We shape the world and the world shapes us.
When you smash a violin, you get a pile of
useless fragments, not smaller violins.
Weighing almost nothing, alive, pulsing with
air between soft spruce, and hard maple, the
violin’s sound easily fills an auditorium.
Our sophisticated self-image leads us to think
that we have solved the riddle of the 3rd sound.
Play a D and an F-sharp together, and we hear
another D two octaves below. This is the
difference tone reality inside our own ears.
But when played on a violin, the open D string
begins to resonate as well. Sympathetic resonance,
similar differences, like resonating with like.
We think we have solved the riddle of sound.
Yet their instruments, and perhaps also their music—
of Stradivari and Vivaldi—are clearly superior to
our own. They meditated upon, wrote whole
treatises, on the mystery of the third sound,
of the lower D emerging out of nothing. And
they listened, listened closely, with a sustained
seriousness of a slowly growing mountain pine.
Even our exact copies of their instruments
do not compare.
We think we have found a better way of thinking
about sound. But even the old Bach, as hard as
he tried, could not duplicate Vivaldi’s miracle of
a bassline emerging from higher thirds,
out of thin air!
The problem with entertainment once it has become
commercialized is that it quickly replaces our own
unique experience of the world, our own voice,
with something merely second hand. After a while,
that is what we ourselves become—second hand,
empty containers, filled with somebody else’s
self-serving idea of culture.
Witness the 100-year old photo portrait of an
American homesteading family. They’ll be standing
outside their self-made cabin, and most remarkably,
holding their own instruments: violins, accordions,
guitars. I say a self-played fiddle tune is worth a
thousand mp3 tracks, and in every way except
technologically more sophisticated as well.
So why can’t we have both? That’s an open question,
but what is certain is that real culture, just as real
listening, is never second hand.
CULTURE OF EXCESS
In the Culture of Excess, the Art of doing nothing,
of doing less, of taking away, of going without,
shines more brightly each passing day, like the
bronze foot of a statue pilgrims have touched
for generations.