polyphonic beginning to his Second Symphony with thirteen extremely independent voices, Elliott Carter (1908-2012) wrote his Third String Quartet to sound like two pairs of instruments that just happened to start playing completely different pieces in the same room at the same time, and Andrew Norman (b. 1979) musicalized the flamboyant Baroque architecture of Bernini in the "Teresa" movement of his The Companion Guide to Rome with extreme polyphonic madness.* However, I think the piece that gets us closest to the Hogwarts school song, remarkably, is from 1673: Battalia for ten string instruments by the surprisingly modernistic Baroque composer Heinrich Biber (1644-1704). The second section of this piece, entitled "Die liederliche Gesellschaft von allerley Humor," instrumentally depicts a mass of soldiers, perhaps inebriated, definitely enjoying themselves, singing ten different songs simultaneously. For each instrument, Biber composed a different song at different speeds, keys, and rhythms, ending on a triumphant cluster chord. Yikes! Check out this link and listen from 1:44 to 2:30. 

A page from Cage's Concert for Piano and Orchestra. 

Yet, as dissonant as Biber's example is, all of these polyphonic examples fail to truly represent the chaos of the Hogwarts school song because none of them are aleatoric.** Aleatoric music is music in which some elements are intentionally left to chance and the performer chooses what to play in the moment of performance. The composer could, for instance, indicate that a melody is supposed to rise in an arc and come back down after a given amount of time, but not specify the pitches, rhythm, articulation, or character. Such music could hardly ever be played the same way twice and the whole idea blurs the line between composition and improvisation in a very avant-garde sort of way. John Cage (1912-1992) stated that in his Concert for Piano and Orchestra "The only thing I was being consistent to in this piece was that I did not need to be consistent." He leaves just about everything you can imagine to chance and choice, including melodies, textures, instrumentation, and duration. Here are three vastly different performances of the same aleatoric "work": 1) Orchestre Philharmonique de la Radio Flamande, 2) Orchestra Laboratorio del Conservatorio di Alessandria, and 3) Chironomids Outerspace Group.

The singing of the Hogwarts school song is a an extreme case of avant-garde chaos. Depending on how you count, there could be as many as 300 to 2000 individual voices, each singing any melody, in any key, and at any tempo. This is not some stately rendition of a venerable alma mater. This is aleatoric polyphony at black hole density!*** Dumbledore obviously does not have the same ideas of institutional prestige as other Headmasters.

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*My guess is that Dumbledore regularly listens to Elliott and Norman in his office, with his fingers lightly pressed together. His Chocolate Frog Card does specify that he enjoys chamber music!

**This is why the cut scene from the fourth Harry Potter movie by Warner Brothers (and I assume by the score composer Patrick Doyle) doesn't do Rowling justice. If you watch it, you'll notice that, while spirited and rather noisy, it's really only a canon. Polyphonic? Yes. But not even close to the chaos described!

***Can someone please attempt to recreate this event and record it?!?! Send me a video!!

3. Metaphor

I read the theme of participation in this excerpt.

First, the participation of the students. The start of term feast is full of identity formation. Students become Gryffindors or Slytherins or Ravenclaws or Hufflepuffs, four distinct Houses separated from the others by personality traits, founder histories, dormitory locations, eating arrangements, animal mascots, color schemes. Within those Houses there are other divisions based on your year, your academic abilities, your course schedule, your Quidditch skills. These various (polyphonic?) boundaries crisscross and obscure the inherent unity of these students as a whole, namely that they are all witches and wizards. The singing of the Hogwarts school song momentarily sweeps aside these divisions and unites each and every student through—not just song—but a musical act that is radically egalitarian, welcoming, and accepting. Think about what it would be like to be participating in this event: every student hums, chants, bellows, croons, raps, squawks, or sings-with-good-diaphragm-support-and-excellent-vowel-shapes, with again, any melody, in any key, and at any tempo! It's a musical experience that offers each and every student a chance to participate exactly as they are. And while there are no musical barriers to participation, it's almost as if there are no social barriers as well.

Illustration from the Dumbledore page on Pottermore.

Second, Dumbledore's participation. (Spoiler Alert!) Dumbledore can't get enough of this experience. He sets it in motion, basks in the chaos of the event, vigorously applauds its conclusion, and feels so brimful that tears well up in his eyes as he places music above all learnéd magic. What do those tears mean? Is he actually moved by the musicality of the moment? Is he being sarcastic and pointing out the inherent senselessness of reality? I think neither. I think that his participation in this odd experience has meaning for him because of his troubled relationship to power; later in the books we find that tragic events in Dumbledore's past caused him to distrust himself with positions of authority and with intimate relationships. Hence his reticence to confront Grindelwald. His refusal to take up the Minister of Magic post. His seven-book-long secret-keeping from Harry. I would imagine all these withdrawals, and the remembered, familial trauma of which they are a constant reminder, would have been a source of deep pain for Dumbledore. When he spreads his arms in welcome to the room full of students, perhaps he simultaneously fears to get too close and risk hurting those he loves. But, when he participates in the school song, he has a moment of respite. As long as that chaotic riot of aleatoric polyphony rages, Dumbledore is embracing and embraced in an intimate family. For Dumbledore this unity is a magic beyond all that can be taught at Hogwarts because it is a magic that reunites him with the closeness that he has both longed for and feared for a lifetime.

4. Personal

My mother actually composed my school song. For a good portion of our lives, my siblings and I attended Owens Valley Unified School District in Independence, California, a small K-12 school in a small desert town. And when I say small, I mean small. There were ten people in my graduating class. And it was an abnormally large class! I remember by mother, a singer and flutist, sketching out some words and melody on our electric keyboard in the back room. But it didn't just remain a sketch. Pretty soon we were all learning it in classes. And before you knew it we were singing it as a student body at assembly meetings and pep rallies in the gym! I've written it out below from what I can remember.

In many ways growing up in Independence was a lesson in scarcity. But it was also a place where, because of its small size, each person's individual contribution had great significance. My mother decided to write a school song and so we had one! We can easily lose that feeling of agency and importance in the larger picture of the world. I doubt that the song is still sung at O.V. today. But I'd be interested to know if students from around my year still vaguely remember the birth and brief iteration of our very own school song, and whether they found any camaraderie in shouting "Orange and Black!" at the top of their lungs.

5. Action

Life seems pretty chaotic to me right now. I'm a dissertating graduate student, husband, father of a toddler and a newborn, with one car, living in an expensive city. It's aleatoric polyphony of calendaring and commuting and writing and cleaning and choosing and questioning and failing and rising and trying again. Often it feels heavy. But this passage of Dumbledore's has me thinking that chaos is a particularly rich moment to notice the magic of participation. I don't have to do these things. I choose to. I get to. And it's worth it. "A magic beyond all we do here." Where can you look for magic in the chaos of your life? Where can you sing connection and participation into your community?

I also find it significant that the sound-world that invites community and belonging through participation is decidedly avant-garde. Perhaps I can think of the chaos of life as the deployment of the avant-garde, the advance guard pushing forward into something new. Do we have our wits about us as we march forward into both the knowns and unknowns? Who do we bring with us on this mission? When and how do you rest? 

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NEXT: Recorder squeaks… 

Welcome home, Felix!

One week ago today witnessed the birth of my second child, Felix Leander Roy. This is the first time that I have written out his entire name. Ever. There have been many "firsts" happening in my house over this past week, some enormously beautiful, others incredibly challenging, all precious.

There's also a lot of learning going on. While Felix himself grows an alarming amount of neurons every hour or so and tests out thing like sleeping, yawning, grasping, and crying out, the other members of his family have countless opportunities to express and process the familial recalibration prompted by his arrival. Everything is washed with the sunlight of newness.

His birth was highly anticipated in our family, especially throughout the month of September. Beaches were strolled. Conversations were had. Massages were given and received. Stairs were climbed. Hot salsa was consumed. Songs were sung. I've included one such song below, which I wrote with a little help from my friends... Welcome home, Felix!