by Carl Sagan
The recording was made by Robert MacLennan.
Chinese Ch’in
“Flowing Streams”
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“Flowing Streams” calls to mind the great Chinese landscape painters of the Sung Dynasty, who executed hand scroll paintings of rivers after preparing themselves by memorizing miles of those rivers. They felt that they could begin painting only after they knew the river so intimately that they could feel its contours, as Mark Twain in our time was to describe a river pilot’s knowledge. Only then could the painting hold in balance two equally mysterious forces—those that created the river (the Chinese geomancers called rivers “the veins of the Earth”) and those that produced the artist’s perceptions of it.
“Flowing Streams” originated as part of a longer piece, “Towering Mountains and Flowing Streams,” said to have been composed by Yü Po-ya between the eighth and fifth centuries B.C. Mountains and rivers are the object of prayers and religious rites still performed today, and they endure as symbols in Chinese art, poetry and philosophy—as in Lao Tsu, who writes that the ocean and river hold dominion over mountain streams because they lie beneath them, an idea of importance to Taoism and to Chinese thought in general. “Towering Mountains and Flowing Streams” was split into two compositions during the T’ang Dynasty. Each piece has since evolved into several regional variations. The one on the Voyager record comes from the Szechuan school.
Ch’in are often elegantly constructed, and it is customary before a recital to rest the instrument face down so that the audience may examine the inlays on its wooden back. Turned upright, it reveals seven silk strings set over a lacquered boxlike body. Mother-of-pearl inlays indicate positions for playing harmonics. The strings, tuned to a five-tone scale, are plucked with the right hand and stopped with the left. There are no frets. Great variety of tone is possible.
Ch’in notation lists over a hundred ways to stop the string with the fingers of the left hand; each has acquired poetic ornamentation accumulated over a hundred generations of teachers. One medium-slow vibrato known as “the fading sound of a temple bell” is annotated to remind the musician that his finger on the string should oscillate like “fallen blossoms floating downstream.” A particular three-fingered chord followed by a flourish is known as the “sound a fish makes when leaping out of the water.” A technique of stopping a string with the back of the first joint of the fourth finger is “a panther grasping something.” Harmonics are to be played as lightly as “dragonflies alighting on the water,” and a staccato plucking on a single string is called “cold ravens picking at the snow.”
The Chinese philosophy of solo performance emphasizes approaching the act of playing in the proper spirit. Chou Wen-chung of the Columbia School of the Arts, who recommended inclusion of “Flowing Streams” on the Voyager record, cites the Confucianist Record of Music to the effect that “The greatness in music lies not in perfection of artistry but in the attainment of te—a term which is often translated as ‘virtue’ or ‘spiritual power’ but should be understood as referring to ‘that by which things are what they are.’ In other words, the emphasis is on the single tones and their natural virtue or power by which these tones are what they are.” Chou suggests that Eastern and Western music derived from the same source, the West having since diverged toward polyphony, the East toward te.
“Flowing Streams” calls to mind the sight of a river, as “La Mer” suggests the sea, but its importance lies in territory beyond the representative. As with a river or any other sight in nature, we are always aware of something beyond what we perceive, something whose nature we can barely discern. I consider this awareness healthy medicine for those of us who are guilty of using words like “universe” as if we knew what we were talking about. The visions that open up within a piece like “Flowing Streams” prompts us to reflect upon their kin in our perception of nature, and that for me is what art is about. As the Chinese Record of Rites says, “The Chin … creates humility.”
Raga “Jaat Kahan Ho”
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One of my favorite transitions on the Voyager record comes when “Flowing Streams” ends and we are transported, quick as a curtsy, across the Himalayas to the north of India, and from the sound of one musical genius, Kuan Ping-hu, to another, Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar. Born in 1893 in the province of Goa, she was awarded the honorific title Surshri in 1938 by Rabindranath Tagore on behalf of the residents of Calcutta, and subsequently was presented with the same title by the president of India on behalf of the nation as a whole. The warm tone of her voice invites comparison with Valya Balkanska of Bulgaria, and her effortless three-octave range does not suffer from comparison with Edda Moser’s. These gifts she combines with deep resourcefulness in improvisation. It adds little to our appreciation of this raga, but may add something to our delight over Kesar Bai’s abilities, to note that she made this recording when past the age of seventy.
The word raga means “color,” “mood” or “passion,” and in the classical music of India, as in that of other societies, considerable thought has been devoted to how music can be preserved for posterity without losing its passion and immediacy. The Hindu approach has been to evolve a scale of twenty-two tones, of which five, six or seven main tones are selected for any given raga. The intervening tones are employed for improvisation or embellishment. The Hindu word for musical fundamentals means “ancestor,” while the microtones between are known as “successors” or “descendants.” The performing musician works within the precepts of his ancestors, as is appropriate for a dutiful son or daughter, but improvises and elaborates within that framework. In this way both past and present are honored.
The standard of performance is rendered more complicated by the fact that many of the forms of improvisation have taken on specific emotional and intellectual meanings in Indian culture and even within regional cultures; the sophisticated listener, acquainted with the significance of these variations, receives messages from the performer, to which the performer may add further comment.
Something of this sort occurs in music all over the world, as when an African raps a drum tattoo that reminds his fellows of the day the elephant was killed, or an aborigine sounds a set of flute notes associated with the spirit of his great-grandfather, or a Canadian pianist assails a romantic keyboard tradition by doubling his tempo. But for complexity of dialogue between performer and audience, and between tradition and innovation, no music surpasses that of India.
The raga heard on Voyager is formally designated for morning performance, but its popularity has led to its use as a closing number, a kind of encore, for concerts day or night. Sitar, drum and drone are employed, but the featured instrument is Kesar Bai’s voice. She sings in seven primary tones, with soaring excursions into secondary tones at almost every phrase. The drum accompaniment is in the dipachandi, a stately 14/4 rhythm that arouses the sense of timelessness valued in Hindu art. The words are those of a mother asking her child not to go to a festival because she is still too young. Kesar Bai sings them in a tone that indicates she thinks the child will go anyway.
Despite her obvious virtuosity, Kesar Bai sings with no apparent self-importance. The music sounds humble. Indian virtuosos presumably are as susceptible to egoism as anyone else, but their professional ideal is summed up in an old story about the Mogul emperor Akbar, who asked his famous court musician Tan Sen, “How much do you know of music?”
Tan Sen replied, “My knowledge is like a drop in a vast ocean of promise.”
Beethoven
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It was Beethoven’s fate to have been portrayed by his immediate successors in terms of his role as a founder of the Romantic movement. At least two Beethovens resulted, both prettified. One is Beethoven the defiant rebel, fighting with his music to tear down an unjust world as Joshua with his trumpet brought down Jericho. Of this Beethoven we are told such stories as the famous deathbed scene in which, hearing a thunderclap, he shakes his fist at the storm. The other romantic
Beethoven is a kind of woeful lap dog, forever being misunderstood and kicked out into the cold. Both Beethovens share the staginess with which posterity afflicts the great.
Whoever the real Beethoven may have been, he lived in a world rather closer to that of the “primitive” musicians who accompany him on Voyager than the romantic profiles suggest. Consider that Beethoven, an easygoing conductor, premiered the Fifth Symphony with an orchestra so poorly rehearsed that at one point he had to bring them to a halt, shout “Once again!” and start over. (Afterward he wrote blandly to his publishers, “The public showed its enjoyment of this.”) Or consider this story by the violinist Louis Spohr, an account of Beethoven conducting a new concerto from the pianoforte keyboard: “[He] forgot at the first tutti that he was a solo-player, and springing up, began to direct in his usual way. At the first sforzando he threw out his arms so wide asunder that he knocked both the lights off the piano upon the ground. The audience laughed, and Beethoven was so incensed at this disturbance that he made the orchestra cease playing and begin anew. Seyfried, fearing that a repetition of the accident would occur at the same passage, bade two boys of the chorus place themselves on either side of Beethoven, and hold the lights in their hands. One of the boys innocently approached nearer and was reading also in the notes of the piano part. When therefore the fatal sforzando came, he received from Beethoven’s outthrown right hand so smart a blow on the mouth, that the poor boy let fall the light from terror. The other boy, more cautious, had followed with anxious eyes every motion of Beethoven, and by stooping suddenly at the eventful moment he avoided the slap on the mouth. If the public were unable to restrain their laughter before, they could now much less, and broke into a regular bacchanalian roar.”
Beethoven loved puns and coarse humor. Bad music made him laugh out loud. He could be tender and warm with people he cared for, but in general he displayed atrocious manners. He was sarcastic and sardonic. He was clumsy. His sloppiness prompted housekeepers to quit, and when they had quit and dirty dishes and decaying food threatened to overwhelm him, he would pack up and move to another flat. He wore the same clothes until they fell apart or until friends took an interest and replaced them with new ones, whereupon he would emerge in sudden splendor without apparently noticing the difference. Goethe called him an “utterly untamed personality.”
His life was saturated with misfortune. His mother named him after a previous child who had died in infancy, and seems to have reminded him of that fact often enough that by his own testimony he regarded himself as a “false child.” He left school when he was eleven. At nineteen he was given financial responsibility for the family by his father, an alcoholic musician unable to find work. Afflicted by chronic dysentery and by deafness, he became convinced he would die before he reached thirty. He retired to the countryside and wrote his will.
“What a humiliation, when anyone standing beside me could hear at a distance a flute that I could not hear, or anyone heard the shepherds singing, and I could not distinguish a sound!” he wrote in a letter. “To become a philosopher in my twentieth-eighth year is not easy—for the artist, more difficult than for any other. 0 God! thou lookest down upon my misery: thou knowest that it is accompanied with love of my fellow-creatures and a disposition to do good! 0 men! when ye shall read this, think that ye have wronged me: and let the child of affliction take comfort on finding one like himself, who, in spite of all the impediments of nature, yet did all that lay in his power to obtain admittance into the rank of worthy artists and men.” At the peak of his creative powers, Beethoven could not hear a note; musicians in orchestras he conducted were instructed to ignore him, and guests at his home nodded politely when Beethoven played piano passages so softly that no sound emerged at all.
Beethoven told his friends that he longed for marriage and a family, but his nearest approach to that ideal was his tyrannical guardianship of his nephew Karl, who responded by failing in society, in school and even in suicide, when in 1826 he put a pistol to his head and pulled the trigger, wounding himself. Beethoven proposed marriage to various women, among them Magdalene Willmann, who later explained that she refused him “because he was so ugly and half crazy.” When marriage did seem attainable, he shied away. A fact sometimes overlooked about the famous letter to his “Immortal Beloved,” declaring his love and apologizing profusely for not having written sooner, is that Beethoven never mailed it.
Despite his misfortunes Beethoven found the courage to produce astounding work. This may be why we find him mysterious, and why each age, impatient with mystery, is anxious to view him by its own lights. Courage itself is mysterious. By virtue of its survival value, it has been bequeathed us by millions of our ancestors at the expense of millions of others more timid or more foolhardy. Whatever share is bequeathed each of us, we know it to be a quality we cannot create, but can hope to discover. This old story runs back through the history of our struggle to achieve dominance of our planet, and we are its subjects, not its authors. But we find it transcribed in the music of Beethoven. He composed it.
The word “compose” means to place things in their proper order, to fix them, and—further up the tree of etymology—to take a stand on behalf of the result. This, I think, is what Beethoven meant when, leaving a performance of a work by another artist, he remarked, “I must compose that.” He meant there was something there, but the composer had failed to assemble it, hold it up, stand by it. For Beethoven there was as much there as for any composer we know of—more tenderness and exuberance, more grief and loneliness, more rage and humor than we would will upon anyone—and he composed those emotions with grace, strength and ingenuity. His sketchbooks offer little to support the romantic notion of the composer who hears a bird call or the clang of a blacksmith’s forge and rushes home to spew out a symphony in a fit of inspiration. Instead, we find an artist whose imagination was harnessed by a tenacious intellect. Themes such as the opening bars of the first movement of the Fifth Symphony, which seems spontaneous as a cry of pain, are revealed in the sketchbooks to have been refined laboriously from earlier ideas. However “crazy” Beethoven may have been as a man, as an artist he was balanced.
Nor did Beethoven, however rebellious, develop independently of his times. He grew up in a musical stew that had been cooking for generations. He studied under Haydn and possibly Mozart, and learned fugal structure by poring over The Well-Tempered Clavier. His music arose from a musical society. Vienna, where he lived and died, had been a settlement since early paleolithic times. Its inhabitants had included Celtic tree worshipers, Roman invaders, German tribespeople, Christian crusaders, migrants from the Balkans, Slavs, Franks—and all these people brought music. Of the rules and principles by which Beethoven learned to write music, Sir George Grove reminds us that “they are no dicta or fiat of any single autocrat, which can be set at naught by a genius greater than that of him who ordained them. They are the gradual results of the long progress of music, from the rudest of volks-lieder, from the earliest compositions of Josquin des Pres and Palestrina—gradually developing and asserting themselves as music increased in freedom and as new occasions arose, as instruments took the place of voices, as music strayed outside the church and allied itself to the world; but as absolute and rigorous and imperative as the laws which governed the production of an oak or an elm, and permits such infinite variety of appearance in their splendor and beautiful forms.”
Symphony No. 5 in C minor, First Movement
Schoolchildren sing the theme of the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth, the Allies used it in propaganda broadcasts during the Second World War, and it has been made into a best-selling pop record. But its familiarity cannot be expected to trouble the extraterrestrial listeners for whom the Voyager record was intended, and it doesn’t much bother us here on Earth either. It may be possible to drain the life out of a piece of Beethoven’s music by popularizing it, but no one yet has succeeded at that feat. The Fifth Symphony sounds at least as compelling to us today as it di
d to Beethoven’s contemporaries. It “has been the harbinger of the Beethoven religion,” writes Grove. “It introduced a new physiognomy into the world of music. It astonished, it puzzled, it even aroused laughter; but it could not be put down, and in time it subdued its listeners.…”
Beethoven wrote the Fifth while, as usual, immersed in personal tumult. He began it in 1805, was interrupted by his engagement to the Countess Theresa Brunswick—a happy interlude that produced the “Eroica” Symphony—then completed it in 1807-1808, after they had separated and broken off the engagement. Its first performance was the mitigated disaster that had Beethoven shouting, “Begin again!” A more successful second performance followed, and the Fifth soon received the acclaim it has enjoyed ever since. The composer Hector Berlioz was to say of the first movement that it went “both beyond and above anything which had been produced in instrumental music.” A dissenting voice was cast by Goethe, who, after having had the Fifth played for him by Felix Mendelssohn, said, “That causes no emotion, it’s only astonishing and grandiose,” but later complained that he was unable to keep the theme from running through his mind.
Beethoven himself seems to have been impressed by the theme, for he chose to reintroduce it, as a kind of echo, at the conclusion of the symphony—a highly unusual step that has been called unprecedented, though he may have borrowed it from Haydn’s Symphony No. 14. The English essayist and musician Sir Donald Francis Tovey described this reprise of the scherzo as a “memory,” and speculated, in a remarkable sentence, that Beethoven decided not to elaborate on the memory because “if you cannot recover the sensations you felt during an earthquake, it is not much use telling as your own experience things about it that you could not possibly have known at the time.”