I’ve always loved big questions rooted in poetic expression, abstract concepts with counterintuitive answers, ones best expressed through experience and art rather than rational dialectic. So, when Julia first reached out about this performance, I was intrigued by both the breadth and depth of the questions she was asking in her proposal. In some ways it seemed like more of a philosophical inquiry than a show, and, I have to admit, I wasn’t sure how such an interrogation would result in performance let alone in a satisfying musical experience; I am, afterall, in the business of producing concerts. 

Don’t worry, the work is beautiful and the sonic landscapes stand on their own with textures and melodies that mimic the captivating, diverse minutiae in the sounds of nature. It is the scale of the inquiry, however, that deepens the sense of beauty, just as the stars turn from a dazzling light show into a spiritually humbling experience when we begin contemplating the vastness of space. Julia is asking big questions, questions about our perceptions and how they inform our understanding of who we are and the relationship we have to the world around us.

What happens when we give our attention to materials and timescales that are far bigger and older than ourselves, to resonances that make our bones hum? 

Breath is the connective tissue of this concert, breath and resonance. How the water and wind moves through sea caves, creating a song like howl that echo the pumped air through the pipes of the massive organ at First Congregational Church. How both seem to mimic our own organic breath, the invisible but constant cyclical undulation at the center of our lives.

It is not just breath, however, but breath as a vehicle for resonance – resonance as a means of putting two objects in dialogue, in relationship. And we are always relating, creating, emitting, and absorbing vibration, then in turn creating and emitting new vibrations to be absorbed. That’s physics, but it’s not music. Music doesn’t exist out there in the world, it exists because of us and is filtered through our bodies as well as our minds before it takes coherent shape. The mind itself, our experiences and expectations, our state of being, our questions and considerations, are the final part of the sound chain and all indelible parts of what music fundamentally is. Without interpretation and memory we only experience a collection of sounds. 

another of Julia’s questions: 

How can geological listening help liberate our imaginations from the present moment, allowing us to speculate on what might have been, and what might be? To fever dream deep into our planet’s mercurial pasts and far forward into potential futures? 

Let me tell you part of my fever dream: In these questions I hear the implication that deep listening, listening through our creative imagination, can radically alter perception away from our singular, linear perspective. By engaging in simultaneous listening, or what Jonathan Harvey calls the ambiguities of music, we can hear the multi-layered natures of a sound all at once and perhaps collapse the arrow of time into a kind of simultaneity we theorize about but do not experience. This is a listening where each sound exists unto itself and as a collection of memories, a listening across geological eras where we hear both an ancient and present moment together, a listening that expands the boundaries of our sense of self, entwining our identity with those around us to layer the perceptions of others onto our own, and perhaps even further towards the non-human, the inorganic. Or as Julia asks:

What is it like to hear the secret world of stone?

Perhaps these analogies and parallels are a stretch, perhaps this anthropomorphism of rocks and sea caves, this collapsing of time and perception is a step too far, a fanciful flight of imagination that veers into the realm of magical thinking. Certainly the world is wondrous enough and doesn’t need us to add additional layers of fantasy for it to already be fantastical. And perhaps such creative imagining is exactly what we need to realize a truth beyond rational knowing: that the world is more interconnected than we could possibly imagine.