Gathering of the Tribe: Music and Heavy Conscious Creation

BOOK

INTRODUCTION

In a recent interview the singer Robert Plant made a revealing remark about his hair. when asked why, in 2011, it was still long, he replied that it was so because for him long hair represented a time (the late 1960s) when being different actually meant something. It was a symbol of a freedom, of non-conformity and a desire to stretch the boundaries of what was possible. his long hair had stayed with him so that, Samson-like, he was reminded to retain the powerful countercultural experiments of his formative years. It is a reminder for us too of a time when music meant ‘something’ different; however di?cult, naïve, ridiculous, confused. Most music in the twenty-first century has become simply a commodity, a sophisticated simulation, a unit to be bought and sold and discarded. Music is no longer about ideas or a wish to enter another conscious or unconscious space or to experience danger. It is not so much that this is a new aspect of music because we know that this process began, as Jacques Attali has noted, with the advent of recorded sound. The capturing of the spirit of music into units ‘killed’ the special aura of sound, although as this book shows, some music managed to break free.

But the phase where recorded music did not quite understand its own limitations and thus broke out in an explosion of experimentation has passed. Now music has reached a state of total commodification and is all the weaker for that. Robert Plant’s hair is a reminder of the once powerful connections between music and the occult.

In a collection of writings on music and mysticism, Joscelyn Godwin makes it clear that music has remained a vehicle for revealing divine and cosmic laws, for voyages to another world and as a tool for transformation. Gathering of the Tribe reviews some of the most unusual and challenging recordings in the recent history of music that have in some way examined these ancient laws. The contents are selective. But the book celebrates that music which attempts — usually consciously but sometimes unconsciously — to alter consciousness. I have in parts adopted the phrase ‘heavy consciousness’ because the usual affect of this kind of music is that it in some way profoundly re-orders the human organism; it is music that acts on the mind and body in a deep, spiritual, sometimes evil way. Often though, the harmony of musical composition is recognised in the harmony and composition of humankind and the human body. This is music that connects with the soul (but is not necessarily over-hyped ‘soul music’). This is music that is a far cry from the turgid output of much of the ‘service musicians’ of the music-making industry today. The most penetrating music comes not from commercial imperatives or notions of ‘quality’ but from an inner spirit bursting into the world of creativity. As the philosophers Deleuze and Guattari note: To be an artisan and no longer an artist, creator or founder, is the only way to become Cosmic.

‘The Gathering of the Tribe’ was a free countercultural festival called the ‘human Be-In’ held in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967. Many of the era’s psychedelic rock bands performed live and ‘head’ prophets such as Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Allen Ginsberg spoke. ‘The Tribe’ implies a collection of like-minded peoples gathering to share experiences. Part of this book is about the way in which individuals create these tribes and the role music plays in this process. For the late jazz musician Michael Garrick, who appears in this book, this connotation was of concern. The word ‘Tribe’ implies a kind of mob linked by blood ties he told me, the opposite of the reality! Garrick was in some ways right but the book is simply collecting a set of esoteric musics together for consideration. The music is very diverse but is, I believe, linked by a concern for cosmic expression.

GATHERING OF THE TRIBE is not an attempt at defining any parameters of what is ‘heavy consciousness’ music, although this conceit runs throughout the book. The book is a personal selection dredged from some years of seeking out and listening to obscure and di?cult music; music that is profound but made for reasons which the creators and performers are often at pains to properly explain. william James wrote about the ‘varieties of religious experience.’ Gathering of the Tribe is a book about the varieties of occult musical experience.

THE ANCIENT MYSTERY OF SOUND

Much of the music discussed in this book deals with the special power of sound and tone. This is just as important as music per se. The occult philosopher heinrich Cornelius Aggripa stated that we existed in a ‘three-fold world’ made up of the Elementary, the Celestial, and the Intellectual. Music is the great art form which unites this idea as it is formed from mathematical principles, is subject to tangible thought processes and expresses ideas yet is capable of transcendence into the ‘celestial.’

Aggripa links the songs of virgil to a conception of the natural world where the signs and symbols of the zodiac are connected to mathematical philosophy. Agrippa believed that this process occurred through ‘magick’ and music contributes to this idea, as many of the examples in this book testify. The alchemical elements described by Agrippa as ‘Fire, Earth, water, Aire’ have made their way into musical sound through work as diverse as John Dankworth and Neil Ard-ley’s avant-jazz suites, the acid folk of the Third Ear Band and the strange songs of Charles Manson.

Agrippa’s conception of the sacred and divine letters is the life of men writ in their hands. These letters are signs of the vast realms of the human experience. So music too is capable of representing such evocative notation although clearly its written form is less than half the story. The power of music is such that the inscribing of musical notation is a poor representation of music’s true potential. To fully realise what music can do it must be heard and in this way is the most celestial of arts. For Agrippa, music held immense power as it doth change the affections, intentions, gestures, motions, actions and dispositions of all the hearers, and doth quietly allure them to its own properties. Book two of his work on occult magick posits that the properties of musical sound (especially harmony) can profoundly affect great populations of the animal kingdom and the natural world (in the shore of Attica the sea sounds like a harp). This is something that mere words cannot do. Music is so influential that through it some diseases of the body, and mind may thus be cured, or caused.

It is notable how much of this fascinating music emerged during the late 1960s. In particular, the year 1969 is important. Nineteen-sixty-nine marks a high point in ‘heavy conscious creation’ music. Somehow, due perhaps to a confluence of mysticism, drugs and art, the atmosphere of that time evoked a heavy spirit, the apogee of the rock aesthetic. The music of this time was psychedelic because it dealt with the ‘psychedelic experience’ and connected the psychic landscape, which had previously been examined through literature, with sound. Nineteen-sixty-nine was at the same time the year of mind-expansion and hedonism (Serge Gainsbourg’s ‘Annee Erotique’ for example) and the year of death and destruction (what David Felton and David Dalton describe as Charles Manson’s ‘year of the Fork’). The year 1969 has informed projects as diverse as Sonic youth’s occult track ‘Death valley 69’ and DJ Mark Goodliff ’s ‘1969’ encyclopaedic soundscape project.

The sections in Gathering of the Tribe are concerned with recorded music that contributes towards the shaping of:

1. Cosmic Consciousness

2. Occult Traditions

3. Revolution in Sound

4. Ancient Mysteries

5. Outsider Art

6. Mindfucking

It is worth noting finally that this book is not about the ‘commercial’ use of the occult in music. For example, there is no mention of certain forms of metal music which has already been dealt with in various texts. Many of the records discussed in this book sold very poorly in their lifetime. They have been chosen because they exist (with one or two exceptions) outside of any commercial reification processes. Frank Zappa may have once said that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. But his book explains how music can — or for a moment believed it could — move mountains.

Our normal consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

William James

Volume two: If you have a suggestion or would like to contribute to a future edition of Gathering of the Tribe 2, contact Mark Goodall via the publisher.

COSMIC SOUNDS

The renaissance period in Europe saw the keen development of interest in music and sound as an occult force. The connection was made between music on earth and that of the supernatural world. Robert Fludd, a hermeticist who was associated with the Rosicriucian movement, filled his works with musical references and was interested in music that was both human and divine. In his Tractacus Apologeticus Integritatem Societatis de Rosea Crucis Defendens (1617), he wrote of the occult and wondrous effects of the secret music. here, the best of harmonies is generated by the conglomeration of the spheres. Fludd believed that concords and discords both affect the human mood, the former excite things in love, harmony and pleasant desire; the latter hatred, discord and destructive scorn. he produced diagrams to explain the connection and interdependence of the cosmos with music and sound. So, Apollo is the god of ‘celestial music.’ his lyre showers notes and harmonious sounds into the earth and the sea and these in turn occultly modulate the secret music of lives whose audible sounds lie hid in creatures just as fire does in wood. Music is an elemental force affecting all nature. In this Fludd recalls Ficino who advocated a ‘magical use of music’ to support his doctrine that ‘as above, so below’ — tones are chosen by the rules of the stars leading to a celestial power. The human body can be moved by musical sounds.

Fludd speaks of an experiment carried out with two lyres. A straw is placed on the string of one lyre and when the corresponding string is struck on the second lyre the straw will move and be thrown off in a sudden motion. Ficino believed that music could be aligned with an entreaty: a prayer when it has been suitably and seasonably composed and is full of emotion and forceful has a power similar to a song. It is important to note that these experimental thoughts grew from an interest in the natural affect of music and was not in essence demonic or drawing on the souls of the dead. The music of Gurdjieff for example, using sound as a healing force, continues the work of Ficino and Fludd. But some music, as we shall see, would be attached to the demonic and was inspired by the dark arts.

It was in the late nineteenth century that the connections between occult philosophy and music were ‘modernised.’ Charles Fourier developed the system of ‘correspondences,’ a scheme of ‘universal harmony’ built on the theories of Agrippa. Fourier even developed a talisman (and issued clear instructions on how to make it) using musical notes to correspond with colours.

Chapter one

It is through the work of Claude Debussy and Erik Satie that the first modern, concrete, and extended link between music and the occult was made. Debussy believed that music ought to have been a hermetical science. Satie’s every musical work was infected with a high sense of esoteric religiosity. Alex Ross points out in The Rest is Noise that Debussy and Satie were avid devotees of obscure religions, including the Rosicrucian/Cabalistic orders, and those who came after them held similar beliefs about the occult power of sound.

According to Cyril Scott, Debussy was the first modern composer to introduce through music the overtones of the lost civilizations of the past into the present. In such esoteric terms, his music conveys the sound vibrations of Blavatsky’s Atlantean race to the Aryan race of today. Debussy’s famous exploration of Javanese Gamelan music, according to Scott, is a remnant, though mellowed and modified, of the Atlantean. Debussy fuses the ancient, the esoteric and the modern through his revolutionary compositions. In Agrippa’s time the ability of music to alter human consciousness and physical behaviour was made clear:

We read also, that they in Apulia that were touched with a kinde of dangerous Spider, were astonished until they heard a certain sound, at the hearing of which every one riseth up and danceth.

Agrippa, Occult Philosophy

This phenomenon is recalled in David Kerekes’ article on Zimbaria where music and ritual remain deeply ingrained in Southern Italian culture and myth. The sounds of Zimbaria ring out across ancient ‘rotting’ lands, bringing the living in communion with the dead. Then the invention of various forms of electronic music has aided the daring explorations into heavy conscious creation. In this chapter this is manifest through Messiaen utilising the early electronic invention of the Ondes Martenot in spiritual works, Stockhausen’s avant-garde occult vocal experiments (recalling Marsilio Ficion’s statement in De Vita Coelitus Comprandana that: Song is a most powerful imitator of all things) or Pierre henry’s sonic landscapes of the afterlife. In all these pieces, where a higher octave of ‘secret music’ can be perceived, the effect for the listener is designed to be profound and deeply religious, nothing less than an encounter with the spirit world, the fusing with sound becoming what Joscelyn Godwin calls those harmonies of heaven and earth.

CLAUDE DEBUSSY

Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune

(Deutsche Grammophon, 1971)

I have made mysterious nature my religion. Claude Debussy

This short (nine-minute) piece of orchestral music, first sensationally performed in 1894, is one of the most important and revolutionary works in the history of sound. Claude Debussy was a pantheistic artist profoundly affected by the occult power of nature and felt an overwhelming extraordinary emotion upon his extended meditations on the forces of the natural world — the sun, the falling rain and the impression and reflections found in the varied forms of water. his work was ‘symbolist’ in scope, a philosophy based on the anti-realist aesthetics of much European art of his era, and designed to evoke rather than to describe or authenticate the phenomena of modern life.

Prélude à L’après-midi d’un faune is based on a poem by French writer Stephane Mallarmé, recounting, in Debussy’s words, the settings across which the desires and dreams of the faun move in the heat of the afternoon until, tired of pursuing the frightened nymphs and naiads, he drifts into a heady slumber in which wishes are fulfilled and possession in universal nature is complete. In his book Ocean of Sound David Toop interprets it more prosaically as: a pagan cosmos of half-human flautists fucking in forest glades.

Whichever reading you prefer, Debussy’s aim was to imitate, using musical sounds, the occult power of mythological beliefs. The flute that is central to the piece, played by the great George Barrère for the debut performance, is the Great God Pan’s instrument. The work is made up of isolated impressionistic phrasings (although for some reason Debussy hated to be associated with ‘impressionsim’). Debussy faithfully structured the 110 bars of Prélude à L’après-midi d’un faune around the 110 lines of Mallarme’s poem. Perhaps typical of French culture, Debussy found inspiration in the works of writers, poets and painters as much as through other musicians.

Debussy’s work was to present the music of ‘Initiates’ where sound is constructed to build wonder-inspiring forms, a new more responsible formation of a merging of music and the occult. According to Cyril Scott, Debussy was unconsciously used by the higher Ones to carry over Fourth Race sound-vibrations into the Fifth (according to Blavatsky’s mystical conception of the human race). Debussy’s study of and use of Javanese music is Atlantean, redolent of the esoteric notion of astral energy profoundly affecting the physical body.

The instrumentation Debussy used to realise this mystical dream-work consisted of woodwind, horns, two harps and strings. Added to this is exotic percussion, most notably ancient cymbals; Debussy famously was at the forefront of integrating world music (especially Javanese Gamelan forms) into the western classical canon.

The piece starts with a solo flute cantilena. Critic harry halbreich explains that its languorous tremolo, reaches up into the relentless blue of a Sicilian summer sky, and this transcendent sound greatly entranced me when I was a child without knowing what the music was. I associated the sound with some magical environment, a mysterious woodland area possessed by spirits. It conjured up for me the strange and dangerous meadow of walt Disney’s Bambi film. The opening note is a C sharp, known in musical circles as the bad note, the sensuality of this sound captivating or repellent to the audiences who first heard it.

A horn seemingly responds to the call of the ‘faun.’ Then more instruments build and swamp the flute. A harp renders some flourishes or arpeggio notes. The horns and harp repeat this phrase. when the flute appears again it is surrounded this time by a different and sustained musical texture, symbolising the magic transformation that is gradually taking place in this supernatural realm.

The sound becomes a swirl of enchanting sounds powerful, natural but also capable of great emotional confusion. The final chords of each section are forceful and enigmatic — what Alex Ross in his book The Rest is Noise describes as a self-su?cient organism, symbolic of unbound nature. A more sinister atmosphere then emerges but morphs gradually into a sweeping, almost grandiose orchestral section where all of the instruments are made to soar towards the cosmos and then back down to earth. The harp becomes prominent again and the flute motif returns, re energised by its profound journey. The voluptuous nature of the piece conveys the spirit of nature as it is presented by some hidden god or higher power. what Debussy called the ‘dead’ instruments of music are born anew through the magic of sound transformation.

The finale is made up of gentle and soft bars of combined, satisfying notes. The order is resumed but has been altered; it is no less than the birth of a new dawn.

Prélude à L’après-midi d’un faune was the first masterpiece of modern mystical music. It proves that heavy conscious creation can be exquisitely beautiful and lyrical. Debussy’s work tries to represent the intoxication of natural forces both in terms of erotic flesh (one version of the poem has an illustration by Manet of three naked nymphs cavorting in some reeds) and an abundant plant life. The cover painting is henri Rousseau’s ‘La Cahrmeuse de Serpente,’ or snake charmer, and perfectly complements the spirit if Debussy’s music. A dark-skinned and mysterious naked woman has entranced one serpent so deeply that it is coiled around her shoulders. Others lurk nearby emerging from a lush tropical forest, the lush reeds and leaves of Debussy’s setting for the piece.

The occult nature of this piece of music has not been disputed. Debussy’s experiments with the occult have been made into a ballet and dramatised in Kate Mosse’s 2007 novel Sepulchre. Further proof of Debussy’s (and Romanticism’s) immersion in the esoteric is proven by recalling that he was once a member of the The Priests of Zion and/or the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross (Rosicrucians) where, amongst others, he encountered one Erik Satie…

"No water, but that which my flute pours, murmurs

To the grove sprinkled with melodies: and the sole breeze

Out of the twin pipes, quick to breathe

Before it scatters the sound in an arid rain,

Is unstirred by any wrinkle of the horizon, The visible breath, artificial and serene, Of inspiration returning to heights unseen"

Mallarme, L’Apres-midi d’un Faune

ERIK SATIE

Vexations (Philips, 1983)

Contemplation of the waves of the sea or of the mountain ridges of the Himalayas is something everyone finds quite normal, but the great marvel that a human being has been able to write a small piece of music which exerts the same effect when repeated is scarcely heeded. K. Schippers

Vexations is an occult piano composition by the eccentric French composer Erik Satie (1866–1925). Satie is famous for his beautiful piano cycles such as Gymnopédies and Gnossienes. Satie’s eccentricities mask an intense mystical dimension to his musical works. Satie was connected with the Rosicrucian movement in late nineteenth century Paris, specifically the Salon de la Rose + Croix. This movement was led by Joséphin Péladan, a guru-like figure in bohemian Paris. Satie composed works for this occult sect such as the ‘Sonneries de la Rose+Croix.’ It was a combination of esoteric musical experimentation and a deeply psychic lament for a lost love (Satie’s lover Suzanna valadon had recently left him). Satie eventually broke from Péladan and formed his own ‘break away’ unit: The Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Leader. he announced its formation in a letter to the public:

Behold the church of Erik Satie, a refuge where the Catholic faith and the arts shall grow and prosper sheltered from profanity unsullied by the workings of evil.

Satie, naturally, was its only member.

Vexations emerged from the wreckage of Satie’s notes twenty years after he had died. It was written in 1893. It consists of a short ‘bass’ piano phrase lasting eighty seconds which Satie instructed the player to perform 840 times in succession making the work actually lasting eighteen hours and twenty minutes. The work grew out of Satie’s known obsessive nature — he would walk the same route into Paris everyday and reside with, wear and consume only white objects.

Vexations is based around a single piano line, utilising almost every note of the piano scale, which is then repeated but accompanied by a second piano line — a parallel tritone. The first line is based on plainchant or a form of simple religious vocal music, strongly liturgical in spirit (but also occult: Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus von hohenheim in Einsielden, otherwise known as Paracelcus, labelled his hermeticist alchemical text Coelum Philosophorum alternatively as the ‘Book of vexations’). The two lines present an entirely new harmonic sensibility akin to two microbes moving through time and space alongside each other but with different and occasionally diverging paths. The two strands work to affect the memory of the listener; they fall into each other almost before the last note has resonated. while Vexations is a beautifully constructed work, performers have been known to find its seeming ‘simplicity’ bewitching (they achieve, when confronted with it, what Satie called a paralysis — the ‘serious immobility’ of his instructions). The ‘tune’ is also impossible to recall (or, for example, to whistle) and great concentration is required to perform the piece (another symbol of its occult pull). Engagement with the piece as player or listener leads to awareness of some secret form of knowledge.

The Zen-like quality of the piece led to the development of minimalist music and arguably a new age dimension to music that was pure and naturalistic in its tendency. Satie composed the piece to test the endurance of the pianist (Cage cheated by having a relay team of players). The recording offers the listener a form of endurance too as to reach the full effect of the piece the disc must be played twenty-four times. Satie’s instructions for performing the piece were brief and typically playful:

To play this motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.

In other words the performer must be able to access a strict Catholic form of conscious creation like the transcendent state of a meditative monk. It is interesting that the piece is assumed to create and be about the sense of boredom (in art) when in fact it strikes out to formulate a spiritual dimension to a minimal form of art, sound and tonal variations. Through repetition one goes beyond boredom into a higher state of consciousness. This can be just as likely achived with a simple and esoteric structure as it can a heavy and complex explosion of amplified noise. Even the grooves of the record appear perfectly smooth and in unison.

The most famous performance of Vexations occurred in 1963. It was organised by John Cage and included the participation of velvet underground member John Cale (refunds were available). It is said that Cage’s infamous 4,33" — a completely ‘silent’ piece — was written as a first movement for Vexations.

‘Silence’ followed by ‘serious immobility.’ As John Cale might have said: there’s heavy conscious creation for you.

Vexations creates its own time zone. It is meditation, a mantra and hallucination.

Stephen Wittington

KARLHEINZ STOCKHAUSEN

Stimmung

(Deutsche Grammophon, 1970)

The spirit will be the music itself. Karlheinz Stockhausen

In 1969, at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam near the end of the holland Festival, student protestors disrupted a performance of Stimmung, one of avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen’s most powerfully esoteric compositions. Twenty minutes into the performance, the protestors, part of the left-wing ‘provos’ movement, began imitating the distinctive vocal inflections of the piece until Stockhausen stopped the performance. The protesters then took to the stage, grabbing the microphones used in the piece, stating that they objected to the ‘authoritarian’ nature of the composition (it did not allow them to ‘join in’). Stockhausen was typically nonplussed: "Stimmung will reduce the bellowing wolves to silence," he wrote afterwards. It says a lot for the radical nature of the times that Stimmung was considered so reactionary, when it is one of the most experimental pieces of music ever written.

Like Sun Ra, Karheinz Stockhausen believes he was not of this earth. The composer’s belief, that he was born on the star Sirius (the ‘Dog Star’ — considered by esoteric traditions as the star with a special connection with the destiny of planet Earth), demonstrates the power of cosmic forces in his music. Stockhausen believed that music could represent humanity’s higher consciousness and most of his work was dedicate to achieving this state (he supposedly ‘dreamed in sound’). Sounds that are organised by human beings — music — has the capability of going beyond the simple layers of reality into a new space/time experience. This was Stockhausen’s logical expansion from musique concrète, where non-‘musical’ sounds were collected to make new forms of music.

After studying under Olivier Messiaen, Stockhausen continued his experimental career in the French studios of Pierre Schaeffer and his colleagues (such as Pierre henry) before setting up his own experimental music studio in Cologne. This incorporated experiments with the purity of the human voice which resulted in this record. For Stockhausen, a sound is not just a sound. Music was about synthesising existing sounds into entirely new modes, using of course the immense and growing power of electronic music. working in ‘sound laboratories,’ Stockhausen carefully studied and manipulated sounds using electronic techniques — principally tape recorder equipment. Simple vowel sounds were treated and altered, filtered to produce a new form of sound. The ability to speed up and slow down exiting sounds and music makes a magical transformation take place. Stockhausen expanded the micro-acoustic properties of sounds, extending a simple phrase or note or sound from a very short space of time to a longer amount of time — a form of musical alchemy.

Since that year of revolutions — 1968 — Stockhausen, rather than making his works more ‘political,’ began experimenting with music as no less than a major player in the ‘spiritual transformation of mankind.’ Stockhausen wanted his music to operate with the different energy ‘centres’ (sexual, mental, suprapersonal) of the human organism. Like Gurdjieff he believed that the vibrations in music and sound affect these centres and likewise that these centres themselves can affect vibrations. Music can operate in a direct physical way (dance music and rock music do this) but it can also operate in a spiritual sense in what Stockhausen called a purely sacred manner. Like any countercultural spirit, Stockhausen recognised the importance of the change from the Piscean age to the Aquarian age. More importantly as an artist he felt this change. Stockhausen wanted to create music with a great spirituality, away from the increasing development of what he called ‘utility music’ (Gebrauchsmusik) that was music devoid of any spiritual dimension.

Stockhausen once asked the question of the record under discussion: "what happens to me when I hear the composition Stimmung?" The composer intended this music to awaken consciousness in the listener. An encounter with Stimmung would keep awake the connection of the soul with the other side. The work is about reawakening the sensations crated by the great religions of the past using modern elements and vibrations that are not necessarily connected with any established sacred path. Stockhausen’s music is not Stockhausen, but this spirit which is using me he admitted. It is music for the post-apocalypse age. Stockhausen believed that if a musical composition came from inner convictions it was ‘natural’ even if it was made with electronic tapes, synthesisers and mixers.

Stimmung is performed with six singers sitting in a circle (sometimes on chairs; other times on cushions; the beautiful photograph on the booklet for the record shows the performers each lit be a single light source surrounded by stars). The performers sing, with subtle variations, the notes of a single B-flat harmonic chord. The texts sung in the piece are words taken from divine names from a range of global deities mixed with the texts of two erotic love poems composed by Stockhausen. The piece was informed by profound religious experiences Stockhausen had while in Mexico. Stockhausen visited the great ruins of Oaxaca and Merida. The Mayan temples and the Mexican planes impressed Stockhausen and the spaces of these locations (which he described as being slightly out of phase) inspired the sound of Stimmung. The sound of Tibetan monks chanting can also be discerned as part of the soundscape, especially at the beginning where basic vowel sounds are manipulated and transformed and the precise ‘language’ is unclear. It marks the way in which Stockhausen brought in non-western music (Japanese, Indian, Balinese) to amplify the spiritual path of his compositions. Jonathan Cott, on a visit to the composer’s home, once asked Stockhausen what a Stimmung house would look like. Stockhausen responded: Caves, slopes, curving rooms! It would be nest like? These are the aesthetics of such a spiritual musical journey.

The structure behind Stimmung is based around a single chord extended, using phonetic sounds of the alphabet to alter the sounds. It has been noted that it expands upon the occurrence of wagner’s single chord in Die Götterdämmerung which resounds for several long minutes. It is also a tribute to a person, Mary, who Stockhausen clearly loves, hence the transcendental is a combination of the physical with the erotic. The chord sequence is determined by a scheme and each singer has eight or nine so-called ‘models’ to work within, determined by the ‘leader’ for that section (which of course changes). I noticed when I enjoyed a performance of Stimmung some years ago that each section began by determining the opening note with a pure electronic tone and the section progressed from there. Stimmung transports the listener, if they allow themselves, to a state rarely reached in music.

As Stockhausen points out in the notes for the LP, there are multiple meanings of the word ‘stimmung.’ German for ‘tuning,’ stimmung relates both to the tuning of an instrument (piano or voice) and what he called the tuning of the soul. Stimming also means to be in tune with each other, a psychological sense of well-being. The composition attempts to bring these aspects of the word together.

Such ‘tuning’ can be heard throughout the piece, at times resembling the haunting vibrations of a tuning fork. The first voice is joined by other lighter voices (female), which then other overlap and merge. This is the ‘pure’ tuning undertaken by musicians in preparation for playing where each player/singer works through a chord. But here it is extend into an entire composition. Around four minutes into the piece a stunningly beautiful and cosmic harmony occurs, all the more striking because the combination of notes preceding it have been examples of both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ stimmung. The aura of the soul’s harmony is evident throughout the piece.

The type of singing Stockhausen devised for Stimmung is evident. The sounds come from the phonetic alphabet and must be sung without vibrato or other vocal ‘techniques.’ These sounds must resonate in the ‘head’ of the performer with long gentle breathes in-between (some of these tunes resound in the listener’s head too). The ‘Magic Names’ brought forward by each singer are to be responded to by the others through improvisation. Such transformations of sound, tone and vibration results in many changes of mood and provokes a form of reflection in the listener. "Certainly Stimmung is meditative music, Stockhausen writes. Time is suspended. One listens to the inner self of the vowel… THE INNER SELF… In the beauty of the sensual shines the beauty of the eternal." various sounds are emitted across the piece, some of which sound sometimes comical and animalistic. It is a recoding of spectral harmonics — an experiment with the full spectrum of sound and vocal techniques that went on to influence singers such as Meredith Monk.

Naturally, Stimmung ebbs and flows with some sections loud and becoming forceful and others where the drones are gentle and meditative. high-pitched ‘Oriental’ inflections also emerge, evidence of Stockhausen’s absorption of Japanese religious music. The word hallelujah can clearly be heard at the end of side one. The blending of voices towards the end of the piece reaches a high level of intensity where the vibrations, literally, move the listener. Breathy whistling ends Stimmung in a fragile and poignant manner.

while clearly a very modern composition Stimmung conveys the ancient forces of the spirit. It is the trance of medieval polyphony brought into the Age of Aquarius.

Stockhausen threw himself into experimenting with the transformation of consciousness through music. Hymnen, a 1971 work lasting three hours, sent audience members off into a cosmic trip. For his vast work, Aus den sieben Tagen, both the composer and the performers were required to fast for several days before the performance in order to achieve a force produced primarily from the intuition rather than the intellect. his 1970 piece Mantra is based, like the religious chants, on a single melodic-rhythmic-tonal complex. he performed such works in 1969 in an extraordinary concert in the Jeita caves in Lebanon, a place the composer described as a fantastic hole in the stomach of God.

Stockhausen famously appeared on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s LP, one of their heroes. Stockhausen went on to become a hero to many generations of popular and electronic musicians, the experimental force of his sound works and his esoteric imagination undimmed today.

I connected Stockhausen with Sun Ra at the beginning of this review and with good reason. Both are in a long line of musicians and composers who believed that the vibrations of the cosmos can affect and be affected by the human earthly realm. The universal and cosmic source of music must be divined by the experimental and creative individual. Stimmung tries to reconcile two different concepts of time and space, one (Christian) where time dominates space and the other (Indo-hellenic) where space dominates over time.

Ultimately Stockhausen believed that music can help you to ‘discover yourself.’ Cosmic consciousness is achievable, the journey one takes as what Stockhausen called a ‘cosmic tourist’ powered by sacred music and sound. The cosmic composer can help us begin the journey up the ‘ecstatic’ spiral of the spirit.

Stockhausen is only a label, a name. When I have gone it is no longer there. But the music lives on.

Karlheinz Stockhausen

OLIVIER MESSIAEN

Petites liturgies de la Présence divine (ABC, 1974)

Anitienne de la Conversation Interieure • Sequence du verbe, Cantique Divin • Psalmodie de L’ubiquité par Amour

To compose is an act of faith.

Messiaen

The French composer Olivier Messiaen was another artist who dreamed in sound. In the introduction he wrote in 1941 for his chamber piece Quatuor pour la fin du Temps he claimed that In my dreamings I hear and see ordered melodies and chords, familiar hues and forms; then following this transitory stage, I pass into the unreal and submit ecstatically to a vortex, a dizzying interpretation of superhuman sounds and colours. This sensory overload is an instance of the process of synaesthesia, the supposed ability to perceive letters and numbers as having colours, and sounds as having colour associated with them. It is as if Messiaen can see the colours of the astral world and transpose them into wonderful musical sounds.

It was Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande, given to Messiaen when he was only ten-years-old that had the most profound impact. It was this score that decided my vocation, he later reflected. At the Paris Conservatoire he studied with Dupré and Dukas. he combined this with the study of ‘world musics’ using hindu rhythms and Chinese, Japanese and Javanese forces to colour his compositions.

Messiaen was a profoundly spiritual composer with a strong religious background. Many of his works were inspired by liturgical texts and his Roman Catholic upbringing. yet Messiaen was not a conservative composer. he absorbed many exotic musical influences (such as — like Debussy — Indonesian gamelan). Messiaen was one of the first composers to use an electronic keyboard in an orchestral work. This was the Ondes Martenot (also favoured by varèse, Jean-Jacques Perry and Stereolab). The extraordinary instrument features in this recording, combining beautifully with the female voice.

In his Technique of My Musical Language (1956), an ambitious discussion of the elements which formed his musical style, Messiaen includes a remarkable preface in which he thanks not only the usual characters (his wife, his teachers, his friends, etc.), but includes in his gratitude "stained glass windows — hindu rhythmics — Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov — the mountains of the Dauphine — birds — Gregorian Chant…" This catalogue of eccentric enthusiasms is a precise accounting of significant influences which shaped a highly individual musical voice.

The religious and spiritual dimension of Petites Liturgies De La Présence Divine resulted in harsh criticism. The most vehement critic was musicologist Claude Rostand whose outspoken views on modernist composers are legend (he described Poulenc as half monk, half thug). Rostand stoked the controversy which came to be known as ‘Le Cas Messiaen’ (The Messiaen Affair). Rostand’s criticisms were directed towards the quality and relevance of Messiaen’s commentaries and the use of unusual sounds for expressing religious themes. Rostand described Petites Liturgies De La Présence Divine as a work of tinsel, false magnificence and pseudo-mysticism, this work with dirty nails and clammy hands, with bloated complexion and unhealthy flab, replete with noxious matter, looking about anxiously like an angel wearing lipstick. But Rostand later recanted and became a supporter of Messiaen.

The text for Petites Liturgies De La Présence Divine is based on Messiaen’s own surrealist poems — his ‘modern psalms.’ The first liturgy ‘Antienne de la Conversation Interieure’ (Antiphon of Internal Conversation) opens with a heavenly choir of female (soprano) voices. The sound is beautiful and pure if slightly sinister. It is interrupted by an odd collection of tinkling piano notes. After each piano sequence the voices surge forward again. Brief periods of silence also shape the music. The choir sings a mixture of sweetly harmonic phrases and then menacing dissonant chants. Eventually the peculiar sound of the Ondes Martenot moves with the piano. This instrument lends itself to snaking glissando lines like the weird patterns of electro-spiritual energy.

‘Sequence du verbe, Cantique Divin’ (Sequence of the word, Divine Canticle) begins with a discordant and alarming cacophony of words and music. Again, the sweetness of the choir is assaulted with a barrage of percussion, piano runs and the occasional weird Ondes Martenot whoosh.

The second part of this piece is much calmer and slower, the choir surging like a wave. The melody line is clear and is emphasised by the organ and strings which move progressively alongside it. But then the discord returns and the anguish of the singers becomes tangible. There is a definite ‘Oriental’ feel to this section, emphasised by the inclusion of a xylophone. A crashing chord, building to a crescendo of noise, ends the section and side one.

‘Psalmodie de L’ubiquite par Armour’ (Psalm Tone of Omnipresence Through Love) begins with more chanted words, like the dark phrases of a nightmare. The text emphasises the omnipresence of God. A loud gong sounds occasionally. The chants are devilish, like the speaking in tongues of supernatural possession. Incongruous ‘whistling’ does not lighten the mood much. Messiaen spoke of his horror of cities and this musical movement appears to be an expression of that fear. Messiaen’s experiments with tempo and the musical score (the ‘tyranny of the bar line’) resulted in a long musical work with many different sections and moods, often moving between them with great rapidity. And so with this final section suddenly the reverberating and distant sounds of the choir appear, like voices from the deep. The orchestra is soft and reassuring here. Love was a key theme of this composition for Messiaen and this section strives to reconcile the passion with faith and the beauty of the natural world (in contrast to the violence and confusion of the other sections). The ethereal beauty of the Ondes Martenot plays a prominent role here, too, hovering over the voices, swooping low and then rising to a peak that is almost shrill (you can hear how this instrument was effective in films which wished to convey the supernatural, and how this effect would have sounded ‘cheap’ to the conservative voices who first reviewed this work). Then the music becomes again disturbing, the gong crashes become more intense and the voices more urgent. here the text overturns the praise of God in the opening sections; this time the ‘dual nature’ of God, the opposites of Levi-Strauss’ binary structures of kinship, is expressed.

The point of Petites Liturgies De La Présence Divine was to convey the message of the liturgical texts but in a secular space (a concert hall rather than church). In her notes Jean hughes likens Messiaen to the troubadour composer-poets of fourteenth century France who mixed up notions of sacred and profane love. This is one of the great legacies of French music; it sets it apart from Anglo-Saxon traditions.

Messiaen wrote a preface for Petites Liturgies De La Présence Divine:

The music is, above all, the music of colour. The modes I have used here are harmonic colours. Their juxtaposition and superimposition produce blues, red, blues striped with red, mauves and greys dotted with orange, blues studded with green and circled with gold, purple, hyacinth, violet, and the sparkle of precious stones: ruby, sapphire, emerald, amethyst — all in draperies, rippling, swirling and spiraling, their movements intermingled.

To this must be added my research into rhythm: non-retrogradable rhythms, rhythmic canons, the use of the deci-talas from ancient India — and also the percussive use of the piano, vibraphone and celesta (which evokes the gamelan of Bali and Java): the rhythms and timbres that I have chosen help to accentuate these colors and their movements.

I wrote the poem of the Trois Petites Liturgies at the same time as the music and expressly for the music. In other words, it does not lay claim to any independent literary merit. And, in spite of its surreal appearance, it proclaims theological truths using terms borrowed, in all humility, from the Holy Scriptures. The principal idea is that of the Divine Presence, with each section dedicated to a different kind of presence. The first section, ‘Antienne de la Conversation Intérieure’ (Antiphon of the Interior Conversation) is dedicated to the God who is present within us; the second section, ‘Sequence du Verbe,’ ‘Cantique Divin’ (Sequence of the Word, Divine Song) is dedicated to the God who is present in Himself; and the third section, ‘Psalmodie de l’ubiquité par Amour’ (Psalmody of the Ubiquity of Love) is inscribed to the God who is present in all things. These inexpressible ideas are not expressed but remain of the order of a dazzling display of color.

Messiaen was also famous as an ornithologist and his musical studies of birdsong — he would rapidly note down the songs as he heard them in the natural world — are evidence of another attempt at fusing the natural beauty of pure music with the composed creations of humankind. Like most mystics he was searching beyond the rational scientific world of the twentieth century towards something more profound and esoteric.

Messiaen said in an interview with Bernard Gavoty that he desired to create a music that touches all things without ceasing to touch God. The new sonorities of Trois Petites Liturgies, a work of ritual rather than drama, were devised to achieve this. he said that, One thing alone is important to me; to rejoin the eternal durations and the resonances of the above and beyond, to apprehend that inaudible which is above actual music… Naturally, I shall never achieve this… And yet with Petites Liturgies De La Présence Divine the composer moved towards reconciling the sacred energy of religious song with a transcendent avant-garde sensibility.

ZIMBARIA

Live

(Planet Music Studios, 2004)

Review by DAVID KEREKES

Smarrimento • Sciuparieddru • Pizzicarella • Lu rusciu de lu mare • Pizzica de focu • Aria caddrhipulina • De sira • Stornelli • Kalinifta • Sale

I had not stepped foot in the mountain village of Montefalcione for more than twenty years when the imminent death of my mother precipitated my return in 2006. The village is in southern Italy, located in the province of Avellino in Campania, some 523 metres above sea level. In the last week of August, Montefalcione is host to a festa (party) devoted to its patron saint, Sant’Antonio di Padova, during which the unassuming streets are decked out with lights and musicians and inundated with visitors, no less a Diaspora returning to the place of their birth (among their number my mother).

I was quite prepared for the bitter fruit of such mitigating circumstances, of returning to the village after twenty years at the behest of a dying parent, but what I found in 2006 was something wholly unexpected.

Southern Italy is depicted in the history books as a cruel and amoral land overrun with brigands and devils. This preconceived image has moved on somewhat, but it will assist the reader to bear it in mind when I talk about Zimbaria. The territories of the south begin with Rome, perhaps Naples, and they stretch down to the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, becoming collectively the Mezzogiorno, which means midday sun, or, that blistering and rotten country. The geography of the south is harsher than that of the north, its economy poorer, and its culture occult and mysterious.

Nothing much had changed since I last visited Montefalcione. The pace of life had not picked up so that I could notice: Old people still observed the street from their chair at the door; Tony’s bar remained a fixture in the playing of Scopa and Briscola, the traditional card games; and men of the comune, the local council, still had a lot of things to shout about. The place quickly assumed the disquieting dream like quality I held for it in my thoughts, in no small part attributable to the folkloric stories of my mother and her childhood, in which family and Church are sacrosanct. In these stories the living often walk with the dead, and almost no division exists between real and unreal.

The soundtrack for the festa is the hymn of S. Antonio. This sober musical phrase plays on a loop from a speaker and serenades the statue of the saint as it travels through the village on the back of a truck. It ebbs and flows on the mountain and can be heard for miles, rallying funds for the procession of S. Antonio that takes place on the Sunday, when the statue will be carried through the streets (bedecked in a coat fashioned from the silver and gold trinkets and jewellery donated over the years). Fireworks are another key aspect of the festa. The breathtaking display of pyrotechnics that conclude the festa on Monday is anticipated each morning by thunderous practice charges, which rattle the wind and S. Antonio’s melancholic theme.

From what I could determine, the influx of tourists in 2006 was greater than the preceding years (and has increased exponentially since). The architects of these old streets, said one member of the comune, could never have expected it. Indeed not. They had more in mind peasants, the occasional latifondista, chickens and goats. with dusk, people begin to saunter down via Pieschi and via Roma, where gaudy bancarella have been erected selling tat, arriving at the piazza where the entertainments begin. This part of the village retains much of its antiquated flavour, and the entertainment in 2006 comments something of the fact with a medieval theme, including revellers in armour, a re-enactment of a scene from Romeo and Juliet, and lots of food and wine. On one small street are the antichi mestieri, examples of traditional work craft as demonstrated by old folk. The street is nameless but comes out beneath an archway that carries a fitting crest: Porte del Tempo (Gates of Time). A Tv crew has arrived and interviews one barrel maker behind a cigarette, documenting for posterity a former generation and