A Good Listen

Carried out a bit of an experiment in the early hours of yesterday, related to a sort of new way of listening to music. It was just after the Dawn Prayer, for which I'd woken early. I found myself wide awake, but intended to go back to bed, except that my bed was actually just a mattress on the floor. Noi was sleeping on the actual bed, but I've avoided that particular bed in Melaka since January when I had severe back problems which I thought might have been the result of prolonged lying on the very soft and yielding mattress on it. Next to where I was sleeping was my trusty iPod, on which I'd been listening appreciatively to Ghosts, a very fine mid-career album by The Strawbs.

It suddenly seemed a good idea to put on a very different kind of music. I've enjoyed listening to Jonathan Harvey's somewhat avante garde Bhakti before, but never felt all that familiar or even entirely comfortable with its demands, never really felt equal to its challenges. So I lay down and in the utter quiet of the not-quite-morning surrendered to its spell (using the ear-buds, so as not to disturb the Missus.) And found myself enchanted, completely at one with a sound world that had seemed a bit beyond my capacities on my last listen.

I suppose I'd half-expected that I'd be lulled asleep by the piece before I began to listen, but I found myself hyper-aware. Every segment seemed to me somehow urgently necessary, yet there was no sense at all of my understanding Harvey's work. He didn't repeat anything that I could grasp in the full span of the piece, yet it felt unified. I didn't feel anything in the way of an emotional reaction, except a sort of rapt pleasure at the beauty of it all, even at its most discordant.

It all felt vaguely meditative, in its way, though I wonder how much my awareness of Harvey's interest in Buddhist modes of thought made me think-feel like that. Really there wasn't much thought involved, that would have got in the way. Occasionally I seemed to search for words to capture what was happening (I suppose I was contemplating writing this entry, if I got as far as contemplation) but the words quickly fell away: gorgeous, rapture, sculptural... no, nothing worked, or came close.

Nor does this.