A Pure Solar World by Paul Youngquist

Author:Paul Youngquist [Youngquist, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2016-11-29T16:00:00+00:00

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SPACE MUSIC

Interstellar Low Ways contains a message from Sun Ra to his listeners printed in caps on the back cover: “THE IMPOSSIBLE IS THE WATCHWORD OF THE GREATER SPACE AGE. THE SPACE AGE CANNOT BE AVOIDED AND THE SPACE MUSIC IS THE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING THE MEANING OF THE IMPOSSIBLE AND EVERY OTHER ENIGMA.”1 Sun Ra expected the Arkestra’s music to do more than flock the walls of a space-age bachelor pad. In his hands, the commercial idiom of space pop became a vehicle of insight and change, a means of understanding the “meaning of the impossible” and living accordingly. In this way, music becomes more than music, transfigured into philosophical inquiry, social criticism, and a way of life. Space music explores possibilities other than those endorsed by contemporary preoccupations, however scientifically plausible or socially progressive they appear. It pursues aims higher than that of landing humans on the moon or even achieving equality among them on Earth. It aspires to nothing less than transforming reality. Space music performs the impossible, transporting people to better worlds. “When I talk about outer space,” Sun Ra once said, “people listen. People are sleeping, and I’m here to wake them up from their slumber. The right music can wake people up.”2 And the right music is space music, which moves people by force of sound: “You got to reach people with all kinds of sounds now. Sounds. That’s what they need. They got to have sound bodies now. Sound minds.”3

As Sun Ra and the Arkestra, including its chief studio engineer, Abraham, understood things, sounds produce remarkable effects, and not merely as a function of the latest recording technologies. For all their playful jacket testimonials of recording technique (“Solar Fidelity,” “Galaxtone,” etc.), El Saturn records mostly remained low-tech fare compared with their commercial counterparts. Sound, not the equipment reproducing it, could touch and transform minds and hearts—physiologically and in real time. The long and wandering manuscript typed on Mount Sinai Hospital letterhead contains an interesting commentary on the “tone science” that informs the Arkestra’s approach to music. It ponders in detail the force of sound as vibration: “these invisible sound-vibrations have great power over concrete matter. They can both build and destroy.” The writer, likely Abraham, illustrates this principle by describing how powder on a brass plate assumes “beautiful geometrical figures” when a violin bow drawn across its edge causes the plate to vibrate.4 Then the author draws a revealing human parallel:

If one note or chord after another be sounded upon a musical instrument, say, a piano, or preferably a violin, for from it more gradation of tone can be obtained, a tone will finally be reached which will cause the hearer to feel a distinct vibration in the back of the lower part of the head. Each time that note is struck, the vibration will be felt. That note is the “key note” of the person whom it so affects. If it is struck slowly and smoothingly it will build and rest the body, tone the nerves and restore health.

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