SONORITIES OF STILLNESS
Some galactic anthems for you listening amazement and pleasure and some elegies for the fallen in America's many wars
This is the saddest Indepedence Day of my life for we have forsken everything it once stood for. So how do I cope other than with drunkenness?
There are regal realms within the realms of desolation and solitude once you become correlative to and coterminous with them. Inward is the only way to an outward that is also upward and free of fear. The cosmos itself must be your only escape from the partialness and isolateness of bifurcated consciousness. Are you brave and determined to merge with allness in aweness? Are you willing to leave daily finitude behind? Some will say I am signing up for a citizenry of dust. Maybe. Maybe not. All I know is that the reunion that is death can be experience in life. And I have pledge allegiance to that discovery, even if I fail in making it.
Today I present my first-ever medley of Fourth Dimensional misic for an otherwise ionconsolable Fourth of July. The Fourth Dimension can be celebrated everyday and made into a holy day. Admitteldy, much of my Fourth Dimension music is atonal. But atonality was my first means of transcendence. Here atonality is meant to simply be pantonal, and all-encompassing. Most of the music comes from the early 20th century when ears were far more open and friendly to chromaticism and giant steps beyond it.
See this as a listening adventure and invitation to spaces and places where I have spent much ofmy listening life. The fireworks here are softly glowing embers and bright sparkles of moonlight on a lake.
However, since this is a national patriotic holiday, I felt some music of a solemn nature also belonged here. These are mostly elegies that will have renewed resonance shortly. Although this isn’t supposed to be a day of mourning, it is now one for me and, I strongly suspect, many of you. Let mourning carry you to a new morning.
SWR Volkalennsemble Stuttgart, Morton Feldman’s “Chrstian Wolff in Cambridge,” composed 1963, 2007
Royal Conservatiorium, “Farben” (Colors, a/k/a “Summer Morning by A Lake”, the 3rd of Arnold Schoenberg’s “Five Pieces for Orchestra,” written 1909), 2014
JoAnn Falletta conducting the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Charles Thomlinson Griffes’ “The Lake at Evening,” composed 1905), 2002
Susan Narucki & Domald Berman, “The Light That Is Felt” by Charles Ives, written 1904), 2008 (The Victorian felt God as a preence that could be summoned closer and closer; this is the faith that guides Ives)
The Light That is Felt
by John Greenleaf Whittier
A tender child of summers three,
Seeking her little bed at night,
Paused on the dark stair timidly.
"Oh, mother! Take my hand," said she,
"And then the dark will all be light."
We older children grope our way
From dark behind to dark before;
And only when our hands we lay,
Dear Lord, in Thine, the night is day,
And there is darkness nevermore.
Reach downward to the sunless days
Wherein our guides are blind as we,
And faith is small and hope delays;
Take Thou the hands of prayer we raise,
And let us feel the light of Thee!
Jeannine Hirzel & New Music Ensemble Zurich, “Serenity” by Chalres Ives (written 1919) 2013
O, Sabbath Rest of Galilee!
[Excerpt from the poem “The Brewing of Soma”]
by John Greenleaf Whittier
O, Sabbath rest of Galilee!
O, calm of hills above,
Where Jesus knelt to share with Thee,
the silence of eternity
Interpreted by love.
Drop Thy still dews of quietness,
till all our strivings cease:
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
and let our ordered lives confess,
the beauty of thy peace.
Dennis Russell Davies coducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra, “The Alcotts,” from Henry Brant’s orchestration of Charles Ives’ “Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord, Mass., 1840-1860,”composed between 1909-1915 and orchestrated by Brant in 1996), 2007
Johnny Reinhard conducting the American Festival of Microtonal Music Orchestra, Lou Harrison’s “At The Tomb of Charles Ives,” composed 1963, 2023
Gerard Schwartz Brass Ensemble & The Gregg Smith Singers, Carl Ruggles’ “Exaltation,” composed 1958 on the death of his wife, 1981
Bernard Hermann, The Day the Earth Stood Still: “Arlington” and “Lincoln Memorial”, 1951
Geroge Szell conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra, William Grant Still’s “In Memoriam of the Colored Soldiers Who Died for Democracy,” composed 1943), 1945 broadcast
Leopold Stokowski, Aria from Lou Harrison’s Suite for Violin, Piano & Small Orchestra, composed and recorded 1951
Ulrich Krieger, Henry Cowell’s Air for Saxophone, composed 1963, 2016