I was sitting and reading in my backyard last summer and happened to look up and see, through the window in my wife's office, a ceiling fan. Earlier in the year, one of the fan blades had broken off in rather dramatic fashion -- fortunately no one was hurt -- and so the fan had hung motionless since, awaiting a replacement wing. That afternoon, though, I saw it wheeling about at low speed, surprisingly wobblelessly; being a moderately warm day and my wife being a lover of fresh air, the windows were open and so she had decided to risk the fan's aid in keeping the breeze flowing through her space. After I got over my initial uneasiness from seeing an unbalanced fan running, I noticed that the blades cut across my view through the window with an interestingly odd meter: 1-2-3-4-()-1-2-3-4-()-1-2-3-4-(), etc. Even on low speed, the tempo set by this aeolian zeotrope was fairly high and, getting out my favorite metronome app, I timed it at about 178 bpm. Tapped out by hand, this created a compelling beat and I went right up to my studio and began composing what ultimately became this:
Monday, December 21, 2020
4:1 and 3:2
Friday, October 30, 2020
The Young Lions
It is a cityscape composed of brutalist polygons and spires, jungle vines, and oddly young asphalt. Sweeping curves abound in the architecture and the streets; the few straight lines intersect bends at acute angles and tangents. Fresh, neat sidewalks band city blocks in uniform gray. Blank glass panes hold back blackness behind street level storefronts and upper storey windows. White crosswalks and lane demarcations seem only months old, yet all feels empty and abandoned. Draperies of unidentifiable foliage make bunting that everywhere celebrates Nature’s apparent reclaiming of this hypermodern space.
This theme continues uninterrupted for blocks. Here and there, down an avenue or between buildings, small parks are revealed, with grasses and brush overgrown and trees clothed in the same vines decorating the otherwise naked brute castings of the city. Above, a bottomless blue-blue sky accented artfully with an occasional cumulus. No breeze; comfortably warm. An ideal day, but for the incongruity of the place.
Time passes like the endless theme-and-variation facades of concrete and glass -- then, a sound of movement. From around a far corner: a young man, bedraggled as through some extended physical abuse, attached via a strange, stretchy, starry, translucent cord to a young male lion with an especially scruffy mane. The man is obviously but futilely attempting to master the lordly cat, tugging agitatedly on its leash -- which appears to be of a piece with the lion’s collar and a loop firmly around the man’s wrist -- and variously castigating, cajoling, cursing, and crying at it. For its part, the lion responds to the man with no more care than it would were a stone at the end of the tie, sniffing about, ambling a bit, looking inquisitively this way or that, only now and then casting the mildest of interests in the direction of the gesticulating primate. Clearly, the young man believes the young lion owes him some due of respect; clearly the lion does not.
If the lion moves in the direction the man wishes him to go, it is coincidental, but that does not stop the man from expressing exasperated relief and reiterating, verbally and gesturally, his intended direction and strutting off thence -- only to be yanked comically off of his feet by a combination of the elastic leash and the imperturbability of his three hundred pound companion. If the man attempts to push or otherwise overpower the beast, he is mostly ignored. However, given enough persistence and enthusiasm, the man’s efforts may be rewarded with a gentle mauling; hence, the man’s tattered mein. Once his Panthera partner gives up this attention and moves on, the hominid has the option of either being dragged by the line at his wrist or pulling himself up and staggering alongside. Typically, it is only a few moments before, bloodied but unbroken, this wisest of species of men renews his entreaties for dominance.
This continues for quite some while.
At a certain point, a distant snuffling, shuffling, and soft growling is detected by the pair. Both stop their torturous tarantella and listen intently. Determining that the noise is coming closer, the two head perpendicular to its anticipated direction and conceal themselves around a corner. In a few moments, a pack of male lions comes into view, half a dozen or so individuals of mixed ages older than the one with the young man. As if a single but chaotic unit, they walk along a sidewalk bordering a park, with a wilded hedge on their left, sauntering confidently and closely, rubbing shoulders and haunches, and shifting position within the group as if in a slow, informal, but highly competitive race. They pass out of sight as they came.
The pack gone, the young man and his pawed partner come out of hiding and resume their queer pas de deux. As the day passes, this pattern repeats: the man and the cat interact, always to the man’s detriment, yet always at his insistence, interrupted only by the intermittent passing of some tightly-traveling half-pride of maned veldtian expats. Once, a younger member of a group is seen wearing the shredded remnant of a sparkling collar-and-leash identical to that binding the man-cat pair. No other living things, that aren’t green anyway, ever appear.
If the man’s and lion’s dynamic seems unsustainable, it is. At a certain afternoon moment on a particular street corner, maximally piqued by the lion’s indifference, the man throws himself at his fellow captive in a last ditch effort to bring the animal into his control, an effort that is, in fact, his last. The great cat concludes that this gnat must simply be swatted and, noting too that he feels a bit peckish, casually but messily at once rids himself of his annoyance and settles his stomach. Thus endeth the youth.
Having mostly decapitated the man as he crushed his windpipe (the simplest way to kill) and supped on his entrails (the easiest to access), the lion gets up to leave his meal and rapidly realizes that, of course, he is not yet quit of his burden and so spends a few crunchy moments gnawing the forearm off of the corpse. Once through the bone and gristle, the lion sits up and looks around, a forlorn hand still dangling, but no longer a bother. He sits facing away from the sun, gazing into the distance, sated, occasionally cleaning the blood from his paws and muzzle, Zen-like in his tranquility.
Eventually, the lion stands, lazily, and turns around. At this moment, he sees you. You have not been aware of yourself prior to meeting his eyes; you have been a bodiless observer, floating, dronelike, drifting in this experience curious but detached. At this moment, you have deep knowledge of your body, with arms and legs and a head, all made of meat. Live meat. Meat that you would very much like to keep alive. And the young, shabby-maned lion, standing passively, sees you and your meat.
He begins walking toward you. It’s strange how you can sense the early evening air, the post-afternoon cool coming on, and how the shadows seem unexpectedly high up the city’s vine-draped facades, as this adolescent carnivore, whom you’ve just watched amiably devour one of your species, ambles in your direction, eyes locked to yours, a still-cooling hand at the end of its tether trailing blood on the blacktop as he goes.
How do you react? Do you run? Do you think it through? Like, “Okay, he’s just eaten his fill, it seems unlikely that he’s coming to eat me, but do I want to test that hypothesis just now? Maybe I’m supposed to slip the leash onto my wrist and follow the lion, attempting to tame him until I annoy him enough to eat me? What the hell?” Prudently, you opt to bolt.
The lion, in your wake, stops in surprise at your flight and watches your rapidly shrinking silhouette disappear into a distant doorway. After several moments, hearing nothing, you peek timidly from around its edge and see the lion waiting, standing in the empty street, looking mildly bewildered. After a few moments, you both hear the familiar snuffle-shuffle-rumble of a pack of adult lions coming down a street behind the recently fed-and-freed feline. Suppressing your still-raging breath as best you can in order to avoid detection from the approaching pride, you cringe back into the doorway, but your new friend turns and looks in the group’s direction. After a moment’s pause, he walks toward the sound; as the pack comes into view, they spy him and stop and wait for him, then greet him with licks and head-butts when he meets them. One of the younger members picks up the still attached severed hand and, with a quick jerk, frees it from its band, sending the leash to jiggle briefly about like an epileptic tentacle, as he munches the body part snackily. The group walks on with its new addition, leaving the street empty again and your heart yet unquieted, as you wait, blind in the doorway, for silence to return.
However, it does not. Before time enough for the pack’s soft sounds of danger to fade, you hear in another direction a chuffing and pumping and grinding, as of an immense engine powering a monstrous machine across asphalt. You hide in your shallow city-cave as the mechanical mishmosh gets louder and closer, but your desire to see another human soon outmatches your fear of the departing lions and you poke an eye into view of the street: no maneaters in sight. Warily, you reveal more of yourself in order to see further, then step onto the sidewalk and begin watchfully walking in the direction of the sound.
From behind a building a few blocks up on the left emerges a sphere several storeys tall. Longitudinally striped in dirty red and white like some circus helium balloon, it gropingly jounces into view. However, it is not floating: it rides on a truck of heavy tires, partially obscured by its striped bloats. Into the intersection, the vast, Gilliamesque machine rumbles to the right and heads down your way. Startlingly, you abandon all heed and find yourself careening toward it, hollering for help and waving your arms in a frenzy. The balloon treads on slowly toward you, as yet indicating no awareness of your presence.
Racing up the street as if chased by lions, with the machine still unacknowledging of you or your need, you come to a stop several yards before it. Awed by this colossal, gaudy, banded-bubble-on-wheels, you stand slackjawed as it juggers toward you, wondering if you are about to be crushed. Then, abruptly, with a sharp venting of steam, it stops, the balloon wobbling ominously forward and back, and, with another steamy hiss, the balloon releases its gaseous contents and, supported by a towering circular-shower-curtain-like rack, parts to reveal a behemoth, red-painted, steampunk engine. Cartoonish mechanical arms leap out from nowhere, one of which sweeps you up and stands you on a flat spot on the front of the vehicle, while others fly about with mysterious tasks. A jointed spray-arm erupts from near the apex of the machine and deposits a foamy circumference on the pavement; somehow, you understand this to be lion repellent which, while effective, also dissipates quickly and benignly.
Amidst this Seussian flurry of activity, you notice a figure ricocheting about the giant apparatus: about five feet in height, shaped roughly like a squat tromba marina, with a pair of two-fingered tentacles for arms and a head like a Handycam, it is vaguely translucent and filled with star-like lights like the leash you saw between the young man and lion. As it caroms around, you realize that this being, whoever it is, is the root and power behind all you have seen. It acknowledges your presence only with a few passing glances, and makes no sound, but its movements are joyful, buoyant, efficient; you sense that you have become a part of some grand project. In any case, you seem to be at the mercy of this evidently advanced being and to have little choice but to wait and see if you can understand what is going on.
In a flash, you see an arm appear bearing a young male lion and another carrying a sparkly leash, while a third grabs you and places you back onto the street, along with the lion, just outside the fading foam ring, and the second slaps the leash onto both of you. As quickly as they materialized, the arms disappear and the starry being bounces out of sight; the hulking red machine begins chugging again, pivoting, reversing direction, and sweeping the slowly reinflating balloon back around itself, leaving you and your lion looking confusedly at each other and at the new umbilical joining you, in the midst of the macadam and the surrounding grays and greens of the vine-festooned concrete canyon.
As if placed in your mind as a parting missive, you -- and, presumably, the lion -- suddenly understand what is happening:
You are part of a child’s impassioned experiment to help lions and humans “get along.” There have been many iterations of this experiment before you. It is the child’s sincerest wish that you and this lion should succeed where other pairs have not. [You feel a deep, joy-filled, well-wish from the child-being you saw on the giant balloon machine.]
Thursday, October 8, 2020
Prayer Walk
The words "psalter," meaning a book of psalms, and "psaltery," which, in modern usage, is a kind of zither, both come from the same Greek root referring to a family of harp-like instruments. It is easy to imagine (although I don't know that this happened) the one coming to be associated with the other through medieval prayer rituals. Interestingly, the bowed psaltery, a 20th century invention, has a voice that harkens me to the sound of sacred psalms sung in ancient, reverberant church halls: the instrument feels inherently meditative to me.
After spending a fairly short time with it, I could clearly auralize the psaltery's strings in a choir together, surprisingly resonant and sustained, and, building on this inspiration, constructed a series of four-voice chords. Each is repeated once via the delay (no feedback) and from one chord to the next only one note changes at a time, creating -- hopefully -- a kind of wandering but even musical kinhin. Over this, I improvised an independent fifth voice, allowing my ear to move the bow where it wanted; I did some light editing of this melody, adding a few notes in spaces that seemed missing them, but I did my best to retain the sense of meditativeness.
Like the work with the bowed clock chime, this piece is mostly a first experimentation with and demonstration of the instrument, exploring its timbres for future inclusion in other works not necessarily based or focused on it. The more I play with it, the more I like its sound and am excited to continue on the path of discovery it blazes.
Saturday, September 19, 2020
Number Three
I finished my third instrument (second kit) this past week: a bowed psaltery.
I first learned that bowed psalteries were a thing while perusing the kit maker's site looking for something else and was immediately excited by its sound and, frankly, just the idea of it. It's completely different from any other bowed instrument I've played in several ways. First, the bow is the only (standard) interface with the instrument; it's not designed to be plucked (although, there's nothing really preventing you from doing so and I'm considering ways of incorporating plucking into playing it). As a type of psaltery, each pitch has its own string, so to play a tune, one bows different strings. It's a chromatic instrument, with the notes laid out like a piano keyboard: the strings corresponding to the white keys are on the right side and the blacks on the left. That means that the bow jumps around to different strings constantly and, depending on the music, quickly. Many folks play with two bows, enabling harmony, since the left hand has nothing to do otherwise (unless one is not using a stand and so must hold the instrument). All Western standard pitches between C4 and G6 are represented, but the strings are all steel and unmarked and so all look the same. The black dots on the right side just outside the pins notate C and F, but it is still confusing -- a little like playing piano with one finger and no knowledge of the keyboard. I've been able to get some interesting sounds out of it and even picked out "Sheebeg and Sheemore" and "Over the Rainbow," but I'm a long way off from mastering it. I'll continue to experiment with it and hope to be able to share some music made with it in the next few weeks.
About the bow: having spent my life handling viola (and violin and 'cello) bows, I was dubious about the design of this, expecting it to be a cheap, simple, and coarse version of the more elegant and, presumably, versatile and appropriate violin family bow. I was completely wrong. It is less sophisticated, but it turns out that it suits the bowed psaltery far better than a violin or viola bow could, for several reasons. First, it uses a thin floss of horsehair, rather than a wide, flat band; this is important because the space between pins where the bow engages the strings is not only narrow but varies in width depending on how close to the bridge one is playing. Second, the strings are very responsive, much more so than a violin or viola, and so require very little excitement. Indeed, the instrument sounds best (to my ear) when the bow just brushes the string, which is the opposite of a violin family instrument; even with a light touch, using a violin bow on the psaltery easily chokes the sound, rather than enhancing it. Third, a violin bow is comparatively long and heavy -- it's not made for movement along the strings -- so the psaltery bow's relatively smaller size and weight make it much easier to do the longitudinal leaping about the instrument required to play any kind of melody. Contrary to my expectations, I've found that my experience as a violist has had, so far anyway, little to no utility for the bowed psaltery beyond general musical knowledge.
A little about the kit and my experience building it: I was initially very excited about this and the kalimba kit, which I bought from the same manufacturer, but found the quality control and some of the materials to be poorer than expected in each case. The milling appeared to be done on good machines, but the fit and guide marks ranged from imperfect to sloppy. Even the pins were inconsistent in quality -- you may note that there is an empty peg hole for the high G on the right; I'm waiting for a replacement for an incorrectly manufactured pin that came with the kit. Overall, it had the feel of being based on a tried-and-true template, but hastily put together. To add to the issues, the instructions were confusing: they seemed to take a "keep it simple" approach oriented toward a beginner, which would have been fine if the milling had been more accurate, but, given that it wasn't, more details and even adding a few steps would have rendered the imperfect cuts unimportant and thus might help a kit builder end up with a better quality instrument with the materials as they are.
When I was in my twenties, I spent about five years rebuilding old pianos and so have some experience in woodworking and finishing, as well as some understanding of zither-type instruments (of which the piano is one) but I'm aware that I'm no expert. There's no question that some of the issues I encountered in building this kit could have been circumvented had I had a more seasoned eye; indeed, I already have ideas for how I would approach it if I could do it over again or if (when?) I decide to attempt making one from scratch. Too, I bought the kit as a training opportunity and an experiment; by both of these standards, it was time well spent. In the end, what really matters to me is how the thing sounds and, at least to my inexperienced ear, it sounds quite lovely. Looking forward, I see myself spending far more time making music with it than grumbling about its flaws.
Sunday, September 13, 2020
Days of the Virus: Six Months
The ceremony sinks
Innocence is drowned
In anarchy
The best lack conviction
Given some time to think
And the worst are full of passion without mercy
-- Joni Mitchell, "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" from the album Night Ride Home and based on the poem "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats
On Saturday, March 14th, not quite a quarter of the way into this year, my wife, my mom, and I began quarantine from the COVID-19 pandemic and I wrote my first post about the experience. Now, 184 days and nearly a million deaths later, almost three quarters of 2020 has passed through us and the only thing that feels notably different from six months ago is how accustomed we have become to the drumbeat of mortality and the chaos that, at least in the United States, has grown out of the combined willful ignorance and entitlement that seems to be the foundation of our contemporary culture. Indeed, as we slouch toward Election Day, it seems very likely that the thickest part of the spear impaling us is still to arrive.
To my family and to my few dozen patients, I peddle optimism. I am not a purveyor of falsehoods: I do believe that that essential thing that makes us human -- our mutual interdependence and the compassion that arises from it -- will carry the day in the long run. A vaccine will be developed and disseminated and communities will reconvene, dazed and bedraggled but ready to be whole again, as after a great storm. However, just how long that "long run" will be I cannot reliably guess. From the perspective of a private practitioner, I cautiously anticipate that on or about the anniversary of our quarantine we will be able to break it and I can return to my regular work. As a father, husband, and son, as a friend, as a citizen, these days any trek off of my property -- "the compound," as a rural friend calls my suburban home -- is accompanied by such anxiety that it's sometimes difficult for me to imagine ever re-entering the world again.
Like many, I've found "COVID projects" to keep myself occupied and for self-care; some are very satisfying and rewarding and I plan to continue them long after the pandemic is an awful memory. I attend to my relationships and do my best to care for those around me. Although not abstinent, I do minimize my news intake -- which is, as Brené Brown points out, "the definition of privilege" -- but I cannot lament what I am exposed to: I believe it is my responsibility to know and care about the lives and suffering of others, even as I must curate my resources for responding. Indeed, that is the name of the game for all of us these days: to feed and protect ourselves enough that we survive and can remain of service.
If my imperfectly informed guess is right, we're at about the halfway mark of our quarantine. If my equally imperfect other guesses are even in the ballpark, the second half of our quarantine will be the more challenging. May we all have what we need to make it through.
Thursday, September 10, 2020
The Long and Long of It
When I first learned of ambient music -- some 35 years after Brian Eno's Music for Airports -- one aspect that fascinated me was how composers could simultaneously create a sense of dynamic changelessness that evolves over time. Of course, not all ambient music does evolves that way; some of Eno's earliest experiments were musically static, built with asymmetric loops that created a texture that never repeated, but any one section more than a few moments long nonetheless contained the same elements as any other. The works that I have been most drawn to are those in which one can "drop the needle" and no section sounds the same as any other, yet the changes are hard to identify as one listens to the piece across its length. Of course, one might argue that ambient music isn't meant to be that way -- it's purpose-built background sound, creating a space, an ambience -- but I find the boundary between the indirect and passive, on the on hand, and the purposeful and directed, on the other, to be rich and enticing.
So, my forays into ambient music have all been aimed at straddling this line, creating something into and out of which the attention can wander, but that nonetheless remains interesting enough to hold a sufficiently curious attention. Sustaining that over time into longer forms has proven to be a significant challenge, and one that I am only beginning to feel that I'm having any success with. It is from those efforts that this, my first album of music, has come.
Sunday, August 9, 2020
A New Level of Satisfaction
So, after all this talk about building instruments, how do they sound? The bowed clock chime and the kalimba, at least, sound like this:
As I mentioned in my previous post about the bowed clock chime, I had made some recordings with the instrument back in November, but I didn't do anything more with them. Last month, I was going through some of my old "song stems" and was reminded of what I had done with the bowed chime; listening to it again, I heard the tinkle of a kalimba in my head and knew what to do. Today, when I finished tuning the kalimba, I immediately pulled up the bowed chime tracks and began to mess about with the instruments together.
I really love how the piece came out. The sound of the bowed clock chime is very satisfying, so full of harmonics and breathy timbres. The kalimba's plink provides a perfect counter to the chime's soft, slow, bowed attacks and yet both instruments' textures overlap, as they would since they are both metal lamellaphones. The nature of the bowed chime pulls for a meditative ground, while the kalimba's ability to fill in some of the notes that are missing in the chime make the latter's drone more musical.
More than that, it's immensely satisfying to create a sound from scratch and make music with it. Nine years ago when I reconnected with music and started composing, I was especially interested in timbre, texture, and sound design. Computer music made that really accessible, but over time I've been increasingly dissatisfied with most electronic voices and drawn toward those that at least begin with acoustic, "real-world" sounds. Today, I can imagine a sound-making machine and what kind of sound it might make, then build it and make music with those sounds. This feels like something I was meant to do.
You Say, "Mbira," I Say, "Kalimba..."
I've loved the sound of mbiras since I first heard them. I mentioned this fact once to a friend who had a small one in his office and he later surprised me with one as a gift; I keep it on my table of favorite instruments in my studio. Building one from a kit seemed like an obvious choice for getting my feet wet in instrument making, so when one came on sale last month, I didn't blink. Here's the finished piece:
Front/top.
Back.
Right side.
I learned in researching for this post that "mbira" is a broader class of instruments of which "kalimba" is a particular type; this kit is, as far as I can tell, properly a kalimba. I'm happy with the way it turned out. Most important, of course, is the sound, which is lovely; the folks who designed it seem to know what they're doing. The shellac finish came out well enough. It's not terribly robust, which I knew, but I like what it did to the wood (hard to see in detail in these pix) and I'm looking forward to seeing how it ages; critically, it seems not to interfere with the sound, which was my primary criterion.
(A brief search online reveals a wide and enthusiastic debate about what finishes are best for musical instruments with wooden resonators. Polymerized varnishes like one finds on tables or basketball court floors are tough as nails but that property actually mutes vibrations. Lacquer is common on pianos and electric guitars for its relative strength and ease of application with the right equipment, but that equipment is expensive and lacquer itself is nasty toxic. Oils like tung or linseed are lovely but terribly slow to cure and I'm unsure of their acoustic effects -- and no one seems to use them on musical instruments. The varnish used on violins is based on tree sap and has ingredients that can cost hundreds of dollars an ounce, and I'm no Antontio Stradivari anyway. On the other hand, shellac is made of inexpensive, natural, non-toxic ingredients, can be layered to a lovely finish and dries rapidly; it is used by many luthiers for classical guitars, so it has demonstrated acceptable acoustic properties. As I said, it's not terribly strong, but these are musical instruments, not pub bars or gym floors, so I think that's an acceptable downside. And that's why I settled on shellac.)
There were, as is always the case with new projects, a few things that didn't go as I had hoped, the most noteworthy of these is the mark: I had planned -- and, indeed, attempted -- to affix a paper label with my logo, the date, and instrument number (this is #2 after the bowed clock chime) inside the soundbox, viewable through the soundhole. Unfortunately, my method for securing it failed and the label came off after the instrument was nearly complete. Further experiments will be made.
I learned quite a bit on this kit, identifying whole categories of things I didn't know that I didn't know. On the whole, though, it was a very validating experience: there was no question in my mind that I was (and remain) very ignorant on the subject of musical instrument design and building, but it turned out I knew more than I thought and was able to apply much of it to the discoveries of what I didn't know. I'm very excited about this work and am looking forward to new, future experiments. (A bowed psaltery is next in line!)
Bart Hopkin Is a God
Maybe ten or fifteen years ago, my father gave me a set of chimes that, I believe, came from a clock. It was comprised of a piece of dark wood attached to a cast iron bridge/mount that, in turn, had a set of eight metal rod-gongs screwed into it. If the assembly was attached to a resonator (such as the side of a grandfather clock) the rod-gongs, when struck, could chime with a bell-like tone; they were tuned to be able to play the Westminster chimes. Dad said he had planned to make a doorbell with them, but had decided to scrap the idea and so passed them on to me, knowing my interest in bells.
I hung onto the chimes through several moves, knowing I wanted to do something with them, but unsure what. They sat loose in closets or stuffed into boxes, took up space on my desk, and, at one point just for fun, I bolted them to a bookcase and whacked them whenever I went by to hear the lovely chord they sounded. Finally, last year sometime, I had the inspiration that they would probably sound cool if I bowed them, but they needed a resonator more portable than a bookcase.
One night last November on my way home from the office, I went by a craft store and picked up one of those wooden project boxes that people paint or decoupage (I wonder what the other customers thought as I sorted through the shelf tapping on and listening to each box one by one). At home on my family room floor, I spent quite a while experimenting with how to position the chime unit to get the best tone and resonance from the box. I also expended some effort rehabilitating it, as the bridge was dusty and oily with age; in that process, one of the rod-gongs broke, but, fortunately, it was one of two at that pitch. All that done, I finally screwed the reassembled unit to its new soundbox and began experimenting with playing it, using an old violin bow I had. Unfortunately, the rods were nested in such a way that one could only access two at a time with the bow, so I couldn't play any melodies, however simple, but it made a really interesting drone with lots of overtones -- I was pleased. Trying to mic it for recording tended to interfere with the bowing, so I experimented further with two piezo pads, eventually gluing them in place and attaching their 1/4" sockets to the walls of the soundbox. I liked the amplified sound and recorded a piece with the instrument, but it seemed musically incomplete and I didn't know where to go with it, so I left it alone.
Fast forward to this past week, when I found myself with a workshop in which I could actually build and experiment with musical instruments. One of the explorations I was engaged in was figuring out what kind of finish I wanted to use for the instruments I was going to build. I'd had quite a bit of experience working with lacquer, some with varnish, and a little with oils and they all had advantages and disadvantages; after much research (read: Internet surfing), I concluded that shellac was a good place to start, but I really hadn't done anything with it before. I had already started building the kalimba kit, but wanted something to practice on before committing to that, so, after doing some tests on scrap wood, I decided the clock chime needed a finish. In the end, I was pleased with how it came out, especially the dark wood to which the bridge is mounted, although it's difficult to see in these images the depth it added. I now consider the instrument -- at least this iteration of it -- complete. Thus:
Top and front, with two rod-gongs attached to the bridge and the rest in a simple holder I made. (I'm not showing the bow here.)
From the back; you can see the brass screws attached to the top of the rods as they are inserted into the bridge.
Close up of the bridge from the front…
...and from the back.
Placement of the piezo mics and their output; notice they are asymmetrical. You can also see the screws and washers attaching the wood block to the soundbox.
As I say, I was pleased with the result, and with myself; I had had an idea for an instrument and had built it, at least a prototype. Although I didn't think I was the first person to have the idea to bow a rod-gong, I did have the thought that maybe I might have done something fairly original.
I've since learned that, well, it's unlikely.
Of course, anyone with an education in twentieth century music can list a handful of pioneering instrument makers -- Harry Partch, the Baschet Brothers, Luigi Russolo, Lou Harrison, among others -- whose inventiveness pushed the boundaries of music, sculpture, and even art. Unsurprisingly, their work inspired generations of others even more fascinated than me by how sound is created and propagated. Too, Western musicologists have traveled the world exploring sound arts from folk to classical traditions of non-Western cultures, discovering the inventiveness of millennia of instrument making; the Sachs–Hornbostel system of instrument classification has over 300 basic categories and still doesn't capture everything.
So, while it's possible -- only possible, I say -- that no one else has bolted a clock chime to a crafts box from Michael's, electrified it with piezos, and played it with a bow, it turns out my instrument fits neatly into a well-established class of sound-making devices. It's a kind of idiophone, that is, instruments the body of which creates the initial vibrations (as opposed to a string, membrane, column of air, etc.), and of the subclass lamellaphone, where the vibrating body is anchored at one end (it turns out that the kalimba is in the same subclass). There are examples of bowed lamellaphones, too, such as the nail violin and the daxophone.
All of this I learned through a recent reading of Bart Hopkin's Musical Instrument Design, a fabulous book on principles of sound making that takes an impressively detailed overview of pretty much any kind of instrument you can imagine -- and a whole bunch you never did. Mr. Hopkin has been designing and building instruments since the 1980s and knows of what he speaks; you can hear and see some of his work on YouTube. I didn't know it when I was in high school, but I think what I really wanted then was to be Bart Hopkin.
At this point in my life and my career(s), I know that's not gonna happen (I mean, it already did, right? -- he's Bart Hopkin!), but, to paraphrase what I said in my previous post, it doesn't matter whether I change the world, just that what I'm doing is meaningful. I had a blast building and experimenting with my bowed clock chime and it has given me ideas for other sounds and music I want to make. I plan on exploring those ideas when and as the chance takes me.
How I Spent My Summer Vacation
The first day of my vacation, I woke up. Then, I went downtown to look for a job. Then, I hung out in front of the drug store. The second day of my summer vacation, I woke up. Then, I went downtown to look for a job. Then, I hung out in front of the drug store. The third day of my summer vacation, I woke up. Then, I went downtown to look for a job. Then I got a job keeping people from hanging out in front of the drug store...
-- Cheech & Chong, "Sister Mary Elephant" from the album Big Bambu
I've had a desire to build musical instruments since at least high school, when, in my sophomore or junior year, I came across a book called The Physics of Music, a paperback binding of some Scientific American articles on the subject. Simultaneous with its fomenting effect, the book also told me I couldn't possibly build instruments, as the pages were interspersed with mysterious squiggly mathematical symbols that supposedly meant important things to anyone smart enough to build musical instruments (I was one of those kids who believed I sucked at math). Four or five years later, I found myself working for a piano restorer, eventually learning to rebuild player pianos, but even then I believed I didn't have what it took to be a "real" piano technician because I hadn't learned to tune pianos -- something that, again, at the time seemed utterly esoteric.
In the four decades since my first thrill at the thought of making instruments, I've discovered that most of what I believed about my shortcomings was bullshit -- I'm decent at math and I can train my ear to hear anything below the range of my tinnitus -- and, perhaps more importantly, have come to believe that if you want to do a thing, you should just do it.* Whether you're good at it or not doesn't really matter if it's meaningful to you.
Still, even with that understanding, circumstances have been such that instrument making hasn't been logistically feasible for me -- until very recently. As a result of a surprise largesse earlier this year, my wife and I decided to make some significant quality-of-life investments in our home: we built a garden for her and a basement workshop for me. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the dream of instrument building has become a reality!
In early July, I made plans to take the first full week in August off from my practice. I'd spent my spare time since June building workbenches and my wife and I had organized the basement (she did the lion's share of that). For Father's Day, I received an excellent book on musical instrument design. Serendipitously, a musical instrument kit company I like had a sale, so I picked up a couple of kits. By the time I started vacation, everything was set up and I could spend the week futzing about the workshop, making sawdust, gluing chunks of wood together, and getting shellac all over my fingers. Pure joy.
My efforts produced two objets de musique: first, a bowed clock chime (my own design) and, second, a kalimba (the first of the two kits). I'll write about those in more detail in separate posts (see links). Also arising from this recent burst of inspiration was a piece composed for and performed on those instruments; I'll post about that separately, too.
My fantasy has reified into fact. I have ideas for several instruments in the queue: a bowed psaltery (the second kit), a multistringed monochord (a zither-like instrument with many strings all tuned to the same pitch), a single-string, very long monochord (like 10 or 15 feet), aeolian harps of various sizes and design, didgeridoos, a very large spring reverb (like 10 feet -- technically not an instrument but an audio effect), and others. Over the balance of my life, I hope to build many instruments, to make music with them, and, with luck, to share them with the local music community. However the project goes, I'll be posting updates and developments here.
*Within the limits of harm, of course.
Saturday, July 18, 2020
Shshshshsh
Pauline Oliveros told the story many times about the first time she recorded her environment, the sounds of her backyard from her bedroom window. She said she was shocked by all the things she heard in the recording that she hadn't noticed just listening. That's an artifact of recording -- and one of the reasons why I love field recording -- the recorder doesn't sort and prioritize sound the way the human perceptual apparatus does. When we then listen to a recording, it does a kind of end run around that apparatus; it helps us simultaneously focus our attention and expand it.
As an example and exercise, listen to these few minutes of my studio:
What did you hear? Maybe the first thing you noticed was the sound of the ceiling fan humming above my desk. My clothes swishing against the faux leather of my chair. The click and clatter of my mouse and keyboard. My unconscious ahemming and breathing. Distant thumps of my wife as she moves about downstairs. Maybe a very distant lawnmower. Some of these sounds I heard as they happened; many I discovered upon listening to the recording.
Take a moment today to sit and listen. It doesn't matter where you are or what is happening, just notice the sounds that go on around you. Let your ear wander, allow your attention to be pulled in whatever directions it may be. Notice what you notice. Listen. Your world, your environment, your community all can benefit from it.
Wednesday, July 1, 2020
That Moment When You Earthquake-Proof a Bridge and It Becomes a Giant Aeolian Harp
However it got there, I loved it. Indeed, I'm fascinated by the sounds that bridges make (and, for that matter, just by bridges in general), although my attempts to record and make use of/music with those sounds have mostly not gone very well so far (but watch this space). In any case, I saved audio of the Golden Gate wherever I could find it and eventually began to analyze it with the intent of creating something musical from it. This is the result:
If you listen to the recordings linked above, you'll probably quickly discern that this is not a recording of the Golden Gate, rather, it's the result of my deconstruction and reconstruction of its pitches, timbres, rhythms, etc. using digital music resources. My aim was to recreate the song of the bridge closely, but not exactly, taking some small liberties to make it a little more musical; it doesn't need much, to my ears, being already almost the definition of ambient music.
Surprisingly, this was not terribly complicated. My ear training being very rusty, I guessed (incorrectly) that the frequencies had some simple overtone relationship and, therefore, (correctly) started with simple sine waves, thinking additive synthesis would be a useful starting point. It turned out that the pitches are oddly near to standard scale pitches: G3, A3 (A440-ish), B3, A4, C5, and D5. Although I didn't dig very deeply, I found no evidence that the bridge rail designers did this purposely, so I found it astonishing that the notes were so consistently diatonic -- right off the white keys of the piano.
After that, most of the work was setting up randomized LFOs to create the shimmeriness of the pitches' relationships, then adding a relatively high-frequency (132ms), high feedback (86%), low saturation (35%) delay and finally a little bit of reverb (Valhalla VintageVerb tuned to huge halls but with the tail dialed way back) to knit the thing together and give it the sense of scale and distance you hear from the bridge.
The work is intended as an ambient piece, to be either listened to directly or left as atmospheric sound. I found myself drawn to expressly meditative mindsets as I felt through the shape and direction I wanted, so it could fit in that context as well. Of course, to the extent that I simply mimicked an existing sound, I can take only very limited credit for creativity; however, as a self-expression, it resonates (sic) deeply.
I'm as pleased with this as maybe anything I've done. It captures/recreates a sound I am endlessly in love with: a held tone or drone with overtones (or, as in this case, scale steps) that unpredictably jump in or fade out, creating an aural sensation equivalent to watching the light of the morning sun sparkle over rippling water. I've struggled to produce that kind of sound acoustically (although I'm learning -- again, watch this space) as well as electronically; combine that with what I've learned about the structure of such sounds and this outcome feels especially satisfying.
Monday, June 29, 2020
A Suburban Welcome
(Click on the images to see full size.)
Tuesday, June 23, 2020
Days of the Virus: 100 Days
Millions -- in the United States at least -- have made a different response. Many of us have adopted the argument that if one's own chance of surviving COVID-19 are high, that one can do as one pleases because one is only risking harm to oneself. Of course, this assumption has been demonstrated to be patently false, but the abstractions required to apply that fact to practice seem to be lost on those blindly congregating as if in the few months of collective hibernation the virus had disappeared.
Indeed, our collective cabin fever seems to be forcing us out of doors and back to each other. Not only do we see myopic expressions of entitled rage, but protests and uprisings by the legitimately aggrieved seem also to be accelerated by the energy held in check until recently by the pandemic. In this time of great press, caught between the threat of an invisible carnivore devouring us from the inside and using us as living incubators for its spawn on the one hand and the struggle to respond mindfully to the darkness of centuries-suppressed violence in our culture being brought bold-face into the light on the other, it can be hard to know what to do.
My answers are not perfect, but this is what I'm doing:
First, I believe we all have a responsibility to be of service. My family is my first concern and my promise to my father to support and protect my mother in her age keeps us sequestered. I am only of use to her, my wife, my children, and my community if I am well enough to be so. This applies, too, to my patients who depend on me to be available and clearheaded to support them as they navigate their own crises. Therefore, I attend to my own mental and physical health as an expression of care and service.
Minimizing my exposure to the virus supports my ability to care for those whom I care about, but it also has the prosocial function of keeping one more human out of the loop of contagion. For every person who contracts the virus, between one and three others are likely to get it; even if the first person has no symptoms, the fact that they can pass it on is a critical issue. I work to keep from becoming that vector, not just for my mom, but for the community in which I live.
Too, it is important to be a voice for facts and for collective and long-view thinking: I strive to speak and act based on what science tells us -- stay home if you can, wear a mask if you go out, wash your hands, keep away from others. I stand for these actions and require those around me to do so as well.
In the face of the eruption of anger over and new awareness of our country's original sin of racism, I work to educate myself about my whiteness and others' blackness. What I learn, I share with others, especially those things that others don't yet see. I invite white family members and friends to explore what it means to be white; with white patients who are struggling to process the outcries and pain they see, I guide their questioning toward the perceptual lacunae that privilege creates; I listen to friends and people of color, to learn to hear and to understand their experience, working especially to remember that my own experience can lead me to misunderstand theirs. I set boundaries with and push back against those in my life who fight -- knowingly or not -- to keep hold of their ignorance and to contribute to our collective amnesia. These I believe are the most important things I can do.
There are other things, too. I make art; I try to process the pain I witness and my own in a public and, hopefully, respectful and empowering voice. I give money to organizations working toward the solutions that make sense to me and encourage others to do the same.
I also imagine a future. From here, it seems to me unlikely that we'll see the far side of our current crises in another hundred days or even two. Along with everyone else, I feel the weight of quarantine, the unique, unanswerable, dull throb of being a social animal in isolation. Yet, if we keep our heads and, ironically, stay connected across our bubbles, I can imagine a future in which we exceed our current selves, are more willing, and safer for our better trust.
Friday, June 12, 2020
Getting Out a Bit
There's a small pull-off of the narrow road to the north of the river and I was delighted to see well-trafficked trails leading off along it when I arrived. Unpacking my field recorder, I trekked up and down the first hilly quarter mile or so and back before I decided that the most interesting sounds were to be found in the middle of the river in direct line of sight of the bridge. I may have ruined my sneakers.
What I like about this recording is the constancy of the water's play over its stones punctuated by the almost rhythmic rumble of the bridge. As the recording goes on, the ear begins increasingly to notice and appreciate the gaps between crossings. Different vehicles leave, of course, different sonic trails, some more and some less subtle (and occasionally disturbing). The birds sing nearly as steadily as the river and you can almost hear the soft greens and deep browns of the glen as shiny metal boxes hurtle across the gray structure and along its carbon ribbon feed.
This was recorded on a Zoom H4nPro (seen in the track art). It is unedited except for about five seconds I deleted from a long silence during which I banged my water bottle 🤦; it is otherwise unaltered. My aim here was to get as close to the sound I wanted in the original recording so as to require little or no tweaking in the studio (the equivalent of "in camera" effects in film). I would have liked a little more panning as vehicles crossed the soundscape, but getting that brought me closer to the rumbling steel plates and away from the river's plash, so this balance represents my best compromise. Initial review was done in Audacity and editing and export was done in Ableton Live 10.
Monday, May 25, 2020
Murderer of Summer
On the scale of quality, especially compared to the town creamery or to modern artisanal ice cream, they weren't fabulous, but they were cold and sweet and, as a kid, that was enough. Or nearly so: along with Nutty Buddies, which were probably my favorite, I sought, and sometimes fought with my little brother for, Buried Treasure. Like Nutty Buddies, they were mass-produced, paper-wrapped conical things, but they didn't have a graham or cake cone; instead, they were more like popsicles made of sherbet (I don't recall any flavor other than raspberry, although it seems like there would have been). Treasure pops, as I called them, had a plastic handle topped with a flat, bas-relief figurine, which, in manufacture, was dropped handle-first into the pointed end of the wrapper and the sherbet poured on top of that so that the figure helped hold the sherbet. When you unwrapped it to eat, what you saw was raspberry sherbet on a stick, but as you ate your way down, you'd get to the "treasure" of the figurine. I loved these things, not least because the sherbet was pretty tasty, and I casually collected the sticky leftover hilts.
That was the closest I got growing up to living where there was a regular Ice Cream Man in his Ice Cream Truck. The five Air Force bases I stayed on as a child did not allow them. The year I spent in my parents' home town and, thus, in Mr. Sweet's territory, came after he retired. The housing development I lived in as a teen had no such thing, which, in retrospect seems possibly to have been a consequence of High Desert life (I imagine cruising over macadam in 100º+ Junes and Julys would play havoc with freezers). In any case, all my early associations with ice cream trucks come either from the second-degree proxy of Gram and Gramp's freezer or shared cultural myths about them.
As an adult, however, my experience has been very different.
We can leave the "ice cream" itself alone. Any adult with even the most passing exposure to real ice cream would be forgiven for not recognizing the modern multiply-refrozen mess revealed under the sickly-bright wrapping dispensed by your average ice cream truck occupant. Too, the unnerving price of these semi-crystalized pseudo-noshes clearly reflects the challenge of keeping a small mobile business moving today, compared to when gas was 10¢ a gallon and car insurance was optional. No, that unfortunate casualty of modern life is to be lamented and justly grieved, not berated.
For me, contemporary ice cream trucks have devolved from tragedy to atrocity because of their assault on the sonic environment. Long gone are the quaint miniature carillons (if they ever existed) tinkling out tunes announcing the arrival of The Good Humor Man in Pleasantville. My earliest memory of a musical ice cream truck was in my 30s, when I lived in a New Jersey suburb of New York City: the fake electronic "bells" were broadcast over a bullhorn speaker that would render even the sound of the Choir Invisible fully infernal.
Ice cream trucks seem to be something of a fixture in Maryland, at least in most of the neighborhoods I've lived in since arriving here in '07. And, although the PA systems over which their "music" is blasted have improved, that which erupts from them seems only to have become more heinous. Bells, acoustic or electronic, have given way to flat-enveloped sine-wave tones even lower-fidelity than 80s video game soundtracks. Worse, they play one, single, looping tune, ad nauseam, which pierces my brain like a neurotoxin-tipped arrow, leaving me cognitively paralyzed for the half an hour that they are typically within range of perception. The tortures of their endless excretion of "Turkey in the Straw" are so great as to believably incite even Phillip Glass or Terry Riley to murderous violence. Greater yet is the unforgivable, criminal, diabolical, deployment of "It's a Small World." I assert that even the likes of Ghandi could and would recruit the enthusiastic assistance of Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Mother Fucking Theresa in pulling the driver from his seat and pummeling him into pink goo over such an act.
In all seriousness, I would rather listen to car alarms and leaf blowers. At the same time.
Summer's chorus is one of my greatest pleasures. As my local ice cream man meanderingly serenades my neighborhood in hopes of enticing the many children here to entreat their parents for the price of his icy indulgences, I have to gird my cochleae against the aural assault of his efforts. Quickly, before That Song gets tattooed onto my auditory cortex: I reach for my phone and play something -- almost anything -- loudly enough to drown out the Mephistophelean chant. I don't begrudge the kids their treats nor the dairy entrepreneur his living; I just resent that ice cream trucks can't more benevolently make themselves part of the delicious soundtrack of summer.
Summer Return
When shadows are brief and the sun lingers,
Open windows beckon with alarm bells of
Distant raucouses of children,
Meditations of lawn mowers,
Cacophonous ensembles of horny avians,
And soft, reassuring drones of air conditioners.
I awaken from eight months of restless dreaming,
Greyness, a desaturated life,
Wrapped defensively in too many layers
And not enough air;
I stretch to find my tightness and resent
The lifetime lost to seasons that were not meant for me.
Although I am February's child, I regestate all the year
That is not Summer
And fill my lungs anew only as the sun slows its march to zenith
To bask in this fraction of the year
When I feel myself.
Thursday, May 21, 2020
Dory and Viola
Laying in bed one night recently, I had the thought to build something out of loops using the first four or five steps of a C Dorian scale (Bb and Eb, if you don't know) on each viola string. Each string would be its own voice (so, four voices, with four loops each on the C, G, and D string and five on the A) and each loop would be of differing lengths and could include only one pitch, but each pitch could be played more than once and in more than one manner (legato, staccato, etc.). Ableton Live 10's Session View, based as it is on clips, can extend this Enoan technique by allowing randomization of clip order, velocity, and other parameters.
I haven't played my viola since before the lockdown, mostly because I just don't have the energy these days to practice. But this piece really wanted the viola voice, so I relied on Ableton's Orchestral Strings sample pack, which I've used many times before. Its voila samples in have some significant shortcomings, which were especially apparent in my last piece, but the requirements of this one were such that it wasn't as much of a problem.
While I appreciate the concept, I'm mostly not gaga about algorithmic music per se, as it often feels flat to me and doesn't seem to go anywhere. However, my intention here was to use the algorithm as a foundation and then to perform effects on it in a way that would create some sense of development and direction. Compared to most of my other music, this approach much more like that made on a modular synthesizer in which a patch is set up, usually with one or more generative sequences, and the performer manipulates the mix of those sequences and various effects to produce a musical piece. A key challenge in that modality is to design effects and how they relate to each other in such a way as to be musical and performable. After much head-scratching and flow-charting, I settled on a routing structure that would allow me to manipulate sections of the work live with a feedback delay, a harmonizer, and a buffer-based sequencer and then feed the whole thing through my favorite reverb.
The harmonizer is a relatively old (I'm guessing Max 6?) Max for Live device called M4L.dl.13.Harmonizer (I couldn't find documentation for it beyond a reference in an undated tutorial index). I like it because it has a feedback loop, so the transposition you pick stacks up: if you choose a two-step transposition, you get whole-tone harmony; with three steps, you get diminished chords; with five steps, you get quartal harmony, etc. Additionally, it incorporates per-channel delays, giving a kind of pseudo-arpeggio effect. I manipulated the direction and distance of the transpositions to give the algorithm a sense of mood and movement.
The sequencer I used randomizes pitches and limits them to whatever notes (or microtones) you want. In this case, I continued using the dorian scale; i.e., any sound in the buffer would be repitched to any note in a dorian scale in the first octave up or down from that sound. This has the effect of creating a new dorian "key" centered on whatever note goes into the buffer; in other words, if the note being played is D, then the sequencer plays random notes from a D dorian scale (no sharps or flats). When you have multiple notes going into the sequencer, this can get a bit chaotic, but it somehow feels to me still tonal, if strongly chromatic, at least compared to allowing the sequencer to play in twelve tones.
I also experimented with controlling or randomizing different parameters of the loops themselves. For example, I had hoped to map velocity to attack, with low-velocity notes having long (1500ms or more) attacks; my experiments with this were ultimately fruitless, though, and I abandoned the goal.
I enjoyed being able to incorporate performative components into this. I did several takes of it, all of which came to about the same length, giving me some confidence in the naturalness of the flow. In the absence of my viola (or at least the energy to invest in it), I expect to be looking for more ways to make my electronic music more "live."
Wednesday, May 20, 2020
Days of the Virus: The Cost of Paradox
Tones it down.
- Laurie Anderson, from "Sharkey's Day" on the album Mister Heartbreak
I'm very fortunate. As I've described elsewhere, I live in an easily protected place with family I care about and get along with and am able to continue my work. By almost any standard outside the US, I am wealthy (in the US, I'm solidly middle-class). My house is in a safe neighborhood; I have nice toys; my family has plenty to eat and we get both our groceries and takeout delivered. We are all reasonably healthy for our age and able to care for ourselves and each other. We are about as well set up to weather the pandemic as could be wished.
In contrast, am also free of many risks and stresses. I don't have to make my living doing things that regularly expose me, and therefore the rest of my family, to the SARS-Cov-2 virus. I'm not working in a hospital, retirement or nursing home, or dentist's office; I'm not a police, firefighter, EMT, or other first responder. I don't work in a grocery store and I don't deliver groceries, takeout, or packages. I'm also not unemployed: I'm not a restauranteur or server or cook; I'm not an artist or performer; I'm not a retailer. I'm also not homeless nor am I living in a crowded, underserved and over-policed neighborhood lacking basic infrastructure services. As of this writing, no one in my family or network of friends or in my patient caseload has died of COVID-19.
For all these reasons and more, I consider myself and my family lucky. And therein lay a problem.
As I've been chronicling in this series, the pandemic has been difficult. The loss of physical contact, of variety and novelty, the ongoing uncertainty and fear of dying or of someone close dying -- all these are things that normally cause pain and would be normal to grieve. In a normal world, when we suffer a loss, our family and friends rally around us for support; they witness our pain and tell us it will be okay and reassure us that they are and will always be here for us. They can do that because it's very likely that they are not suffering a similar loss at the same time. Conversely, we, who are in pain, feel free to be so because we know our pain, relative to our loved ones in that moment, is significant.
That's not true now. The burnout, depression, anger, disorientation, etc., that any one of us is experiencing right now, while significant on the scale of things, is not greatly different from most others in our community. Everyone is struggling, laboring under deficits imposed by the pandemic.
Grief -- the process we go through when the world changes around us -- requires permission, welcome. To grieve, we must accept our grief, the pain of it, the inconvenience of it, allow it to bubble up and wash over us when it chooses to. In grieving, our bodies and our minds process the losses and accustom us to this new world, absent of the things or people we lost and different from the world before.
The ubiquity of loss and grief in a pandemic -- it is a pandemic after all -- makes this permission difficult. How can I "complain" about how hard it is when there are people dying alone in plastic isolation bubbles with no more human comfort than an iPad screen can provide? How can I "indulge" my anger or sadness at my lost privileges like a private office and a gym membership when folks in my city have no safe shelter of their own, let alone safety from the virus?
To be able to grieve in times like this requires we tolerate this paradox. It is true that I am very fortunate; it is true that others suffer horribly. Yet those truths do not make my suffering untrue. If I am to be well, both for my own sake and so that I may be of service to others who suffer beside me, I must grieve my loss, feel my pain.
This is what is required of us: to grant ourselves our pain. Humans' greatest strength is community (even if Americans aren't especially good at it). Not only do we serve each other better when we can accept our own grief, but we grieve best when we grieve together. In permitting ourselves to be in pain, we permit each other; in permitting each other, we permit ourselves. And with permission, we can grieve and disencumber ourselves and be of service.