 |
| David
Rothenberg |
| Sudden
Music BOOK & CD |
|
| University
Of Georgia Press |
| $19.99 |
|
Hardcover book & CD. First edition.
"Music," said Zen patriarch Hui Neng, "is a
means of rapid transformation." It takes us home to a
natural world that functions outside of logic, where harmony
and dissonance, tension and release work in surprising ways.
Weaving memoir, travelogue, and philosophical reflection,
Sudden Music presents a musical way of knowing that can closely
engage us with the world and open us to its spontaneity.
Improvisation is everywhere, says David Rothenberg, and his
book is a testament to its creative, surprising power. Linking
in original ways the improvised in nature, composition, and
instrumentation, Rothenberg touches on a wide range of music
traditions, from Rob Nachman's stories to John Cage's aleatory.
Writing not as a critic but as a practicing musician, Rothenberg
draws on his own extensive travels to Scandinavia, India,
and Nepal to describe from close observation the improvisational
traditions that inform and inspire his own art.
The accompanying audio disc features eleven original compositions
by Rothenberg, none of which have been previously released
on CD. Included are a duet with clarinet and white-crested
laughing bird, and another duet with clarinet and Samchillian
TipTipTip Cheeepeeeee, an electronic computer instrument played
by its inventor Leon Gruebaum. Also featured are multicultural
works blending South Indian veena and Turkish g-clarinet with
spoken text from the Upanishads; a piece commissioned by the
Tanglewood Contemporary Music Festival with readings of texts
by E. O. Wilson accompanied by clarinet and electronics; and
improvisations based upon Tibetan Buddhist music, Japanese
shakuhachi music, and the image of a black crow on white snow.
Sudden Music is a concise and delicate work of beauty. It
will help all readers experience the world as a musical place,
full of wonderful events that come out of nowhere to create
a strange and rhythmic harmony.
David Rothenberg is a philosopher, musician, and writer. He
is the author of Why Birds Sing, which will be published in
five languages and has been turned into a BBC television series.
His other books include Sudden Music (Georgia), Hand's End,
and Blue Cliff Record. His essays have appeared in such publications
as Parabola, The Nation, Wired, Dwell, Sierra, and Orion.
Rothenberg's five CDs, on which he plays clarinet, include
Before the War and Bangalore Wild. Rothenberg is professor
of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
"David Rothenberg's Sudden Music is a shimmering, picaresque,
poly-brilliant book, rather like butterfly flight, but suitably
piercing too. And he shares, I think, my hunch that music, like
wind, is the lungs of the world, and that Brownian motion seethes
at its heart."
—Edward Hoagland
"Wandering monk, lovelorn klezmer, Rothenberg roams
the world, ears wide open, ready to jam with veena players
in Bangalore or birds in the High Sierra. The news he brings
is vital—that nature can teach us how to make music;
that music can teach us how to live in nature."
—Evan Eisenberg, author of The Ecology of Eden
"How to encounter the vital presence of the present
moment, in all its
alterity and loopiness, except by cultivating our own animal
spontaneity? When cricket-rhythms heat up the night, or a
White-Crested Laughing Thrush launches its crazed arpeggios
out across the confines of the aviary, how to join one's own
rhythms to theirs if not by improvisation? Improvisation,
the blessed art, is where we exercise and hone our earthborn
spontaneity and wildness. Here David Rothenberg, accomplished
eco-philosopher and jazzman, lets loose his rich reflections
and riffs on the improvisational craft, discoursing both in
words on the page, and in swooping melodies on the enclosed
CD—melodies that swerve and dance with his fellow musicians,
songbirds, scientists, and sacred texts. Read, listen, and
slip back inside 'the music of what happens.'"
—David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous
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