Did I Mention There'd Be Music?
When words are not enough, I get a visit from a Divine Rapper.
[This version corrects a misattribution in the original version: the description of The Noble Snare I include below is from Sylvia Smith, who commissioned and edited the entire project, not Stuart Saunders Smith, who contributed a composition to the series. Apologies for the error. PC- 11/04/23]
All humans have a language. We speak within our language differently. Our Personhood is signaled by how we embellish our language to make it maximally individualized. By language embellished, I. — Stuart Saunders Smith
AS an editor who writes I’m often naturally compelled to look back at what I’ve written. Today, I confess to an oversight in my previous post, Why Write?: The Elusive Psychology of Authorship.” In it, I depict myself more or less as a creature driven entirely by words whose destiny was born in the realization that he wanted to write a book. To be clear, that happened. The document is real. The story is true. But it is not the complete truth. Before everything there was music.
It is hard to describe the immense and enduring role that music plays in my life, and how it makes possible what I do, even when those things don’t seem to involve music. It often feels that music, along with the natural world and its elements — sunlight, air, earth, sea and sky — is the root cause of my being. It has driven nearly all of my activity in the world, if not always directly, or in a logical, associative way. The spirit of music has often informed the way I have carried out my work proper. When I am editing, I am in some sense looking for the music in a piece. I will often think and speak in musical terms. It needs a hook (something catchy). Let’s hit the right note (emotionally appropriate point). Let’s make it sing (perfect rhythm and tone of the language). Let’s rock and roll (publish this). These are just superficial examples. A way of illustrating that my experience with music drives practically everything I do.
Music has animated and stirred my conscious awareness as far back as I can remember. I was born in 1963 in Canarsie, Brooklyn, rocked and swaddled on East 86th Street, about nine miles from JFK airport (then Idlewild) where the Beatles would first land some six weeks later. I often think I must have absorbed the vibrations of that earthshaking landing and the pandemonium that followed, the fever pitch of those glorious young harmonies and the screams of hysterical fans. Pictures of my toddler self with toy pianos, battery operated keyboards and, glory of glory, the toy drum set given to me on my fifth Christmas, seem to prove that I was born with this impulse. And the impulse was already seeking expression very early in my life.
What I mean to say now is that music is always running through me in some fashion, and that my love for and commitment to all other art forms — storytelling, poetry, painting, physical and athletic performance, and the making of music itself — arise from this musical core.
There has always been a tension in my creative life between my two great loves, music and writing. There have been many times when language failed me, or I failed language, times when words were not enough and I would sometimes be forced to flee from writing to making music to find the outlet I needed to express myself, or to at least open the pathways to that expression, when I would need the physical movement and contact, the vibration of resonant bodies, of guitar strings, of piano keys and hammers striking the beautifully wound cables within the instrument’s body, and most often, I needed to enact the four-limbed, full-bodied assault on the drum set, one of the most tonally and viscerally expressive contraptions ever devised by humans.
Many of my experiments with music over the years were very clear attempts to accurately and organically express what I was feeling at the time, usually because what I felt was sprawling or unmanageable, or felt impossible to capture in words. (I speak here now of my individual sound explorations, not my role as a drummer in various bands, of which more later.). Significantly these were usually emotions that were difficult, violent-seeming or agitating, that could not be articulated in the physically restrictive act of typing or handwriting. (Shaking All Over). But there could also be joy (Can’t Explain). There were times when I just needed to flail away without restriction. These internal forces resisted the logic or meaning that language routinely accommodates. At least the language that I could muster. It was when emotions began to resemble (in my perception of them) natural, powerful forces like tides or swells or weather systems or storms that I’d be most compelled to make music, or even just noise.
[That description of emotions and music taking on the qualities of natural forces always reminds me of a 1975 recording by the seminal experimental vocalist, Joan La Barbara, "Thunder," for 6 tympani and voice with electronics, drums by the great percussionists Warren Smith and Bruce Ditmas. Listen here to this classic recording but buckle up!]
I have a significant archive of homemade recordings of my own outbursts, experiments, explorations and forays, even attempts at formal music making. And I find that along with the crumbling journal pages I've been sifting through and viewing, these recordings, too, are calling for attention and examination. They suggest to me that the story of myself, or any self, as a single thing — writer or editor or poet — is incomplete.
This work is also pointing out a possible mistake or illusion that I have labored under for a long time — that music, language, writing and speech were all separate things, that the category lines that separated these activities were hard and real, and that when I fled in frustration from writing to music, I was going to a different place. I believed I was “switching” activities, when the difference was perhaps more one of mode or degree, like taking a walk instead of a swim or going to a different street without leaving the neighborhood. I was acting without a real understanding of the broad and oceanic nature of the human impulse toward contemplation and the expression of our relationship, both bodily and conscious, to the physical, social and spiritually inflected world. Obviously, singer-songwriters have solved this problem for themselves; it’s called writing lyrics. Lennon, McCartney, Dylan, Mitchell, Cohen, Prine and Prince seemed to have no such problem. For some reason this always seemed beyond me. Or just not of interest. And I don’t know why. Maybe I’ll try.
I've been thinking a lot about all this after rediscovering a misplaced recording the other day of me playing solo on drum kit. It’s about 12 years old, I think. I called it “For Stuart Saunders Smith,” as an homage to that composer, an iconoclast in his 70s who lives in Vermont and works extensively with both percussion and speech. I listened to this recording of mine, and I liked it. It was my attempt to abandon the drum set as a vehicle for timekeeping (a job I carried out for years as a drummer in bands) and to explore its other expressive possibilities, in this case, patterns of speech. I then returned to listen to some of Smith's music, specifically the album Breath and his contribution to The Noble Snare, a series of pieces by various composers for solo snare drum. Sylvia Smith, the composer’s wife, who commissioned the works described the project thusly: “In 1987 I asked many composers to turn their abilities to making a snare drum solo to be published in a collection called The Noble Snare. Everyone I asked was so eager to take up this unprecedented challenge. Instead of one volume, there were enough pieces for four volumes. The Noble Snare is used all over the world.”
[A two-minute sample of my charmingly low-fi recording of For Stuart Saunders Smith can be heard here. ]
I was first introduced to Smith by Nathan Davis, the percussionist and composer with whom I studied on and off for a few years between 2010 and 2015. Nathan was the perfect teacher for me at that time. He is younger than me by about 10 years and a far more deeply studied, devoted and gifted musician and artist than I am or was. (I urge you to listen to his conceptually rich and often beautiful music.) So in approaching Nathan when I was nearing 50, as an editor and not much of a performer any longer, I had to adopt a sort of baseline humility. The older man, a “word man” with a respectable job, a former rock drummer without any serious compositional or classical or avant garde credibility, perhaps a dilettante, seeking instruction and guidance from the younger, more accomplished artist. To my own credit, I easily removed my ego from this equation. I have always wanted to get myself in the room with the best people and artists I could find, and Nathan was that person at that time.
Nathan took me on as a student in good spirit, embracing my intention to achieve a deeper sort of musicianship and approach to both music and life. And he educated me in kind. Some lessons were traditional (introductory marimba studies), but we soon moved on to more open-ended sessions, during which we might listen to music, allow time for me to experiment, or just talk, often running over the allotted hour. Often I left the talking sessions feeling more enriched than I did by the playing ones, which made me understand that I had not only a performative impulse, but an impulse for understanding (I think Rumi says something like: seeking to know the flute maker and not the flute). Anything that would allow me to learn the magic that seemed to lie at the heart of music.
Nathan recognized that my affinity for words and language were part of what brought me to him, that I was in some sense coming out of words and into sound, but also that there were places to explore at the intersection of these two modes, where language can be understood as music and music as language. And so at one point he directed me to Stuart Saunders Smith. I listened. Though I can't say I fully understood his work in total, or that every piece I listened to moved me, I did respond to the transformational act of looking beneath the patterns and inflections of language and considering how one might respond musically to them. I found that when the compositional approach was too literal, like a drum pattern following a speech pattern very closely, or performed simultaneously, I was unmoved. But when the speech was pointing toward music or the music was pointing toward speech, it excited me. That is why I can listen to these solo snare drum performances on Jason Baker’s recording of The Noble Snare repeatedly and always with interest. Perhaps it's the subtlety of the connection between the two.
One of the best expressions of this speech-music nexus was achieved by the great jazz drummer Max Roach. His performance on the drum kit in response to Martin Luther King's “I Have a Dream” speech, which I play for myself and everyone I can find who will listen on King's birthday and sometimes randomly, is fairly well known. King, as we all know, was an absolute master of musical speech, which is why practically every recorded utterance of his demands a sort of rapt attention, even when the listener is not aware of the subject or content.
In his playing, Roach is not trying to mimic King's speech or too closely follow its patterns, but is creating instead a forceful dialog with the preacher, a traditional call and response. As the intensity and urgency of King's speech rises, so does Roach's performance, building in the crashing wash of ringing of cymbals as King intones “let freedom ring” and crescendos at the resolution of “free at last.”
There are few works that carry such a titanic socio-political and religious meaning and weight. Those of us interested in the intersection of speech and music tend to hammer away at the quotidian to try to discover what already exists in the words and gestures that we exchange with each other each day. But that makes it no less meaningful as a quest or a search, or even as an experiment. And we may just listen and look for signs that we are on the right path.
About an hour ago, as I began writing this, I heard a man's voice approaching the window of my first floor room I am staying in for a writing residency at The Betsy hotel in Miami. He stopped directly beneath my window, and I mean directly. As I peered out through the blinds, I could see the top of his head. And then he began, I shit you not, rapping, freestyling at 7 a.m. in an alleyway in Miami, apropos of nothing except his urge to rap, to make speech with music and music with speech. I am a rational creature at heart, or at least I think I am. But I couldn't help believing that this daybreak rapper had landed outside my window as a sort of divine visitor, a raven or mourning dove, a magical bird of some consequence. In my rapt listening, I froze at this line: “Say you wanna talk about God; I been talking about God since ‘92.” As my journals will attest, that’s about when I started talking about God.
When the rapping stopped I came to the window to try to get a better look at him, but he was already half-way down the alley, heading past a word sculpture called the Poetry Rail at the Betsy. And just like that, he was gone.
Nothing more left to say today.
I have heard Mr Roach live and in person at a small church venue and it was a jaw dropping experience.
The MLK piece I have never heard, thanks for sharing ,very moving.
So true Peter! I tried to communicate this in my very first serious Medium article a few months back, when I came out as a writer, performer and shitty cartoonist. But it was more a resurrection, but still, with re-animated creativity I realized that I wanted readers to hear my voice first thing. I also like the idea of mixing music with voice and words to make a complete presentation, no matter what is being communicated. But have u noticed how hard that is to do on these platforms? Either video or audio or whatever u want to add to your words, is just a pain to publish the way that you want, without having a full blown recording studio (which I am blessed with, at least). So thanks for the music!
Cheers,
Jigs