Considerable Sounds: Dancing About Architecture

Considerable Sounds

by

DC Music Editor Benjamin E. New

Ben has played guitar and keyboards with numerous touring bands and recording artists including Bill Withers, Hannibal, The George Jetzon Band, Caravan, Machu Picchu, Strange Cargo, C.C. and The Meat, and After Raphael.

He has worked as a studio session player in major studios in both Philadelphia and New York. Ben has also served as a producer, arranger, and engineer for Society Hill Sound Studios in Philadelphia. Currently a member of The Mighty Parrot Band and a Music Educator in Cape May County, N.J., Ben is more than qualified to give us the music scoop and to guide us through musical meaning and its impact on all thinking as he is hip and high on the Musical IQ meter.

DC Welcomes him!

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In the beginning, Man created music.

We don’t know what it sounded like, there were no MP3 files, WAV files or CD audio. There weren't even vinyl, cassettes, acetate disks, 8 tracks, or radio. Our only glimpse of the early music is through random bits of surviving cave art.

Food, sex, musical instruments, and fire appear in ancient cave drawings
and petroglyphs around the world. I suggest that these things were elemental to the lives of these people.

Admiring the work of someone in the distant past, I can not help but feel that electric tingle of connectivity with the art and the artist. A bolt of lightning ensues from a dim and distant time. An epiphany blooms from somewhere deep in the subconscious and blossoms in the consciousness.

Am I so different from this ancient artist?

Music, and perhaps all art for that matter, celebrates both the communal and the individual, the ebb and flow, yin and yang, night and day. It speaks to us on many different levels simultaneously.

We can intellectualize it, theorize it, categorize it, or just let it wash over us and experience it.

It is both a mathematical language and a conduit for emotion.

The very nature of music is both corporeal and spiritual.

It is an idea, and in a world whose mythology fades in the cold light of day; it is the closest thing we have to magic.

It’s properties are concurrently:
Solid
(instruments, listeners and performers retain their physical size and shape.)
Liquid
(smooth and flowing in quality).
Gaseous
(without a fixed shape or volume and being able to expand ).

Imagine for a moment, if Franz Liszt had been killed in a plane crash at 23 like Buddy Holly was, how the course of music history would have changed! (Not to mention Aviation History!)

If you have "Vista" as your Operating system, the sounds in your computer were created by King Crimson founder and guitarist Robert Fripp.

Here is a relevant quote from the inimitable inventor of Frippertronics that I would like to share with you.

“Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence."

Video of Robert Fripp with analog looping system 1979



Everything is music. A politician sings. The Preacher Raps and wails like Janis Joplin!

All matter and energy vibrates at specific frequencies . Pythagoras, Aristotle, Dante, and Milton all theorized about the harmonic relationships of "the music of the spheres". Quantum physics is based on frequency or the vibrations inherent in any and all elementary particles. The basic idea behind string theory is that the constituents of reality are strings of extremely small size which vibrate at resonant frequencies.

These strings can vibrate in different modes... just like a guitar string can produce different notes.

Music is... within and without everything!

Vibration is the thread from which the fabric of the universe is woven . On a macroscopic level, stars, solar systems and planets all are singing their own signature theme songs through their unique vibrations (radio waves).

On a microscopic level, a composer attempts to rearrange the molecules in the air. My task today is to arrange the words in this article. Since the universe depends so heavily on music.

I hope the page sings.

I ponder what the music editor for Duly Consider should write about and what this section should include.

Like music itself, I have concluded, the subjects to explore have no bounds other than the stimulation of thought.

It will be easier to define what DC's Considerable Sounds will not be.

It will not be about crass commercialism and it will not be about current mainstream music about which you have others giving praise.

It will be about everything else that makes you think; that feeds the passion of consciousness.

The late, great music and thought demi-god Frank Zappa once said,

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture".

Well, here I am... dancing about architecture as well as one can but never with as much power as the music itself!