Klarinet Archive - Posting 000130.txt from 2002/07
From: w7wright@-----.net (William Wright) Subj: [kl] It was.... Date: Mon, 8 Jul 2002 12:51:45 -0400
It was a dark and stormy night as Alexander Gudanorav looked up from his
monotone calligraphy and gazed reminiscently at the gnarled
altocontrabass clarinet in Gb that was made from a mandrake root hanging
on his wall just beside the Limbuagan death mask.
He remembered how the unusual instrument had come to hang on his wall 45
years ago when he had been exploring a forest in western Vermont and he
had climbed a hill --- known to the locals as Hangman's Hill --- to
chance upon a portly man on his knees caressing a horn of some sort ---
some people would have called it a soprano clarinet --- while a lanky
fellow perched a few dozen yards away in tree.
"Yes," Gudanorav sighed, "I remember it well. Strange it was that the
portly man was up in the tree and the skinny man was on his knees on the
ground. A person would've expected the opposite, don't you think?"
"Aawwwk", replied a mynah bird sitting on a music stand nearby. The
bird had that certain manner of self-importance that had, years ago,
earned him the name of Manny the Major Mynah, and his scratchy voice
did, indeed, make one think of a major augmented 9th chord with doubled
root and played in a minor key --- if such a thing can be imagined.
"Yes," Gudanorav mused, "the air and everything around it shimmered and
twisted as the portly man thrust a root, a mandrake root I believe it
was, into the flared end of a clarinet that he was holding --- although
why a person would be carrying a clarinet to the top of a hill in the
Vermont woods at midnight on the evening known as Walpurgisnacht is
beyond me. Perhaps it was a local custom? Hants and spooks and all
that sort of distorted New World nonsense that colonists claimed to have
brought over from the Old World, the true world? But I remember it
well, yes, I do. I certainly do.
"The root and the horn fused into a single thing as I watched, and the
earth swelled at his feet until the hole where the root had been was now
a mound covered by tangled damply profuse violet-blossomed vines with
orange leaves that glistened moistly in the light of the waxing gibbous
full moon.
"Then, since the height of the mound allowed the portly man to put his
lips to the instrument's mouthpiece while the other end of the
instrument extended several feet below his toes, the man played ---
slowly at first, but then gaining energy, the melody ranging with sweet
melancholy through 7 octaves --- and the shiver in the atmosphere
intensified until the border of Nothing was certain.
"Such a complete sound, it was. Much better than what issues from a
simple straight cylinder closed at one end.
"Yes, I remember it well," Gudonarov mused.
==========================
My best guess is that music became possible because of some anatomical
invention that just happens to facilitate interactions between other,
older functions --- for example between some of the brain that does
planning for paths in space and some of the parts involved with
language, or story-like memory systems. [...] It might explain why
hearing certain kinds of sounds might come to give you the feeling that
you understood something, or give you the experience of being in some
other place.
---Marvin Minsky
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