The Wave Hennets: Music
SEA MUSIC
In Debussy's La Mer or in Tintagel,
Bax's sea-piece, you can hear music as wave.
Hear it lift with the pitch, teeter, and tumble,
sprinkled with cymbal dazzle. Hear it relax
in a long semibreve, stilled on the stave
till that sforzando splash recalls the climax,
and a surging of striving strings is quelled
only to surge again; deep-toned trombone blares,
adding clamour beneath, recollection held
fiercer in each repeat, galloping fanfares,
pizzicatos of spray, till the coda's roar
when it thunders, conducted, down on the shore.
MUSIC FROM A CAR
Heard a Mini go by, thudding with music,
pop run at ten miles an hour, lover’s anguish
changing gear, braking slowly, a heretic
rhetoric pausing at lights. Each bystander
has it brought to his notice or hers. Its wish
yells its nostalgia to peeps of a Panda
crossing, shrinks at the ‘Fah-doh’ of a police
siren, the motorway adding the Doppler
Effect, whining up coming, moaning away.
Drivers aren’t dancing. They peer at a corner,
unconcerned. And the cars carry an upright
pliant aerial, unseen in the sunlight.
POP-GROUP ON TAPE
Heard the pop-group Seduction. Mechanical
maze like Arabian knots, insistent zizz,
as of paper-and-comb, each note a prickle
turned on itself, turned on itself, miniature
electronics, obsessive wizardries
on a harmonium speeded to the spun rigour
of a top. Voices are only squeaks or shouts
trapped in the works and whirling along with them,
wordless in ecstatic loss. No place for doubts.
Certain the blanks of recurrence, the rhythm
that rejigs its own jig, committed to play
in eternal return till it fades away.
MUSICAL-BOXES, ETC.
In the musical-box, little spikes sticking
out of the drum caught a comb of notes. You could
see the tune in its rows and steppings stretching
out into space as in time. And the black slots
on the player-piano — each of them would
press down a key and no hands would play foxtrots.
You could watch them approaching the present, then
being drawn up into the roll of the past.
Take a cross-section, trace the composer's pen,
reading orchestral scores, listening from the blast
of the horns to the end, with no going back,
but he'd chosen the notes, though printed in black.
TREE MUSIC
All the branches as upright pendulums sway,
tracing on spaces spirals in time, and upon
them the twigs are made pendulums too, a play
waving on play, and then leaves add melismas
in baroque counterpoint, and for antiphon
one of the leaves trills down. Gusts make choristers
of them all, the invisible air become
audible, eddies as piccolo pennants,
all the textures turned rhythms, shape turned to hum,
all of a tree flagged in orchestral currents
as the gale stirs the forest to grander sound
until branches clash through branches to the ground.
'REFLETS DANS L'EAU'
Synaesthesia. Changes both loud or round,
ruffled or lilting, secret within ripples
and this music. Enlarging arcs burn bright sound
higher, more sparkling, up the keyboard. Lustrous
modulations are fingering shade. Shuttles,
weaving a theme, compose reflections, chorus
the developing waves with scintillant notes.
Echoes of languorous cadences subside
under fresher re-pleatings. A motif floats
slowly, forgetfully. Doubting quavers slide
into shadow and silence, and cease to be.
Similarities drawn from, not two, but three.
BEETHOVEN'S NINTH, FIRST MOVEMENT
This is Beethoven's Ninth, first movement. Each wave
roundly established is led to power
with assertive intent, there to fight to save
self from effacement, but finds it has yielded
to another that grew like a free flower
safe in its pounding. Then that too is wielded
like a sword in the sky, scattering its arcs,
daring and dazzling, that spin new melody
that can echo an earlier with wild sparks
so unmistakably new there's harmony
between freedom and law, desire and duty:
revolution's illusion's tragic beauty.
THE HORSE IN MUSIC
In the symphonies hear the horse galloping;
Those who don't ride feel the exaltation too
of the hunt and cavalry charge, turning
both into near history. As this one lumbered
its damp wool to the fence, with its mouth a-chew,
swivelling ears, shaking head with flubbered
snort, black eyes like jet pebbles, its impassive
patience, its four-square balance belied the tunes
and the drumming, the fanfares of a fictive
music. The spurs and the bridles of dragoons
turn to rust and to dust. Riding's for leisure.
So how long will the echoes ring in culture?
'ELIHU'S DANCE OF YOUTH AND BEAUTY' (VAUGHAN- WILLIAMS' JOB )
A viola plays solo -- plangent, yearning,
linking in lullaby infant and adult
by its soothing of self's division, burning
still from the brand. Hear its expectation rise
to crescendo, about, it seems, to exult,
certain in solace, in regaining the prize
it imagines it's lost. 'God,' said Elihu,
'giveth the songs in the night', but they don't bring
in the day. Hear the minor chord fall askew,
plant at the moment of union the sting
of the difficult fact that nothing has gone.
Hear the mystics make this a proof of the One.
MUSIC-WAVES, WAVE-MUSIC
One can listen and make one theme salient,
singing itself within harmonies, risking
itself over a discord, grow exultant,
poignant. Or one can discern another theme,
soft allegro, absurd to-and-fro frisking
surfaces, deftly ironic on the stream
of the waves underneath. One needn't stop there:
both of these melodies play to a largo
bass, an echoing, sidelong swell, that can bear
all on a slow necessity, its upthrow
and its downthrow recalling the real ocean,
matching water or music or emotion.
REFRAINS
'Tiddley-om-pom-pom!' 'Hey-nonny-no!' 'Tra-la
la!' or else 'Diddle-eye-dee!' The refrains need
not make sense. At the chorus a 'Cha-cha-cha!'
satisfied everyone although a meaning
wasn't there. All that part of the singing freed
you, gave you time to think what you'd be singing
in the next verse because that was different.
All of you joined in, although what you joined in
wasn't clear. It was part of the merriment
(couldn't ask why). Your voice was a violin
or a piano. The song then went with a swing.
It would help if it came to your turn to sing.
IN THE CHORUS
All the voices together imagining
that they are one voice. Each individual
feels a grandeur that's his, as if his singing
led all the rest or inspired them, was their breath
and their melody, ruling the ritual,
tuning the power, mastering life against death,
as his lungs feel the resonance of music
far in excess of his single strain.
But who in this acre of chorus, its majestic
certainty drowning his doubt, takes it as plain,
is mistaking its play, lost in its blending.
Any faith is made safe just by pretending.
SYNCOPATION
One wave cancels another, but energy
vies still within them. It's a syncopation,
a vertiginous swing that stuns suddenly,
caught on the hop. Brahms loved it and the jazz folk.
The thump comes unannounced. Anticipation
finds itself fooled, for it could have known the stroke
by its opposite — here, here —not here! Balance
balances out of a disregarded blank.
What was innocence turns into impudence.
Law is subverted with a bold kind of swank
and a swagger. As Shakespeare said, let the fool
have his head and he'll tell you how you must rule.
LISTENING TO MUSIC
In each measure a repetition ignored
soon as it starts, for it has started in us.
Then a melody, so that we won't be bored,
changing from samenesses of pitch, time and tone
in our silent accompaniment. Unconscious,
we take another imprinting once it's grown
to the length of a phrase, for that phrase repeats,
say, on a new instrument, and we're hearing
with a pleasure quite innocent of the feats
memory's playing. We just go careering
on though prelude, development. We compose
ourselves thus, with a will, right up to the close.
MINIMALIST MUSIC
Heard the minimalist music — Adams, Glass,
Reich. It is woven of iridescent gauze
that is wired into moiré. Rhythm must pass,
shifting in multiple fugue, in anarchic
syncopation that's knitting mini-seesaws
strictly in time, into atomic music
keeping crystalline law. Voiced without voices,
pulsed without pulse, it threads Islamic knottings
under crotchet and lace and stipple, choices
only created in textural plottings
that repeat, not repeating, reconciled strife,
recreating in sound each instant of life.
SINGING
Can one sing? Only one? One can't sing. Even
two have a problem in these times. The chorus
sees the lines of the stave as rungs. The organ
rises to climax for Thai minors in rags,
but not for Eros; for birds, but not for Horus.
Hymns fade to echoes: hear how their tempo lags,
but the hooligans chant 'F the ref!' in time,
all of them calling for the conductors they
haven't had. Hear the bells on Sunday in chime,
tossing and turning. You have to learn to play
faith to play all the scales. You who want a choice
need society if you've to have a voice.