Spring XXI. Bird song + consonance

Intro & Preface & Contents

Previous: XX. Art

All about my garden to-day the birds are loud. To say that the air is filled with their song gives no idea of the ceaseless piping, whistling, trilling, which at moments rings to heaven in a triumphant unison, a wild accord.  Now and then I notice one of the smaller songsters who seems to strain his throat in a madly joyous endeavour to outcarol all the rest. It is a chorus of praise such as none other of earth’s children have the voice or the heart to utter. As I listen, I am carried away by its glorious rapture; my being melts in the tenderness of an impassioned joy; my eyes are dim with I know not what profound humility.

Alpha.

Here I can not really compete with Ryecroft’s world. Our wrens and sparrows are more chatterers than songsters. Our pigeons and seagulls add nothing in the way of music while our crows, while loud, are fairly disagreeable. Even our old standby doves are, while not unpleasant, rather monotonous.  Our parrots are, if anything, worse than the crows. The occasionally heard cry of the hawks that soar perpetually over park and tower alike, while stirring, is a weak basis for rapture.

Beta.

I was struck in this passage by Gissing’s use of the word “accord.”  For one thing, "wild accord" suggests both the overall consonance of the birdsong in his garden and also the life affirming quality all that sound implies or creates in the heart of the person listening. 

Obviously accord/discord are mirror terms, closely related to consonance/dissonance. Both sets have both a musical and a metaphorical meaning the profoundness of which I frequently struggle to grasp. Muriel Barbery, in The Elegance of the Hedgehog first got me really thinking about this

Beauty is consonance is a sublime thought... aesthetics are really nothing more than an intuition to the Way of Consonance, a sort of Way of the Samurai applied to the intuition of authentic forms. We all have a knowledge of harmony, anchored deep within. It is this knowledge that enables us, at every instant, to apprehend quality in our lives and, on the rare occasions when everything is in perfect harmony, to appreciate it with the apposite intensity... those who feel inspired... by the greatness of small things will pursue them to the very heart of the essential where, cloaked in everyday attire, this greatness will emerge from within a certain ordering of ordinary things and from the certainty that all is as it should be, the conviction that it is fine this way.

-Renee, p 165 - The Elegance of the Hedgehog

That Barbery uses “consonance” (what is primarily a musical term contrasted with dissonance) in this way is interesting because the history of western music has seen a trend toward the acceptance of ever greater levels of dissonance in music. You could say that today, the music we experience as beautiful is spiced with levels of dissonance that would have been objectionable a thousand, or even a hundred years ago.

I am not well enough educated in musicology to know what is and isn’t dissonance in the technical sense, but I think it’s something you know when you hear it for the most part. But I may be stretching the term when I use it with respect to jazz and rock. But, having said all that, I think the history of jazz since WW2 is a good example of the acceptance of -- even the craving for -- ever greater levels of dissonance. The saxophone playing of Johnny Hodges...

...is the epitome of consonance while the playing of Charlie Parker...

...and John Coltrane introduced heightened levels of at least figurative dissonance. The same phenomenon is at work in the piano playing of Bill Evans...

...and the playing and music of Thelonious Monk...

But the most striking example of this trend is in the playing of the electric guitar. I’m not sure that people in the past would even recognize the playing of Santana, Jimmy Page, Hendrix, or Eric Clapton as music. Here's one of my favorite examples of this new sound, Hendrix's Little Wing played by Stevie Ray Vaughan...

So saying that “Beauty is consonance,” while probably true, doesn’t explain what an acceptable mixture of consonance and dissonance might be. Also, it doesn’t explain why certain sounds -- or certain patches of color on canvas -- appear to us as consonant in the first place. You could also see wabi-sabi as a recognition of the limits of consonance and the need for some touch of dissonance.

(Wabi-sabi represents a comprehensive Japanese world view or aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.”)

...great works are the visual forms which attain in us the certainty of timeless consonance... our eye locates the form that will elicit a feeling of consonance, the one particular thing in which everyone can find the very essence of beauty, without variations or reservations, context or effort.

-Renee, p 201 - The Elegance of the Hedgehog

And then Nietzsche, in The Birth of Tragedy, pushed me even further. The notion, derived from String Theory, of the universe and all its “particles” and waves as a sort of cosmic music, pushes me further still. I will come back to this in the future.

What interests me most, I think, is the value of dissonance... and also discord. If you think of God as the cosmic author or artist, then discord is an essential tool in her arsenal. Without discord there is no story.

Here’s a quote from Dr. Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist and co-inventor of String theory:

The latest version of String Theory is called M-Theory, “M” for membrane. So we now realize that strings can coexist with membranes. So the subatomic particles we see in nature, the quark, the electrons are nothing but musical notes on a tiny vibrating string.

What is physics?

Physics is nothing but the laws of harmony that you can write on vibrating strings.

What is chemistry?

Chemistry is nothing but the melodies you can play on interacting vibrating strings.

What is the universe?

The universe is a symphony of vibrating strings.

And then what is the mind of God that Albert Einstein eloquently wrote about for the last 30 years of his life?

We now, for the first time in history have a candidate for the mind of God. It is, cosmic music resonating through 11 dimensional hyperspace.

We are nothing but melodies. We are nothing but cosmic music played out on vibrating strings and membranes. Obeying the laws of physics, which is nothing but the laws of harmony of vibrating strings.

Next: Spring XXII. Literary journals a poor mirror.