Body, breath, words (#1)

I'm in the process of finishing a short article that's taken a long time to write. As a topic for the article I chose to write about my experience engineering a collection of sounds for use on the flute. Most of the work I describe in the article took place in 2004, 2005 and 2006 while I was writing Ćáry. The piece is a bass flute solo written for Carin Levine and the piece is composed almost entirely of these sounds.

The sounds I engineered at the time were sounds of the vocal apparatus — sounds you make with the throat, the tongue, the hard and soft palate, the ridge of the gums, the lips and so on. (These sounds might stand in contrast to, for example, those you make by tapping, stroking or rubbing the instrument with a feather, a pencil or a wooden rod, sounds that might be inherently percussive and that are, for a number of reasons, marshaled into service on the piano and the strings much more frequently than with the winds.) Even though a good many of these sounds that I was working with at the time of the piece are extremely close to many of the sounds important in the production of speech, I hesitate to use the word 'phonetic' to describe them, probably because the word would seem to invoke a whole systematic and analytic manner of thought that was absent from the way I was working on the piece as a whole.

The sounds are still with me. I draw a greater or lesser number of them into service depending on the needs of whatever piece I'm currently working. Mon Seul Désir binds the four instruments in the quartet permanently together to create a series of different color areas that are everywhere composite — that are everywhere the result of a working-together of the instruments, rather than a standing-alone of the instruments — thus calling for far fewer of these sounds; on the other hand, Lidércfény works in an intensely horizontal way with each of the instruments in the trio shining separately, thereby allowing for or even demanding a greater number of these sounds.

A very specific set of sensations internal to the body arose when I was working on those sounds. And because those same sensations continue to appear each time I further develop the sounds and the music in which the sounds are deployed, it is precisely these sensations that form the basis of the chapter I'm now finishing up. Writing about the felt sensation of the body — what parts of the body are active in the production of sound, what parts of the body resonate in sympathy in the production of sound, how the body relates to the felt and heard perception of sound, and so on — has turned out to be surprisingly rewarding, surprisingly difficult and surprisingly poetic. Words come only very slowly when fishing around for a description of what happens in motion through time. And a kind of composite sensation of color and touch would seem to be always just around the corner.

An example.

Consider body of the flutist and the instrument together in motion. Arms raised, flute upright and turned in, mouthpiece resting against the lower lip, muscles of the face alternately drawn tight or left slack. Breath passes up out of the lungs, through the throat, over the length of the tongue, past the hard palate, past the alveolar ridge, past the gums. Lips are engaged and spread. Breath spills forward from the mouth and rushes over and into the instrument itself. Tendons tense and tendons release as fingers work in coordination with silvered keys and with the mechanism in which the keys are set. Shoulders move forward towards the center of a phrase and then draw imperceptibly back, in response to which the chest cavity tightens and then opens again. The in-motion body of the flutist and the instrument are a special machine. In the operation of this machine the breath is transformed and acquires its color. The color is blue and the quality is that of a cold-flowing flame.

It's something of an effort to figure out how this sort of description and the images and felt sensation that generate it fit together with the more usual description of technical materials and so on that usually accompany words written post facto about the construction of a piece. And I suppose that it's somewhere in the middle of a process of fitting things together that I now find myself in finishing the article up.