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Echo Root recently posted a poem here at fuzz, "Birth of a Muse (poem)" that your should check out.
When I first read this poem, I immediately related the imagery to Anil K. Rajvanshi essays on the "Nature of Human Thought" that I have been exploring of late while trying to push out the envelope of our consciousness about music and the workings of the brain and the "minds-ear" [a phrase I have been given to for lack of a better conceptual handle on what's going on when we listen to music - what, indeed, are we "hearing", "thinking" and "feeling" in the process?].
In particular, I was struck by the "sense of Becoming" manifested [for me] in Echo Root's poem and in Rajvanshi's notion of a single brain bringing the laser-like focus of 100 billion neurons firing at once to produce a single thought ["deep thought"]. Every person's ethereal muse is just a digital breath away; and I believe that the collective consciousness of the web will cascade and, eventually, coalesce with resounding clarity to transform the "Becoming" of our ethereal muse to "Being". [There are several ambiguous terms here, but, never mind, we can explore them all in the fullness of time with skeptical delight. At fuzz and the Nightschool for Entrepreneurs, we are already believers in the power of music but, equally, truth-seekers of our own make-up.]
Then, in site surfing after midnite [as usual], I noted the genesis of yet another piece uploaded by Echo Root's alter ego at fuzz called "The Song" [which song has been characterized by others - not me - as the only happy piece in the group]. The Artist, Clif, indicated elsewhere that he wrote this piece after reading a book by Joachim-Ernst Berendt. [I have not read the book myself but only a few excerpts, including those quoted below].
In doing some desk-top research to find out more about Berendt, I came across the site of yet another school, The School of Pythagoras [All is Number] and felt this blog would serve as both a good place-holder of a productive link and also to stimulate further discussion at our own [collective] school. The site has many intriguing onward links to music, cosmology, and technology that are a treasure trove of sources [whether speculative or "true"] to advance the knowledge of the fuzz community about the boundless possibilities of music.
Just one example of the mind-boggling notions at this site and cited works are the following excerpts from Joachim-Ernst Berendt's book, The World Is Sound: Nada Brahma at pp. 133, 134 [with emphasis added by me for ease of reading]:
More than once (most impressively perhaps in the change from OM to Amen), we have found that the sound we mean is not simply a sound that becomes audible and then disappears. Sound stands for primal sound. Sound is expression and symbol, an audible representative of the inaudible nada.
When you blot out sense and sound, what do you hear?
The echo of what you then hear is the sound from hara.
Of all the great musicians of classical music, I know none whose sound could make this point so impressively audible as Pablo Casals, that wonderful and wise cellist. Even jazz musicians, who in their own field are literally surrounded by great sound creators, speak of him with breathless admiration. The Austrian tenor saxophonist Hans Koller once said in an interview: "Actually, we tenor players have it easy. All you have to do is listen to the great tenor players of the jazz tradition. They all really have their own wonderful sound. There is only one musician in Europe I know of who could be compared to them: Pablo Casals."
On a radio program in the early 1960s, Koller played a recording of the unaccompanied solo improvisation "Picasso" by the tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, immediately followed by a recording of Casals' sound in Bach's Suite in C minor for unaccompanied cello. The concurrence was astounding, but an additional phenomenon also became clear. It is easy in the case of a wind instrument to envision the sound as coming from the player's belly, because a column of air moves directly through his body into the instrument. In the case of a string instrument, however, there is only a "spiritual" column. In fact, that column is the crucial one. Even if there is an actual column of air, the spiritual one is stronger. It was like meeting an old friend after many years when I read the following sentences in a book by the German psychologist and musician Silvia Ostertag:
"When I heard Pablo Casals play for the first time, something strange took place inside me. It was at a master class in Zermatt, Switzerland. In each of the lessons, there were also participants who were there only as auditors. I was one of them, one of many. Casais was teaching, and I still remember the moment when he took his bow and played a tone, one single tone. It certainly wasn't the case that I had been asleep up to that point, but in the moment when this tone was sounded, I felt as if I were waking up, violently and yet tenderly....
"It was as if this tone had reached an inner ear that hadn't existed before. It seemed as if this tone had gone through all heights and had struck me in my innermost self, a part of myself which I had been unaware of. And yet, this innermost self was more familiar to me than anything I knew of myself, otherwise I would not call it my innermost self.
"When the sound of the tone had died away, I found myself unsure for a moment whether Casals had really played it or whether the room had just become really quiet. If I wanted to describe it ... , it was a tone in which all tones were sounded and in which at the same time was all silence....
"It was many years ago that I heard Casals for the first time. Not only have I never forgotten that tone, but ever since that experience I have been trying to become the kind of person who, through my hearing and my deeds, would open my entire life for the sake of this "tone." . . . Back then I experienced something that transcended the horizon of our rational understanding, something inconceivable, unconditional, something eternal ... the tone in which all tones were sounded--the tone that contained all silence."
Equally fascinating, again quoting from the same source at pp: 135, 136 [emphsis added by me]:
Dealing wirh sound means dealing with listening. Experiments have shown that no other sense can register impulses as minimal as those that the ear can register. The amplitude of the vibrations of our eardrum lies in the area of 10 [to the] -9 [power]. That is smaller than the wave length of visible light and even less than the diameter of a hydrogen atom. The smallest stimuli our ear can just barely perceive, on the other hand, have to be amplified by a factor of 10 [to the] 6 [power] in order to reach the level of the highest volume perceivable, by a factor in the million range. Were we to amplify the smallest impulses our eyes can register by the same factor, we would be blinded instantly.
Hans Kayser points out the astonishing fact that our ears are the only human sense organ that is able to perceive numerical quantity as well as numerical value.
"The ears not only recognize exact numerical proportions, that is, numerical quantities like 1:2 as an octave, 2:3 as a fifth, 3:4 as a fourth, etc.; at the same time they hear ... values that they perceive as C, G, F, and so on. So the tone value fuses two elements into one unit: the element of sensing--the tone, that is--with the element of thinking, of numerical value. And this happens in such an exact manner that the value of the tone can be checked precisely against the value of the number, and the value of the number against the value of the tone.
"Among all our human senses we only have one organ that is capable of this fusion--the ears. In this way sensation controls deliberation--or to put it differently: Our soul is thus capable of deciding on the correctness or incorrectness of an intellectual quantity. Conversely, the phenomenon of tone value also gives us the opportunity to develop proportions and numerical values in the realm of the psyche."
Here is a video [really an audio only] of Pablo Casals and "that tone" at the very first note that he plays from the prelude to Bach's Cello Suite # 1, listen for it and play it over and over with your third ear:
Now here is Yo-Yo Ma, playing the same piece with "that tone" again [the over-all prelude has a slightly extended playing time and texture and, to me, not quite the same opening power but perhaps a more dream-like sequence because of the visuals - both moving pieces, but here we contrast just "that [first] tone" that transcends the horizons of our rational understanding- you decide which, if any, does that for you]:
Happy linking, reading, listening, watching and thinking, all.
[NB: a note to readers of blogs, comments, and reviews at thecapitalclinic: the text of all of my commentary at this site will be an organic "moveable feast" and, thus, evolve; and I hope yours will as well. Our contributions to the "knowledge-space" of the web [such as they are] should not be frozen in time. We should use the power of real-time, web-based music discovery to generate "wiki-[capital]." In this way, the time we spend here will be value-added building-blocks in our quest to advance capital formation, individually and collectively.]
