Do you know someone who could benefit from reading this writing? When you subscribe yourself and at least one other person in a group subscription, you receive this offer:Of Flightless Doves is reader supported and yearns for expansion. Thank you for your attention.The Lone Voice Singing the Dirge in the Open Field Should Be Majesty Enough.A personal essay regarding elegy and effect.
Probably my first vivid memories of hearing poetry are of hearing William Shakespeare’s words recreated by actors performing at The Old Globe Theater in San Diego, California. At the time I was probably three or four years old and my Mother was teaching English at University of San Diego, San Diego State University, and Point Loma Nazarene University simultaneously. She would take her classes on field trips to the theater and I would accompany her. I would usually “fall asleep” during intermission. It was certainly a lucid, porous, sleep that I remember because while my eyes were not fixed on the actions of the stage—they were nestled in her arm—I was calibrating and dreaming with words heard. I remember my Mother’s lullabies vividly, too. These are remembered as a kind of poetry. “Dream A Little Dream of Me,” she would sing. I remember being beside my Grandmother Valerie—her heart and spirit suffused with kindness—as she lulled me to sleep while reading me poems for up to an hour. She read poems deliciously and the insatiable pace of my mind seemed temporarily consoled. I remember absorbing her cadence as I began to dream. The first story that I remember writing was about a black mote that grew on a child’s hand. The mote became his hand, I think became through disintegration. I was nine or ten years old. No, I don’t think I had seen Macbeth or Pirates of the Caribbean II yet. I wrote this short story in a linoleum floored basement without heating on a day during Winter near Seattle, I remember. I think I had been reading lots of Poe. Outside of writing poems when assigned to in class, I don’t remember being particularly compelled to write poetry until I was 16. The first poem I remember writing which I acknowledged as a decent poem was an elegy I wrote for my Grandfather Leland’s funeral called “Evening Primrose.” It was set on a table with ceremonial memorabilia such as photographs at the opposite end of the sanctuary from the altar at the church where the public service was held. In high school I was writing short stories and often avoiding the assigned readings of English classes, though I did love literature and many of the books that were assigned. I read few novels at that time. If I did, I would mostly read Steinbeck. I gravitated toward reading short stories and poetry and was engrossed by theater and music. I always felt as though I could spend three hours rereading one sentence if it was a delicacy. This meant that I was often behind the pace of English class assignments that involved blowing through chapters in a night. Though I had been composing music throughout high school, I began to devote energy toward writing lyrics for songs during the latter two years of high school. Perhaps I was grieving something else beyond a literal death, perhaps grieving the transition into a kind of adulthood and the despair that can possibly come with such an unveiling. Or perhaps my interests were just expanding. Before I graduated high school, I had composed an album which later was condensed into a nine-track album called To Gallery a Cloud Ground, which I released in 2019, just shy of two years after I graduated from high school. I attended Bennington College in Southwestern Vermont the Summer after I graduated high school. During my Freshman year I recorded To Gallery a Cloud Ground with local musicians at Akin Studios in Hoosick Falls, NY. I was very eager to release it. I remember feeling as the album was being released in 2019 that I had already surpassed the work; I had arrived at a new ideal which the album did not suffice to meet. However, it was almost certainly through the process of writing, recording, and producing that album which helped me realize a better premise for my composition. I devoted myself at that point to the premise that any song that I wrote must be sufficient in itself as a poem separate from the music. My premise has not changed too much in essence since then, only clarified. Grief somehow sets many things in motion for me, still. I felt as though my development is marked by death. That was evident when writing about the death of a young peer and friend who I had lost touch with, who was a bassist (see the formerly published Worm Moon). I felt as though this song was a turning point in my ability to live up to the standard which I set for myself. In this particular instance, it was not too difficult; grief conjured the conjugation of poetry and music with strange ease. Around the same time, when I asked a former peer and band-mate —a guitarist— how I could practice guitar more effectively, he said simply “do not practice with pedals.” I had sometimes practiced with pedals, and perhaps came to rely on them too much while playing electric guitar. I realized that following his advice exposed my flaws much more readily. I began to apply his advice directed toward guitar to my voice. I had become comfortable projecting vocally from years of performing in theaters. So I began to perform without using microphones. The experience of taking pedals out of my practice regiment and microphones out of some of my performances further clarified my already extant observation that so much of music today is just effect (and perhaps in some sense, it always is). By effect I mean there is some kind of tool that is manipulating the timbre of the primary instrument or composition. This could be reverb on a vocal track, or some kind of distortion. There is nothing wrong with production. It is exciting to have myriad options! However, some musicians rely mostly on toys of production to convey the principle meaning of their musical expressions. This observation inspires me to beg the question: how many songs stripped of their production would still move us? One could make a rebuttal and say “you can’t divorce the song from the production, so it is unfair” and in a way I think they are right but I also think that such a rebuttal would play well to my thesis. If a song in question was stripped of its production and played on piano and solo voice, how would it sound? We certainly could learn something useful about the song in this context. While contemplating along these terms, I decided to return to a place of utter vulnerability which for me seemed to naturally be a cappella vocal music. I made the decision to focus on solo a cappella voice for several years not so I would dogmatically oppose other instruments (I play bass, have played in bands since then, and compose orchestrations, even for songs I sing a cappella sometimes) but so that I wouldn’t have to use other instruments to communicate viscerally; the lone voice singing the dirge in the open field should be majesty enough. Both the poet and the musician acquire fundamental tools (words, syntax, pitches, rhythms) so they can communicate within their medium. There are many technological advances in music (pedals, amplifiers, Ableton, etc..) which can augment and clarify intention, and enable the musician to express in ways that even one hundred years ago may have been unimaginable. If these tools remain supportive to the musician’s practice, then they may augment the author’s musicianship more than they detract from it. However, these tools may be used to obscure the musician’s reliance upon them because he can’t technically communicate a musical idea without them. In other words, such augmentative tools obscure his deficiency as a craftsmen for he cannot manipulate his instrument (i.e. voice or saxophone) without becoming reliant on interventions from some ancillary tool. As I came to understand that we live in a world where we have the choice as musicians to intervene with tools that alter the sound of our primary instruments, and even tools that alter tools which alter the sound of our primary instruments, in one facet of my compositional practice I surrendered to the mode of effects entirely. I began to make mixes of ambient soundscapes in which emanating bodies and their unique timbres became the instruments themselves for conveying some kind of meaning: the project was totally electrical. This project is in stark juxtaposition to another facet of my practice which became almost entirely devoid of electric appendages. The sonic ingredients of these ambient soundscapes come entirely from field recordings which I harvested directly from sound sources, usually found while traveling or roving. To access such ambient soundscapes, such as A Necropolitic of Sound, please become a paying subscriber.I developed somatic and reactive tinnitus in 2019, too. I think that the constant perception of noise in my ear changed my aesthetics deeply. As I became concerned with the influence “effects” were having on my work, and paranoid by the “effect” of a sound which I perceived in my ear (the tinnitus), it became more deeply apparent to me that as a vocalist I wanted to refocus my attention on vocal production without a microphone. Singing with a microphone and singing without a microphone can be two very different phenomena, something that perhaps I will elaborate on in a future essay. I wanted to return to the effects of the body resonating acoustically in spaces that could be sufficient vessel for that resonance, which did not require amplification or mediated effects. This process of stripping back, as one may shed during grief, further clarified my intention as an artist. I learned on the day of my Senior recital—which was delivered a cappella in a stone courtyard—at Bennington College that another friend who I was out of touch with had died by suicide. I remembered an interaction we had over a messaging app, something he wrote to me after he listened to To Gallery a Cloud Ground. He said he liked the compositions but he wished that I had let myself go more in my vocal performance. He wished that I hadn’t withheld so much in my delivery of the songs that I had written. It was an incontestable observation. I had meditated on the comment when he made it, a few years back. But on the day of my recital, after learning of his death, remembering the comment moved me differently. He knew my vocal capabilities intimately; we sang alongside one another in theater and choir for several years. He knew that what I had actualized into the world via that album was really just a self-imposed limitation of my own potential. To be, what, satisfactory? He knew I played it safe (which in this context means weak) vocally. He wanted the capacity and the range that he was aware of in me to be expressed; I truly had diluted myself for specters during that first album release and I knew it. Perhaps that is why I withdrew from promoting that album. I knew his beautiful voice, too, and wish that I could be blessed to hear it again. During my Senior Recital, where I performed original poems I set to music, the thought that I had limited my own capabilities deliberately in the past to fit into a genre or to emulate other young popular male vocalists in the zeitgeist disturbed me. That my friend hadn't heard my best work (by this I mean even my best for that time in my life) hurt me. That rage of having been mediocre stuck with me through the performance. I should have chosen to fully commit to singing more in the tradition of the athletic singers from musical theater and opera whom I admired, I thought. And so that moment marked another resolution for me to not ever rush my work again. When my Grandmother Valerie died, it seemed as though a formalism had overwhelmed me. I remember hearing the news, writhing in the graveyard across the street from where I lived, and going back to my room to write a Sestina. Only a known form in that moment could seem to hold that species of despair. Days before her death, I was speaking with a friend about the usual and unsurprising difficulty I was having with getting my poems published and the even greater conundrum of finding journals which I would be proud to have my work featured in. I remember that I had played To Gallery a Cloud Ground for Valerie but I had not shared much of my music or poetry composed between 2018-2022 with her, which I seemed to regret. I was considering starting my own Substack poetry newsletter so that I would stop withholding what poems I had clung to, but apart of me thought that self-publishing in that manner seemed like a defeat. Sometimes I still do. In large part due to my friend’s encouragement to publish on Substack, I started “Of Flightless Doves” that summer. I was tired of withholding, yet again. Less than a year later my fellowship at Robinson Jeffers’s Tor House allowed me to excercise my conviction (that my lyrics should be sufficient in themselves as poems before being set to song) in a new way—by setting melodies to another poet’s lyrics. Adapting poems by Robinson Jeffers to song felt like a kind of elegy. In one sense his poems may have experienced a new life as I sung them. In one sense the verses may have died a bit by being bound to melody. What I sought to ascertain through the process of composing “Birth-Dues” — resonating in the stone walls which he built to constitute Tor House (for more info see “‘Birth-Dues’ Album” ) — was how my vocal flesh could truly grok being unaccompanied by any other instrument or effect besides the space I resonated in. Recently my other Grandmother Diane died and during her service I was formulating a poem in my head, or rather the scenario of her funeral presented itself to me in the form of a poem. It seems almost like a kind of illness to trawl one’s life for lines of verse, but perhaps I am being unfair. I did not summon Poiesis deliberately, did I? Perhaps there is a kind of beauty in exploiting moments of grief to be rendered to a realm of abstraction, since perhaps these realms of abstraction (besides the possessions the dead left behind) is all the living have now to connect with the plane that the dead we lament now inhabit. You’re currently a free subscriber to Of Flightless Doves. For access to all content and archives, upgrade your subscription.
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The Lone Voice Singing the Dirge in the Open Field Should Be Majesty Enough.
July 24, 2024
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