What do
Shamsuddin Farid Desai, John Coltrane, Toru Takemitsu, and Jimi Hendrix have in
common?
The answer
is that one cannot understand their music without being appreciative of sound.
Of course all music is made of sound, but knowing that is not the same as being
aware of it. You walk into a room and someone asks you if you were aware of
walking into the room. You think back and remembering the entrance way and the
fact that you were previously outside and that now you are inside, you answer,
“Yes, yes I was aware of entering the room.”—but this is not necessarily true.
Remembering that you did something is not a guarantee that you were aware of
what you were doing at the time. And knowing that you just listened to this or
that piece of music is not a guarantee that you were, at the time, aware of
sound.
Sound, what
is it? Let’s first take a look at a
sound, a single sound. A sound is not a note. Nobody hears notes. Note is, in fact, an abbreviation for notation—an indication of two aspects of
a sound—pitch and duration. Notation works well in a system in which sounds
with specific pitches and specific durations are used to create and express
concrete musical forms—a music in which individual sounds are combined in
various way to create forms. In this kind of music the sound is often
subservient to what it creates.
But the
music of Shamsuddin Farid Desai, John Coltrane, Toru Takemitsu, and Jimi
Hendrix make sound itself equal to, or even superior to, what the combinations
of sounds produce. For musicians like these, a single sound can have more than
one pitch and duration of these sounds often cannot be measured out on a grid defined by a time signature. Also, from the timbrel point of view, sounds previously
considered non-musical are sometimes embraced by musicians and composers. Want
some concrete examples?
Impressions
(India) – John
Coltrane – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSViN6lwGKU
A soundician
is someone who works with sound. Not all soundicians are musicians and not all
musicians are soundicians. But, it is my opinion, that the best musicians are
also soundicians. Without an awareness of, and a feeling for, the living
quality of sound, music seems somehow flat to me—like wallpaper—somehow two-dimensional
instead of three—or four.
Technique is
not only a matter of fingers or lips and tongues, and physical training can go
only so far. Real technique results from a striving to create sound in
accordance with one’s musical vision. To accomplish this, instruments are sometimes
stretched to their limits and when they can stretch no further they are
modified or replaced. Can the same be said for the ones who play them?
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