Klarinet Archive - Posting 000152.txt from 2001/03

From: Bilwright@-----.net (William Wright)
Subj: [kl] Singing bowls
Date: Tue, 6 Mar 2001 02:57:08 -0500

I should've explained more about the 'rkang-gling' horn, but it
caught me by surprise and I posted without thinking.

You may remember a comment (a couple of weeks ago) about bowls of
water that are played by rubbing sticks around the rims while changing
the water level in order to produce a melody. The CD arrived today,
and it is about early Tibetan monks who believed in spirit-worship and
demonology and magic, as opposed to the modern mainstream Tibetan
religion called 'Lamaism.'
So what I thought would be blissful and contemplative music with
chimes and singing bowls turned out to contain elements of a different
sort --- including the horn, the tone of which I don't think can be
duplicated on a modern woodwind.

Did you ever see the Robin Williams movie where Robin is a Far
Eastern mystic who exchanges two people's souls by rubbing his fingers
around a sacred bowl until it sings with exactly the correct frequency,
but he makes a mistake and he puts the wrong souls into the wrong
bodies? I had assumed that this plot was just a Hollywood invention,
but it appears that the film's plot was based (very loosely!) on this
Tibetan version of spirit-worship.

It's really sort of fascinating. Early music is associated with
religion in many (most?) cultures. We've discussed the derivation of
the western word "music" from the Muses, and its relationship to the
unconscious. Also the "duende" goblin who takes over the musician's
soul in flamenco music. In this CD, the 'singing' of one particular
bowl reaches a climactic intensity that is used to cleave a demon's
brain in half. Another singing bowl is the "sound of souls that have
fallen off the Wheel of Life and are clamoring to get back on."
According to the album liner, a certain wooden flute "is
practically the only instrument is Tibetan culture that does not have a
use in religious ritual" (as opposed to merely appearing in
performances of religious music).

Someone mentioned "throat singing" when we were discussing
difference tones. According to the album liner, this is called Bon-Po
chant. If it is done in the traditional manner, the stress of
separating the harmonic partials of a single tone into separate notes
--- the opposite of what happens in most forms of music --- damages the
vocal chords. "Lamas who were trained in its practise frequently
became mute after only a few years."

....well, it's not clarinet music, but it's an interesting
commentary on what music is, nonetheless. The tendency is to think of
music as an art form that has been adapted to many purposes, and because
religion has been around since the beginning, some of the earliest uses
for music were religious. But here's an example where music _is_ the
religion.

Cheers, and my apologies if my first message was macabre,

-Bill

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