[NetBehaviour] One-string music

Alan Sondheim sondheim at panix.com
Wed Jul 1 08:37:20 CEST 2009




One-string music


Three of my string instruments are played on one string only:

The hegelung, which has frets and two strings - drone and melody; the
hasapi, which has no frets two strings - drone and melody; and the yayli
tanbur, which has frets and six strings in three courses - drone, drone,
and melody.

The first two are plucked or strummed; the last is usually bowed.

It's far too simple to play these as mountain dulcimers; the music is far
more complex in general. Grace-notes, harmonics, hammering and pulling,
and with the hegelung, situating the finger in different areas behind the
frets - all serve to create a wide variety of effects. On the tanbur,
different bowing techniques are used in combination with grace-notes,
harmonics, hammering and pulling, and occasional bowing of the drone
strings.

One-string playing is pleasing, since the string acts as a one-dimensional
object with a singular timbre that slowly changes up and down its length.
More than one string creates a two-dimensional field - possibilities are
extended, but the sublime appears as a greater construct, separated from
the sound itself. One-string also uses different muscles - finger, wrist,
and arm for example - since pitch changes are more often accompanied by
large-scale body changes.

On the yayli tanbur, the range is well over two octaves, perhaps three;
the hegelung is slightly over an octave, and the hasapi is variable but
best played within the hegelung range (both are boat-lutes).

To play a single string is to play a universe of fundamental theory with
innumerable images emanating from a model which almost disappears in its
'purity.' Purity results in embellishment, ornament, creating object-
processes flying from the string. The playing is a meditating and drones
ensure its connectivity or networking to other playings and universes.

The playing is a meditating on model, on inhabiting a model, on model as
habitus. Melody and rhythm are 'there,' harmony is a memory: A memory of
harmonies elsewhere (synchronic), and a memory of single-string notes
hinting at the collapse of individuals (diachronic) - never quite bring-
ing either to the foreground.

Therefore a model of models, models with and without memory, pure and
impure ('dirty,' 'noisy') models, models under erasure, models within and
without consciousness and the consciousness of erasure. To play single-
string is to participate in habitus and becoming. Every playing string has
a beginning and an end (or length, if one might imagine a wrapped string);
every string announces, enunciates, its appearance and separation within
the world: Every string _inheres._

The string is a dancing (just as a keyboard is a dancing) - moving every-
where upon or around it, while at the same time letting it speak to its
own devices. And what are these devices, if not the coupling of the string
to fretboard, soundboard, hollow, materiality, frettage and/or stopping?
The string always speaks the world, just as one end speaks _a-_ and the
other _um_. All of us are listening as we are playing to the dual singu-
larities of sound, birth and death, and their irrevocability - what's said
and born can never be taken back.

http://www.alansondheim.org/yt1.mp3
http://www.alansondheim.org/yt2.mp3




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