Maybe then we need a more flexible approach to harmony. Couldn’t we take our cues from the overtone series itself? Building chords by stacking thirds is a geometric method. But if we’ve already parted ways with a geometric approach to scale building, we could do the same with our chords, our harmony.
It’s true that many of the more complex chords formed from pure scales turn out to be more dissonant than their equal temperament cousins. That can’t be ignored. But why think of just intonation, of “pure” tones, as entailing the avoidance of dissonance or the creation of beatlessness, rather than simply a fidelity to scales composed from intervals found in the overtone series—in nature, that is—whatever consonances, whatever dissonances, they might lead to?
Larent’s head was light now. He sat on a speaker cabinet and calmed himself a bit. How, too, to fuse all this with features of music that had no echo in the concert hall? Things like heavy amplification, inharmonic distortion, the full repertoire of electronic manipulation, the primitive rhythms of rock even. Glenn Branca had come closest, he thought, in the middle symphonies, three, four and five, deploying an army of guitars, twenty or thirty, most playing single sustained notes without distortion, right alongside violins. And all of it set to primal beats. Mostly it involved stepwise motion through the intervals of just-intoned scales, this miasma held together by percussion not far from punk rock.
Couldn’t heavier use of melody, more formal orchestration and harmonic structure, produce something less numbing, more agile? And could it even be set to words, not as Partch did, but in more vernacular forms—Dianogah, Slint, Boris, all the bands Moto was so deeply schooled in. Something that could escape the ghettos of art music, the concert hall. Something continuous with the decentered brutishness of the city and ripe for unintended consequences. Everything depended, though, on finding the right musical cohort.
■■■
Eight vintage analog synthesizers, bought on the cheap from Columbia’s Computer Music Center, which was set to scrap them, sat on a long table across from Larent. Here was his lab. As he surveyed the equipment Larent thought of Alvin Lucier’s famous experiments at Brandeis, back in the 1960s: the construction of feedback loops, recorded voices that descended into unintelligibility, overtaken by their own constituent frequencies, reinforced unevenly till they fell into a chasm of static.
And what about Steve Reich’s lab from that era? Larent seemed to remember hearing that it was really the mechanical defects of those tape loops, their incapacity to sustain any sort of constancy, that was at the core of the phase effects Reich was renowned for. More remarkable to him, though, was the idea of Reich spending much of the noisy sixties—maybe the last time society had seemed so malleable—painstakingly splicing tape loops in a soundproof lab. Yet he was never not political. It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out proved that. As a performer, Larent had spent most of his time out in the world. Somehow that hadn’t done much to clarify the nature of his engagement with it.
He switched the synths into oscillator mode, where they produced unnatural tones, simples, the equivalent of partials—single frequencies uncluttered with natural overtones.
He flipped the first of them on. It hummed and buzzed and then produced a disembodied C, akin to a flute in the higher registers. Above this, at a lower volume, he added the second harmonic, the octave. To these he added six more partials: the just fifth, another octave, the just third, and so on through the overtone series. This naturalized the C, incarnated it, forced it into the unsynthesized world.
He altered the amplitudes of the partials, pushing some of the faders up, others down, all in slow, continuous movements, waves, mutating the texture of the C. None corresponded exactly to real instruments, but all corresponded to possible ones. First the tone fluttered and roughened in the direction of a trombone. Another distribution of amplitudes turned it breathy and woody. Then the breathiness fell away and the tone sharpened into something like a violin. Finally he pulled the faders down, all but the first, and the glassy sheen of a fundamental defeating its overtones returned.
With enough oscillators to recreate ever-higher partials, and with enough time, the entire timbral range could be mapped. Every route through this terrain corresponded to a continuous manipulation of overtone amplitudes.
The materials for a performance, perhaps. Moto on drums. Electric strings, a guitar tracing a justly intoned horizontal line, low leading tones with enharmonics restored, all set against a simple vertical construction. Promising, yes, but it would take a very particular sort of guitarist to make it work.
He turned the oscillators back into synths. A middle C sounded from the first of them, an E a pure third up from the second, a pure fifth G from the next, and a Bb on the one after—the greater minor seventh (9:5). Between the third scale degree and the flattened seventh was an interval now slightly wide of a diminished fifth (64:45). So Larent dropped the seventh down by ear, through heavy beating, and arrived at the consonant dissonance of the lesser minor seventh (16:9). The diminished fifth took shape.
More corrections. The minor third from the G to the Bb was still wide, so he took the seventh down still further, the pitch slider drifting down the oscillator’s base, the tone wobbling quickly and then less quickly, settling into an even flatter version of the minor seventh (7:4). The lesser septimal tritone (7:5), the purest, most consonant type of diminished fifth, locked into place and the chord rang out, the overtones reinforcing each other, creating the effect of a distinct binding tone.
Larent sat back down, away from the oscillators, and let the chord draw him in, the harmonic seventh: the barbershop chord, so called for its a cappella uses. He imagined the Crip walkers then, asphalt dancers with picks buried in lightless hair, isolating this constellation, the background hum of another world, together, a dozen of them in that circle. All the while, their immaculate sneakers kept gliding across the pavement, and the men kept whirring about the circle, their motion counter-pointed only by that peculiar chord they would hold until their lungs were raw.
15
The spotted slate tie in woven silk, cross-knotted between the spread collar of a bespoke oxford; the single-button, summer-weight Huntsman, cut long, in gunmetal blue; the flannel trousers, chocolate, unpleated and uncuffed; and the whiskey brogues, one dangling—Kames’s legs were crossed—its sole scraped down to an ashen canvas speckled black and tan.
He clutched the papers with both hands: a few draft essays, a letter of introduction from Hade, a vita. Thirty or forty sheets in all. The high-armed chair, lacquered maple wrapped in blue leather, softly whined as Kames shifted forward and, studying the CV, returned a curl of hair to the place behind his ear.
“Intellectual history,” he said.
“Well, more history of ideas, I think,” Stagg began. “Told, it’s true, through the history of Anglo-American philosophy. Basically, the evolution of modern moral thought, political thought, alongside ideas about the mind—action, personal identity, consciousness—within the analytic tradition, from the mid-nineteenth century on. Which means Mill through Sidgwick and Moore, down to Williams and Parfit. And then for the mind, Brentano, Frege, Russell and Ryle, through to Quine, Austin, Davidson, Dummett, and McDowell.”
Stagg waited for Kames to speak, but the director kept his head turned away from him, apparently in concentration.
“And then there’s some discussion,” Stagg continued, “though it’s not really enough, of how this all relates to wider ideas of morals and minds in Britain and America, the ethical sensibilities of the culture, its sense of itself as a political body and as a collection of individuals. But that was more of an afterthought. Future work, I think.”
Kames turned back to Stagg slowly. “But is there any gesture toward more classically continental thinkers?” he asked. “I’m thinking first of Freud, but also, politically, of Habermas, Strauss… Schmitt even.”
“To a degree. Only if they mark the philosophical tradition I’m working on. Usually the influen
ce, for the continental thinkers, runs through the general culture, whatever it soaks up, and then back to analytic philosophy. So, Freud. Unignorable stuff, not necessarily because it has intellectual credibility—I’m not sure it does at this point—but because it became common sense, a feature of the culture, to be explained like any other. Even its mistakes need an explanation. Nietzsche, the same thing.
“But Schmitt, say, or Althusser, not really,” Stagg said. “They haven’t been absorbed by common sense, not so deeply, not yet, anyway, so they’ve never had to be dealt with by the other tradition. Even if they might have a lot more going for them, intellectually speaking, than Freud. I don’t know. I do have some material on Schopenhauer and Hegel, and also Foucault, since they helped form the ideas I’m looking at, negatively at least.”
“It’s been submitted, I take it,” Kames said. “The dissertation.”
“I’ve had my viva, actually, though I haven’t gotten the official results yet. There’ll be the usual corrections, I’m sure, the examiners always ask for some, but I assume I’m basically done. It went well.”
“Good. You know, your supervisor, James Hade, is an old friend of mine,” he said. “I hadn’t talked to him in years, until your application came in. He thinks well of you, all in all.” Kames smiled. “Anyway, we don’t always see eye to eye. He’s a very good teacher, though.” The next words came haltingly from his mouth: “So, this proposal. Imperial history. The first thought—actually, the first thought I had, I have to say, is what’s this got to do with philosophy?”
“Not very much, really. But then, philosophy is never very far away from anything, so—”
“But how would you bring your learning to bear?”
“There’s a history of ideas in play. Just in a different way.”
Kames ran his thumb up the edge of the papers. “Not much discussion of intellectuals, or ideas as such, though. It’s not very clear, anyway, from what you’ve given me. These drafts.” Kames set the papers on the table at his side, beneath a darkened lamp.
“There is some of that, actually. I can show that to you soon. But it’s about the intellectuals of another culture, the monks, their methods, their ideas of history and interpretation. As far as the West, though, that’s true.
“But that’s what I think is interesting,” Stagg continued. “The intellectual history here works in another way. It’s a break with the classical sort, which is closer to history of philosophy, but with a wider range of thinkers. The ideas I’m interested in tracing here, and they’re mostly political and moral, they were first formed not just, or even mostly, by intellectuals, but by explorers, traders, soldiers. Marco Polo is the obvious example. Their impressions are like ideas in embryo.
“The European sources I’m drawing on most heavily are from a Dutch soldier and two English traders, their journals and letters and, in the case of one, his published chronicle. Mostly I’m trying to see how ideas can develop in a totally concrete way, not as some broad current in a culture, but down through the generations of a single family.”
“Yes, and of some political and intellectual influence. Your family.”
“Well, the pieces would also form part of my genealogy. Literally. But given the specifics of this family, I think the genealogy doubles as a history of ideas. And that would be the interest.”
Kames riffled through the pages and found the brass marker he’d laid. “Carl Rutland Stagg.”
“My mother’s side.”
“And Haas, the warrior.”
“On the other side. A slightly less direct relation, but yes. The Dutch-German part. My father’s family.”
“And how far back are you planning to go with all this?”
“To the time of Rutland’s stranding in Sri Lanka, 1660. But with some mentions of Rutland’s grandfather. And Haas’s. So maybe 1600.”
“The civil war in England too, then, or do you consider that distinct? Perhaps the Rutland role in it.”
“Cavaliers, defeated in the end. That’s about it for their role, I think.”
“That was the pejorative, for a Royalist. Cavalier.”
“Right. But it doesn’t strike me that way now, not so simply.”
Kames looked past Stagg to the windows behind him with eyes that seemed to have gone bluer. “Nor I. But most people still balk. The dictionary does.” He put one hand on the sides of the knot around his neck. “So, these lectures are personal.”
“That and something more.”
“Your motivations, I mean.”
“I do think you can recover something of yourself like this, through genealogy. Sure. But once you get started, blood’s never the end of it. The Buddhist monk, Darasa, there are things he’s doing with history that speak to me. He’s the main non-European source I’m using.”
Kames raised his other hand, put it at the back of the hourglass-shaped knot, and stretched it slightly. The weave of the silk caught the light. “Well I’m certainly intrigued by what you’ve said, and by what you’ve given me. Still, I can’t really say I grasp the meaning of these drafts. They read like scenes from a novel. Not essays, really. The richness of the details—”
“That’s the other break. But the details are actually all in the letters and journals. There are drawings as well, full of information.”
“You’ve supplemented them in some way, though.”
“By other texts of the time, yes. The clerical record, Knox’s chronicle, Dutch and Portuguese documents.”
“More than that. The perspective is so deeply integrated, and the language, it’s not the historian’s. Not the modern historian’s anyway. Maybe Herodotus, who was almost a novelist.”
“Well, there is something ancient going on, you’re right. Herodotus matters. He wrote first of all to be heard, to be experienced by a gathered audience. And these pieces are meant to be heard too. Thucydides, say, he wrote more to be read, studied. It’s very smart but also clinical, as he would have it. He wanted a certain sort of ‘scientific’ history.”
“So then how much of this is, well, reconstruction, imagination?”
“Well, the prose, the diction, the point of view are mine, however close I come to occupying their standpoints at times. It’s the binder, the frame. I haven’t tried to recreate the past, only represent it, in my terms. That’s all Herodotus. He is a master of form, I think. And it also means I haven’t attempted the kind of philosophical history Hegel wanted. I don’t know if that’s possible, to go native in the distant past.
“But I’ve followed Herodotus only so far. There’s something right in wanting a properly scientific history. Certainly we can’t go back now to the older, more poetic form. So, the details, I haven’t taken the liberties he did. They’re all strictly culled from the sources. So it’s not an imaginative act at all, if that’s what you mean by ‘reconstruction.’ I haven’t filled anything in. Whatever gaps there are in the sources are still there in the presentation. That’s why they’re fragments.”
“I noticed that.”
“That’s because I’ve stuck with the known facts, as far as they can be known, anyway. I’ve looked for convergences, checked one voice, one account, against another. Any details that ended up in dispute I’ve left out or signaled. But for a lot of the material—most of the psychological details—there just aren’t multiple sources. The records are spotty.
“But unless I had a reason to suspect error or deceit, I’ve let them stand. If I’d stripped out every detail that couldn’t be corroborated, there’d be no texture left. And the texture isn’t really incidental, for me. It is the history. To thin it out in the name of some sort of definitive history would be a mistake, I think, when there are so few conclusive facts. It would reduce it all to this trivial nub of truth. I’d rather let some of the impurities remain.”
Kames stared into him. “I’m not asking you to change them. I’m trying to get a handle on what you’re doing. It doesn’t sound like you’re imagining things in the ordinary sense.
But there’s a kind of precariousness to it, don’t you think?”
“‘Precarious’ is just right. It’s history out on a limb, at least some of the time. But there is always a limb, at least. Nothing’s being included just because. For all the elements, and their selection and arrangement, narratively, there’s something in the documents that lends them support. That sounds impossible, given the level of detail, but that’s what’s so odd about the evidence, especially what I have from Rutland, and also from the monk. They’re so rich in sense details, internal and external, it’s made a scenic style possible—without having to imagine anything.
“The only imaginations at work here, if there are any, are the ones of the authors of the source documents. What it is, really, is a completely granular history. Around that, I’ve supplied some of the more general details about what we know of the time and place, and bits of analysis or explanation where it’s well supported.
“You see writers, sometimes historians, sometimes journalists, attempt this sort of thing with contemporaneous histories. This is history in the manner of Thucydides. But they can gather any amount of details on the subject they like. Everything still exists. But for a history of four hundred years ago, from a remote part of the world, where what we’ve got is mostly all we’ll ever get? Either you go the way Herodotus did, or you write a threadbare, schematic history. Or you get very lucky with your sources. And I’ve been lucky. Mostly by birth.”
For a moment Kames looked appeased. Then he leaned forward slightly, put his hands on his knees. “So what are you finding exactly? I see that you aren’t, in these pieces, much interested in explanation. But if you were to compose an accompanying commentary—you could do that later—what would you say, to begin, about the knots in the moral and political orders of the period?”
Square Wave Page 15