Author Archives: d.perry
“Perhaps he has heard a warning of someone’s death,
a strange noise, a shriek on the roof.
Perhaps a man has passed him in the open road
and disappeared suddenly, leaving no tracks…
Always there is some souvenir of the spirit-world
Bite the head off the first butterfly you see,
and you will get a new dress.
Take seven hairs from a blood snake,
seven scales from a rattlesnake,
seven bits of feathers from an owl –
boil for seven minutes over a hot fire
in the first rainwater caught in April.
Still,
there it is.”
“The Enforcement of Mosaic Law
To Be Square with the Sun at Noon, STAND STILL and Consider the Wonderous Work of God
The center of attention in a Calvinist meetinghouse was the pulpit from which the minister preached. New England historian Alice Morse Earle remembered that “the pulpit of one old unpainted church retained until the middle of this [nineteenth] century, as its sole decoration, an enormous, carefully painted, staring eye, a terrible and suggestive illustration to youthful wrong-doers of the great all-seeing eye of God.”
Outside, the walls were rough unpainted clapboards. On them were nailed the bounty-heads of wolves with dark crimson bloodstains below. The doors were covered with tattered scraps of faded paper which told of intended marriages, provincial proclamations, sales of property, and sometimes rude insults in which one disgruntled townsman denounced another.
Inside, most meetinghouses had no ornaments except that terrible staring eye—no paint, no curtains, no plaster, no pictures, no lights—nothing to distract the congregation from the spoken word.
Frozen communion bread, frostbitten fingers, baptisms performed with chunks of ice and entire congregations with chattering teeth that sounded like a field of crickets.
Sometimes they dressed in rags and smeared streaks of dirt upon their faces to deepen their humiliation. Occasionally, they were compelled literally to crawl before the congregation.
The meetinghouses of New England were often set high on a commanding hilltop. Roxbury’s aged minister John Eliot was heard to say as he climbed meetinghouse hill on the arm of a townsman, “This is very like the way to heaven; ‘tis uphill.
This Ritual of Worship Became a Powerful Instrument
At the end of a New England service a psalm was sung, if singing is the word to describe the strange cacophony that rose from a Puritan congregation. Here again, the emphasis was on words rather than music. The psalm would be begun with a line by a member of the congregation. Then each individual “took the run of the tune” without common tempo, pitch or scale. One observer wrote in 1720, “ … everyone sang as best pleased himself.” Another described the effect as a “horrid medley of confused and disorderly noises.” Strangers were astounded by the noise, which carried miles across the quiet countryside. But New Englanders were deeply moved by this “rote singing” as it was called, and strenuously resisted efforts to improve it. The result was a major controversy in the eighteenth century between what was called “rote singing” and “note singing.”
Much later, Harriet Beecher Stowe remembered that “the rude and primitive singing in our old meeting house always excited me powerfully. It brought over me, like a presence, the sense of the infinite and the eternal, the yearning and the fear and the desire of the poor finite being, as if walking on air, with the final words of the psalm floating like an illuminated cloud around me.
Afterwards, how ghostly and supernatural the stillness of the whole house and village outside the meeting-house used to appear to me, how loudly the clock ticked and the flies buzzed down the window-pane, and how I listened in the breathless stillness to the distant wind, the solemn tones of the cattle in the field, and then to the monotone of the lamp burning, and then again to the closing echoes of that cold, distant wind.””
Goals:
“Her efforts ensured that, when she passed away in November, nearly half of the attendees to her memorial pedaled to the service.”
Please (for Willem Van Spronsen) (https://mediaweb.kirotv.com/document_dev/2019/07/15/Manifesto_15897725_ver1.0.pdf)
What follows is:
there’s wrong and there’s right.
One life –
the flow of commerce
our purpose here?
At your expense,
I go on?
Unshakable injustice
that is me here, clear.
The handmaiden of evil
should be more humane.
Me in these days of fascist hooligans.
Me in these days of highly profitable semantics.
Me in these days of endless yearning.
Me in the name of the state.
Love without a word.
Emma, if I can’t dance,
I don’t want to be
in your revolution,
head in the clouds dreamer,
believe in love, and redemption.
Please believe! We’re going to win,
joyfully. We should be reading.
No more jingo dreams to be fed –
here comes the airplane.
And so we falter and think.
Our dreams fight.
Who benefits? Let me say it again:
I think you are really that good.
As long as love is the foundation,
we are on the same side.
You make me richer.
And you, and you.
I glow by your side.
We are living invisible ascendant.
Pay attention!
Watch me survive and thrive
unabashedly, with open and full
cooperation from the world.
When I was a boy, my head was filled with stories.
I promised myself that I would not become one.
Until one day I said to myself,
“You don’t have to burn the fucker down,
but are you just going to stand by?”
Here’s to trying to make right.
Real freedom and our responsibility to each other.
This is a call to you and everything that you hold sacred.
I know you. I know that
in your hearts it’s time for you,
too, to stand. Pull away the cobwebs
from these bodies pretending to represent us.
I’m not going to fulfill my childhood promise to myself.
Here I am…
yet afraid to show my faces
for fear of the market’s greed.
Excerpt –
RAVEN CHACON: We were talking about the warble as a technique—can you say more about that?
TIMOTHY ARCHAMBAULT: On the technical side, the warble is a multiphonic oscillation. It’s basically a note that is sounded, and reverberates between the low tonic note and the high tonic note, meaning the octave. A typical vibrato vibrates between one note and the second note closest to it. In the Western methodology, the warble is going up to its octave, eight different chromatic tones higher, and back down, in rapid succession, which is quite fascinating. Some instruments, like clarinets, can do it. I think bassoons or other different woodwinds can do it in the classical genre. For me, it’s a spatial thing and I’ve always been attracted to it. A lot of tribes, like some of the Ojibwe and the Algonquins, used to soak their flutes in water. They thought it made the sound better, because they were mimicking the vocalization of throat rattling, and they called it the horizon, which the melody would float off of. I’m drawn to it—I love the mechanized sound of it. I love the machine aspects of an acoustic instrument. It’s a usually a piece of cedar or alderwood, depending upon what’s regionally specific to each tribe. Each had its own culture, musical history, and geographical resources that contribute to the making of the instrument. I’m still shocked to this day at some of the tones that can come out of it, especially when you think about how it’s just a piece of wood. I think if someone heard it and didn’t know that, they might think it was a machine. It’s about the rapid succession of breath, and pressure, and a threshold in the instrument that together starts off this rapid fluctuation of sound. You can’t change the speed so much once it starts—it stays pretty constant. And then, it’ll shut off. This is not something I invented at all; it was always there. You can hear it going back to old wax cylinder recordings from the early twentieth century or even the late nineteenth century. Not all tribes used this, but a lot did, from the Plains all the way up to the Ojibwe. The sound can mimic different types of bird calls. It could be used at a lake and the sound would ricochet off the water and carry over tonally as a signal for different types of war parties. It’s a crucial component of the flute that I know. I want to see how far I can go with structuring music around that, as the ancestors did, while also bringing in new techniques.
RC: Can you explain more about this horizon of melody—are you talking about actually reading the landscape to inspire a melody?
TA: Sometimes. For me, the warble’s the ground, or the horizon—that’s the edge. The warble has to be on the instrument’s lowest note; it can’t be created on any other note. I can make multiphonics on other holes of the instrument, but it’s always the lowest note that is the warble. That sound is the ground, in some sense. Symbolically, it’s the foundation that everything else floats above. If I were looking at the earth, or a silhouette of a mountain range, for instance, the warble will be the stone or the rock, and the light would be the melodies.
RC: That’s really beautiful. I’ve been using a similar idea in a lot of my pieces, where there’s a fundamental note and then the partial ones are like stars. I actually draw them like that, as little harmonic diamonds above a line.
TA: With a mountain, you can think of it in terms of time versus pitch: A mountain peaks at different intervals, which could be compared to the rate of the warble, or like how a higher frequency or a higher pitch eventually goes down. Your base melodies could be based upon the ground, and the other ones float off of it, not unlike these natural forms.