A Bayati-like Quality

My search through an online list of American composers has been a rich trawl.  Representations if not the oeuvre of nearly all of these composers are immediately accessible on Spotify.  A few days back I stumbled upon the remarkable American composer of Armenian descent, Alan Hovhaness.   Originally I was admiring what I heard as something that I have only just learned to call a Bayati-like quality, and associated that with the Caucuses and their shifting boundaries of Christendom and Islam.  Come to realize that Mr. Hovhaness was voracious ethnomusicologist whose work was recorded on the Javanese gamelan and who wrote songs to Vishnu and to the Qin Dynasty, (presumably to its founder, who was the central all-consuming figure from that short-lived dynasty,) Mount Shasta and the saxophone.   

I’d read a book I’d enjoyed some ten years back:  “The Dawn of Indian Music in the West” and before you get to consider John Coltrane and George Harrison, the author Peter Levezzoli threads the earlier yarns of Yehudi Menuhin’s association with Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan.  I don’t remember coming across Hovhaness at the time.  Culling through there are many hours of music to consider.  “Floating World, Opus 209”, might suite ya.

For the second week in a row at 4:15AM I’ve thumbed through my phone atop the toilet, staring through gritty old contact lenses, just a few minutes before the warning alarm will begin to notice an email from a client colleague informing me that the call this week needs to be rescheduled.  A boon, undeniably.  But the earliest morning light on this, just a few days before the longest day of the year, is already announcing itself.  I should get up, I suppose.  I’ll have another call in ninety-minutes and though I’m tired, I don’t want to sleep.  And so, I go from the New York Times, to the Washington Post to the South China Morning post and doze off and return more than a few times.

Speaking to people in Beijing and outside of London I notice the she-fox spring up and dart after the squirrels.  My eyes were drawn to one squirrel who was not moving.  Surely you are asking for trouble my furry little friend, I thought as I looked him up and down.  Why aren’t you making a straight shot for the cedar tree, here she comes . . . with a squirrel in her mouth.  That explains why you aren’t in a rush to move. 

Paul Laurence Dunbar also writes a lot about the natural world around him: the meadowlark, the owl as well as the caged bird, which doesn’t sing, and it feels like he must have spent a lot of time outdoors, walking, by necessity.  Born to freed slaves in Ohio in 1872, Dunbar is as comfortable in a lyrical English style as he is the African American vernacular of the time.  Bicultural, seemingly, the two voices keep to the confines of their own poems though, segregated.  He died at a mere thirty-three years of age from the wretched killer of that time, tuberculosis, he fortunately left a great body of work behind which I am now, for the first time in my life familiarizing myself with. 

            When All is Done

            When all is done, and my last word is said,

            And ye who loved me murmur, “He is dead,”

            Let no one week, for fear that I should know,

            And sorrow too that ye should sorrow so.

            When all is done and in the oozing clay,

            Ye lay tis cast-off hull of mine away,

            Pray not for me, for, after long despair,

            The quiet of the grave will be prayer.

            For I have suffered loss and grievous pain,

            The hurts of hatred and world’s disdain

            And wounds do deep that love, well-tried and pure,

            Had not the pow’r to ease them or to cure.

            When all is done, say not my day is o’er,

            And that thro’ night I seek a dimmer shore:

            Say rather that my morn has just begun, -

            When all is done.

Tuesday, 06/16/20