Music of the Spheres, part 1

Self & Community

In the cave, before time, everything reverberates. It is a womb for sound. The rocks resound, the water dripping resounds. Stone on stone, hands on stone, bone on stone, our voices sound, our voices resounding into the instrument of the cave. Each of us singing together, each voice adding its reverberations, the vibrations coming through us, the joy of it, the necessity of it. The space, the fire, our bodies, all unified, all drawn together by the sounds we make. What do our bodies know when they are singing, here in the cave, tens of thousands of years before anything will be written down?¹

As a child I was a broken jukebox that never played the song you asked for, and could not be quieted without yanking the plug out from the wall. I was a radio station scanning constantly for a signal, overlaying songs on top of one another, endlessly rewriting the lyrics to the Top 40 jams of the moment out loud. I could not - or would not - stop singing no matter how many times everyone requested, begged, pleaded, demanded, beseeched, entreated, or badgered me to please, please!, shut the fuck up.

As you can imagine, this made me a deeply irritating child to be around, for adults and other children alike. But singing felt so good and it seemed to pour out of me in deluges that swept me away in the irresistible feeling of making sounds, the vibrations through my whole body, the satisfaction of doing something with my exhalations. I do not want you to confuse enthusiasm for talent - though of course I fancied myself the future sixth Spice Girl - but if enthusiasm counts for anything I had more than my fair share. I have written about being a sensitive kid getting crushed by the overwhelm of feeling that I had no idea how to process or handle, and I think singing out loud was a channel for some of it, any of it.

Photo by Adam Cai on Unsplash

I sang in choruses at school and church, in every musical theater production they’d let me into up through high school graduation. In college I got quieter and sang much, much less (although not quite enough to stop annoying people around me, but to a significantly lesser degree) as a social adaptation, a way to try to seem a little less cringe to the new friends I was making. The ironic distance from anything earnest or sincere that felt like a requirement of the time - this was the early 2000s after all, the heyday of 4chan and Pitchfork. I sang less and less over the years, forgetting how good it felt to let the ponies of song ride out on my breath until one day, deep in the terror and paralysis of the early pandemic, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d let myself sing out loud, even alone in the car, a human block of ice.

One thing that I see now had, in some ways, taken the place of singing was the dance floor, the club, the house party, the rave, the show. Anywhere there was an incredibly loud rhythmic pounding, I wanted to be in the middle of it. In the pulsing vibrations, flinging my body around, I found that I could vanish almost completely, lost to myself but fully in the world. I love the alchemy of crowds in situations like these, where strangers momentarily become one single organism moving together in the dark, cilia waving emergent, like a murmuration of migrating birds. And if I could have those moments, I would be all right.

The more I learn about our prehistoric and ancient ancestors the more I see that what I was seeking there was a deeply held, deeply human need, channeled into a culturally sanctioned time of wildness, the young adulthood of one’s late teens and early twenties. It was outside of ceremony, outside of a formal initiation rite, but it could hold my feelings at the time, and it gave me life.

What do you want to do when the pandemic is over? Candice and I are asking each other, asking ourselves, before the vaccine, still in the thick of lockdown. I think I want to sing with people again, I say. And the idea sticks there for the next three years - long years with very few dance parties - a little curled-up grub nestled deep in the soil. So that’s how I end up in a Presbyterian church every Thursday night in 2023 (and now into 2024) after nearly two full decades away from singing with anyone besides the radio, on occasion.

When I join the local queer and feminist chorus at the beginning of 2023 I am ready for something new, but I do not expect to be so broken open in the way that I am. I keep starting to cry when I sing at chorus practice, and it knocks the breath out of me. I don’t know how to explain this very well (other than the fact that it is very easy to make me cry) - it is just that something pressed down very tightly inside me is given the space to unfurl in the act of singing. “All things are breaking and can never be broken, and we feel that in the body,” as Abigail Bengson says.

What does my body know when it sings? What secret does my singing body know that is invisible whenever I am not singing?

There is biology behind these feelings, that’s one aspect. We know that long exhales activate the parasympathetic nervous system, the “rest and digest” function, the vagus nerve that helps us relax and be soothed. But I don’t know if that fully explains the exhilarating joys of harmonizing with a group of 40 people - how energizing it is. I come home every week bursting at the seams, annoying my partner who is already winding down for sleep in bed.

It is also the fact of singing together with women and nonbinary folks, other queer folks. Even if all violence against women, nonbinary and queer folks were magically eradicated tomorrow, these kinds of intentional spaces would still be necessary - for togetherness, for singing to each other, singing to ourselves, singing ourselves alive, awake, and a part of something. Obviously, choruses made up of people of all genders are wonderful - but this specific kind of space has been very important and precious to me.

I really feel that I am part of a community, even though I only ever see any of the folks in the chorus for rehearsals and concerts. There is one warm-up exercise we do occasionally - if you’ve ever sung in a group I’m sure you’ve done it too - where we stand in a circle and one person starts off singing a single note, holding it steady, with their hands around an imaginary ball. We pass the imaginary ball around the circle, each person holding one note and the next person matching it while moving their hands to take the ball and make it bigger or smaller as they wish, corresponding to the volume of the note. We match each others’ resonance in turn, one at a time, and at the end I am ready to die for any one of the people in the circle (never being one to skimp on the melodrama, of course!). Whatever alchemy that is, it is very powerful.

Part of it is the requirement to listen. “Listen at least twice as loud as you sing,” the chorus director says to us, and invariably we make some of the most beautiful music we are capable of immediately after she says that. When we make the listening part of it explicit, when we don’t forget to listen, it really takes us somewhere. When we stand in a circle so we can hear all of the different parts we become a human cave of sound. It gives us each our place in the song. I have far from perfect pitch but when I can hear where I belong I can join in, I can add my vibrations, and maybe this helps someone else nearby find their place too. This is a simple lesson I want to learn better in every area of my life.

Photo by Tony L on Unsplash

Maybe this contributes to the sense of getting so deeply to the root of what makes us human, the very origins of culture in song. The body is the original instrument, no? Singing, drumming, stomping, clapping together in caves (instruments of resonance themselves!) is one of the oldest things that human beings do, have done since time immemorial. As Agamben says, “The primary opening of the human being to the world is not logical, but musical.” Back in November I wrote about collective lamentation, and how scientists believe that humans may have sung to each other before we spoke. ‘"We feel music just taps into this kind of pre-cognitive archaic part of ourselves," [Ani Patel of The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego] says. So it seems to make sense that music came "before we had this complicated articulate language that we use to do abstract thinking."‘

Whatever this primal urge is, it goes beyond simply enjoying music in a surface way. It is something deeply, deeply embedded in us. There is perhaps an innate need for transcendent states found through music, whether it’s the echo of hands slapping cave walls, or the bass dropping on a crowded dance floor after midnight, or toning one note in a multi-part harmony. When it hits just right, it carries us beyond ourselves - into what? When we sing the Kore chant together in my chorus group, and the rhythmic repetition takes me into something I can best describe as a trance state, I have some guesses.

This missive has already gotten pretty long and I have a lot more to say, so next time we’ll get fully mystical about it in part 2. In the meantime, I’ve been listening to a lot of traditional Sardinian throat singing while I’ve been thinking about and writing this newsletter - maybe you’ll enjoy it too: Lamentu by Tenores di Bitti

Thanks for being here, thanks for reading - see ya next time.

1. Josh Schrei’s episode “On Resonance: Caves, Hoofs, Hearts, Harps…the Birth of Culture” of The Emerald podcast had a huge influence on my thinking about what singing means in a cultural context.