Playing by Ear: Reflections on Sound and Music

Prologue

‘Do you like music?’ The question is as absurd as saying, ‘Do you like food?’ There is food that is tasteless, indigestible, sits heavily on the organs, but there is the vast range of foods that can give relief, nourishment, often pleasure. As Orpheus discovered, every animal can respond to sounds. For us, the living question is ‘Which sounds? What music?’ In this book we will try to explore together the infinite range of experiences that can sometimes touch us deeply, sometimes leave us cold.

PART ONE

The Birth of Form

The very first tremor in the eternal nothingness was a sound, a sound which can only be recognised once the human organism has evolved a capacity to respond—in other words, once there is a listener. In the process of creation, with sound came the presence of time—time that measures everything for us humans from dawn to dusk, from here to eternity.

The very first sounds from which gradually music was born inevitably had a sequence, an unwinding thread, that eventually leads to the sense of long, long phrases. And here, whatever the context, but above all in the performing arts, we touch on the essential. The long phrase is composed of an infinite number of details, a music where the beauty lies in the heart of each fragment, because it fills and reaches out of one unique space. This leads us to the recognition that every human attempt to determine what fills the space is a poor, a very poor reflection of the detail that is placed and brought to life by a source way beyond the wishes, the inventiveness and the ambitions of the individual. For this reason I deplore any of us, young or old, being called creators. Creation has only one source far beyond our understanding. This is where the form is born from the formless. Our role, like that of a good gardener, is respectfully to recognise that only when the ground has been lovingly prepared, can the true form be ready to receive the nourishment with which it can grow, develop and open.

There have been countless tales of how the world began, countless attempts to cope with the mystery of creation.

In Africa, where every tribe has its own creation tale, there are those that speak of a fine rope coming from the sky, down which the first man slid to Earth. Or else of the Earth opening for a man to clamber out.

But a very special tale comes from a tiny obscure tribe. Here, it is emptiness that is evoked, a vast nothingness. Then out of a timeless nothing comes a vibration, a sound, and from this original sound comes every aspect of creation. This tale blends at once with ‘the Word’—the source of all the forms humanity learnt to know.

In the rich heyday of the sixties, from New York to San Francisco, from the East to the West Coast, young America was vibrating with the need to throw away all known forms and ideas in the wild search for something new. As always when Pandora’s Box is opened, a confusing mixture tumbles out. There was Andy Warhol, there was Julian Beck with the Living Theatre, there was Joe Chaikin with his Open Theater, and there was the cult of drugs, from LSD to marijuana, in which the miraculous universe, until then hidden in every detail, could now be felt and lived. I remember at six o’clock one morning seeing in a coffee shop a man who had spent the whole night smoking pot. He had ordered a waffle, and as I came in he was deeply concentrated on filling each dent in the waffle’s surface with maple syrup, lovingly watching the passage of every drop. ‘This is the most beautiful task I have ever given myself. It’s worth living for.’

And as I myself plunged into this vibrant world of painters, actors and musicians, I was told of a composer in New York whom I had to meet. I was taken to his apartment in the Village. He warmly led me to where his wife was sitting, holding a cello. He took up a violin and played a single note. She listened attentively and joined him with the same note from her cello. She sustained the sound after his sound had ended, and when she could sustain her own no longer there was no pause, he picked up the same note. And so it continued. There was no end. It became unendurable. I began to fidget, then to speak, asking for some word of explanation. Politely, they put down their instruments. ‘Our aim,’ she said, ‘is to make more and more people pick up this sound. Gradually, it can spread. It can cross the land, go from continent