The Scorch Of Scordatura

Elicia Silverstein performs a Biber passacaglia on a violin in what appears to be a most elegant church, white cross in the background, thought it was a subway at first, I heard what sounded like subway trains whining on the rails, that electric hum, but no, it must’ve been a tram, with the wires above. The sounds are faint and don’t intrude on the notes of the violin, in fact they lend an interesting contrast. Biber – a 17^th century Bohemian-Austrian composer - excelled in scordatura, an alternate tuning intended to facilitate playing in certain keys. Fiddle with the tuning so that it’s a bit off, a little different than normal tuning, and you can achieve more interesting timbres and unusual chords. This applies to writing, too. Little torques and twists here and there to make it all veer from the trodden and broaden into free untrammeled air. Of course if it’s just fullness of feeling you want you go to Air on a G String. Back to Bach. Bach used scordatura in his Fifth Cello Suite in C minor, which gave it a rather dark character, especially the sarabande, which speaks to the inner being, where calculation turns murky, like the prow of a boat cutting through the calm water of a hidden bay. All articulation is difficult, like the crafting of an efficient paddle. When difficulties are encountered, normal, automatic behavior becomes impossible. We need to draw our water from a deeper well. We need eccentricities. Primordial melodies. Unfettered energies. Phenomena that scorch the air, making visible the hidden forms of things. Mad precipitations. Enormous diffusions. Anomalies, idiosyncrasies, and the Hohle Fels Flute, the world’s oldest known musical instrument, made from the radius bone of a griffin vulture, 21.8 centimeters long with a diameter of 8 millimeters, two deep, V-shaped notches carved into one end – presumably where the musician blew – and perforated with five finger holes. The instrument is estimated to be some 35,000 years old. You have to wonder what melodies came out of that flute 35,000 years ago. What emotions, what longings, what passions and difficulties. What a vastly different world that must’ve been. But is our internal life that much different? Constants are constant, needs are needs. Those fundamental experiences of birth and death and sickness and youth and old age were in play, certainly, not to mention friendship, the joys of community, and the miseries of betrayal, the need for loyalty, the sadness of leaving a place you love. I envy them their simplicity of life, if such a life could be called simple, hunting and gathering, keeping warm, finding shelters, fighting, dancing, pleading. None of the current madness, though. Overly complicated technologies with obsolescence built in to feed the capitalist monster, now completely unfettered and out of control. It’s a contradictory impulse, this need for idiosyncrasy coupled with a need for the archaic, for the elemental. It’s contradictory to invoke madness while simultaneously decrying madness. But look where a strict observation of the rational has led us: pandemics and war. Climate change. Failed crops. Empty shelves. The world needs to be washed over with a healing soothing music, a great broad wave of it, gleaming and dreaming its wandering being over the fears and homicides, the fever to exist.