The Vinyl Frontier by Jonathan Scott

Author:Jonathan Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

CHAPTER EIGHT

Flowing Streams and Firecrackers

‘Well, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that, Carl…’

Ann Druyan

Ann had been given the assignment of finding a single piece of music to represent China. She telephoned Chinese-American composer Chou Wen-chung, who recommended a track called ‘Flowing Streams’ without hesitation. Coming in at around the seven-minute mark, it’s one of the longest compositions on the record. It’s also the oldest piece of music, being part of a longer work known as ‘Towering Mountains and Flowing Streams’, thought to have been composed some time between the eighth and fifth centuries bc.

‘Flowing Streams’ is played on a guqin, a seven-string bridgeless zither. The musician is Guan Pinghu (1897–1967), who first learned the instrument from his father before becoming a teacher at the Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing. The guqin has a range of around four octaves, and there are three distinct sounds – ‘scattered sounds’, plucking open strings, ‘floating sounds’ created by string harmonics, and ‘stopped’. With such a range of pluck, slide, strike and harmonic techniques, guqin notation is dizzyingly complex. There are in excess of 50 different techniques that must be mastered. Even the most commonly used are difficult to get right, and certain techniques vary from teacher to teacher and school to school. There are also a host of obsolete fingerings and notations, rarely used in modern tablature.

‘Flowing Streams’ left me a little cool on first listen. I thought it was atmospheric, interesting and certainly – to this Westerner, at least – representative of China’s musical culture. It was clean, clear and, while not concise as such, free of dead wood – perfectly manicured. Tim writes about how it captures the Chinese philosophy of solo performance, of emphasis on single tones, as opposed to polyphony. On repeated listens, I do see why it caused a stir among the Voyager team, and why it jumped straight to the top of the heap marked ‘China’. Played loud through good headphones or speakers, you can feel the performance. You can hear the player’s fingers dancing over the strings. You can feel a subtle rhythm that shifts beneath your feet, like sand in surf.

When Ann called Chou Wen-chung he was at the Columbia School of Arts. He explained that – according to an article Ann wrote for the New York Times in 1977 – it would resonate with Chinese people, but that it must be a performance by the virtuoso. Ann found the Guan Pinghu recording, listened to it and knew it was perfect. Flushed with success, ecstatic that she had resolved the China question, she wanted to tell someone about it. Ann knew Carl was attending a conference in Tucson so she called his hotel. Finding him out, she left a message. Later in the day Carl returned her call, and they had a short conversation that completely changed the course of their lives.

It was Carl who made the first move, disclosing to her that he had returned to his room, found this message saying that ‘Annie called’, and asked himself why couldn’t she have left him that message 10 years ago.

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