[…]
A song, when being sung and played,
acquires a body. It does this by taking over and briefly possessing existent
bodies: the body of the double bass standing vertical while it’s being
strummed, or the body of the harmonica cupped in a pair of hands hovering and
pecking like a bird before a mouth, or the torso of the drummer as he rolls.
Again and again the song takes over the body of the singer, and after a while
the body of the circle of listeners who, as they listen and gesture to the song,
are remembering and foreseeing.
A song, as distinct from the bodies it
takes over, is unfixed in time and place. A song narrates a past experience.
While it is being sung it fills the present. Stories do the same. But songs
have another dimension, which is uniquely theirs. A song fills the present,
while it hopes to reach a listening ear in some future somewhere. It leans
forward, farther and farther. Without the persistence of this hope, songs would
not exist. Songs lean forward.
The tempo, the beat, the loops, the
repetitions of a song offer a shelter from the flow of linear time — a
shelter in which future, present, and past can console, provoke, ironize, and
inspire one another.
Most songs being listened to around the
world at this moment are recordings, not live performances. This means that the
physical experience of sharing and coming together is less intense, but it is
still there in the heart of the exchange and communication taking place.
[…]
In every song there is distance. The song
is not distant, but distance is one of its ingredients, just as presence is an
ingredient of any graphic image. This has been true from the beginning of songs
and the beginning of images.
Distance separates or can be crossed in
order to bring about a coming-together. All songs are at least implicitly about
journeys.
[…]
Songs refer to aftermaths and returns,
welcomes and farewells. Or to put it another way: songs are sung to an absence.
Absence is what inspired them, and it’s what they address. At the same time
(and the phrase “at the same time” takes on a special meaning here), in the
sharing of the song the absence is also shared and so becomes less acute, less
solitary, less silent. And this “reduction” of the original absence during the
sharing of the singing, or even during the memory of the singing, is
collectively experienced as something triumphant — sometimes a mild
triumph, often a covert one.
“I could wrap myself,” Johnny Cash once said, “in the warm cocoon of a song and go
anywhere; I was invincible.”
Flamenco performers frequently talk about el duende. Duende is a quality, a resonance,
that makes a performance unforgettable. It occurs when a performer is
possessed, inhabited, by a force or compulsion coming from outside her or his
own self. Duende is a ghost from the
past. And it’s unforgettable because it visits the present in order to address
the future.
[…]
We have noted how a song borrows existent
physical bodies in order to acquire, while it’s being sung, a body of its own.
The borrowed body may be that of an instrument, a single player, a group of
players, a bunch of listeners. And the song shifts unpredictably from one
borrowed body to another. What Antonello’s painting can remind us of is that in
each case the song settles inside the body it borrows. It finds its place in
the body’s guts — in the head of a drum, in the belly of a violin, in the
torso or loins of a singer and listener.
The essence of songs is neither vocal nor
cerebral but organic. We follow songs in order to be enclosed. We find ourselves
inside a message. And this is why what songs offer is different from what is
offered by any other message or form of exchange. The unsung, impersonal world
remains outside, on the other surface of a placenta. All songs, even when their
content or rendering is strongly masculine, operate maternally.
The words of songs are different from the
words that make prose. In prose, words are independent agents; in songs, they
are first and foremost the intimate sounds of their mother tongue. They signify
what they signify, and at the same time they address or flow toward all the
words that exist in that language.
Songs are like rivers: each follows its
own course, yet all flow to the sea, from which everything came. The fact that
in many languages the place where a river enters the sea is called the river’s
mouth emphasizes the comparison. The waters that flow out of a river’s mouth
have come from an immense elsewhere. And something similar happens with what
comes out of the mouth of a song.
Much of what happens to us in life is
nameless because our vocabulary is too poor. Most stories get told out loud
because the storyteller hopes that the telling of the story can transform a
nameless event into a familiar or intimate one.
We tend to associate intimacy with closeness
and closeness with a certain sum of shared experiences. Yet in reality total
strangers, who will never say a single word to each other, can share an
intimacy — an intimacy contained in the exchange of a glance, a nod of the
head, a smile, a shrug of a shoulder. A closeness that lasts for minutes or for
the duration of a song that is being listened to together. An agreement about
life. An agreement without clauses. A conclusion spontaneously shared between
the untold stories gathered around the song.
[…]
It’s difficult today to express or sum up
in prose the experience of Being Alive and Becoming. Prose, as a form of
discourse, depends on a minimum of established continuities of meaning; prose
is an exchange with a surrounding circle of different points of view and
opinions, expressed in a shared and descriptive language. And such a shared
language no longer exists.
By contrast, songs can express the inner
experience of Being and Becoming at this moment — even when they are old
songs. Why? Because songs are self-contained and because songs put their arms
around historical time.
Songs put their arms around linear time
without being utopian.
[…]
In any utopian vision, happiness is
obligatory. This means that, in reality, it’s unobtainable. Within the logic of
utopias compassion is a weakness. Utopias despise the present. Utopias
substitute dogma for hope. Dogmas are engraved; whereas hopes flicker, by
contrast, like the flame of a candle.
Both candles and song often accompany
prayer. And prayer in most, if not all, religions, temples, and churches is
double-faced. It can endlessly reiterate dogma or it can articulate hope. And
which function it accomplishes doesn’t necessarily depend on the place or
circumstances where the prayer is being prayed. It depends on the stories of
those praying.
The way singers play with or defy the
linearity of time has something in common with what acrobats and jugglers do
with the force of gravity. […]
John Berger, ”Some Notes on Song” (Harper's Magazine, February 2015)
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