A friend sent me this piece by Rachmaninoff a while back and and I can’t pry it away from my skull. It has been sitting in whatever cortex is responsible for holding onto things until they are exercised and let go. When I first listened to it I was in the car driving to have dinner. The sonic architecture of what I was hearing was too amazing to be realized.
If this musical piece was a building: It was broad and tall, with smooth sides, but only three in total. As it rose it came to a point at the top, to as to make a slight curve the last third of the building. The walls were covered in windows that were simple yet somehow deeply profound in their design. The complexity of the structure when up-close was eclipsed only by its simplicity when viewed from afar. The closer you look at the building, the more layers became visible. The beauty, but also the frightening and bold aspects. These aspects were small and when you looked close enough they were everywhere. They seemed to menace the more subtle and smoother qualities of the structure. To provoke in some way.
(An aside: Have you ever heard of a phenomenon which some people have in their minds called “synesthesia”? Look it up. Basically some people "see" colors when they hear music. I have had this ever since I can remember. I “see” these sounds in my head, bright sounds being a bright violet or yellow, sometimes green and blues. Darker sounds signify a darker color, deep crimson reds and blues of the oceans, mixed with blacks and charcoal greys. Currently I hear a violin solo, and it seems “blue”, and now added to it in the background an oboe, which has a chirping “green” quality to it.)
Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash
The most amazing thing of this piece of music is to think that it was created by a human, not by a force of nature. It can be compared to the Grand Canyon, or the gorgeous and brutal views of the Andes mountains, or the shores of some lightly inhabited island in the Mediterranean. But those things are of the natural world, created by movement and time and space. Tectonic movement and whatnot, the shifting of earth.
But this piece of music isn’t the product of natural order. It was willed into existence by a fucking man.
It started as a thought. Intangible. A spark, a gas leak. A tiny wisp of cool wind. It came long ago from the faint flutter of the wings of a moth. Or a million moths. Then this idea in the mind travelled in the physical body, somehow becoming movement. Muscle and bone and breath and blood. The energy from the movement transferred to the knowledge of how to write musical notation. The idea itself, along with the formal knowledge of musical notation produced a score, written on paper. The paper was then shared with others like a plague, and they in turn were charged with adding their skills and their emotions on an individual instrument to deciphering this code, and turning it into a measurable sonic sound. This single instrument along with hundreds of some of the same, mostly other instruments, in unison, conducted by another brain, another body. All together the musical piece becomes a living, breathing thing. It feels. It provokes. It challenges. It awes and flatters. It makes you feel a sublime sadness. It inspires. Why does it have a hypnotic quality? Where does it come from? Why does it have this power over us?
I don’t know, but I love it.
Hi Tyler. Your title triggered me to read : ) again a wonderful blog. The 'Toteninsel' is one of my favorite works by Rachmaninov, but has been many years since I listened to it, thank you. It is super how you painted a different image when thinking about the piece; in my head i stick to the image that inspired it, though I mostly hear the water around it. The French composer Messiaen is very well known for his synesthesia, did you know this? You may like his Turangalila Symphony. Thanks again I look forward to the next email! Jasper