Liberating Sound

INWARD SOUND | 2.20.21

In today’s New York Times I profile the 90-year-old Guatemalan composer and inventor Joaquín Orellana, whose sculptural and darkly sensuous instruments encapsulate the history of a country marked by injustice and ingenuity. (New Yorkers can view his work in a fascinating exhibition at the Americas Society through April 24.) In the 1960s Orellana studied electronic music in Buenos Aires, where European avant-garde currents met Latin American social engagement. 

But back in Guatemala, there was no electronic music studio for him to deepen his interest. He did make a couple of pieces out of taped environmental sounds – market cries, liturgical chant, the voices of street beggars – and nestled in there he kept hearing the sound of the marimba. The marimba was a national symbol of Guatemala, most likely brought over on the slave routes from West Africa and since firmly associated with local folkloric traditions.

In what he calls a kind of Big Bang, Orellana set out to catapult the marimba’s sound into acoustic and physical space by twisting it into new forms. Over time he invented more such “sound tools,” some using humble materials like plastic beads and bamboo, others welded out of brute, black iron. 

In a lucid interview from Guatemala City, he talked about how the musical imagination of composers is caught up in existing constructs and materials. Building his own instruments became a matter of wresting back control not only over the methods of music production but also over his own imagination. Looking back over his life, he said, “I’ve come to the conclusion that what I’m trying to do is liberate sound.”

Orellana speaks of himself as animated by two impulses, one “romantic, effusive,” the other surgical, “like a physician trying to extricate sound from the constraints of composition.”

But maybe the two are not so far apart. Here is an 1835 poem by Joseph von Eichendorff, perhaps the quintessential poet of German Romanticism:

Sleeps a song in things abounding

That are slumbering unheard

And the world will start resounding

If you find the magic word

This month, scientists liberated the sound of a 17,000-year-old conch shell that had been discovered at the entrance to a French cave in 1931. Researchers only recently noticed that humans had tinkered with it in order to turn it into a musical instrument. The Times had a piece on it that also includes a sound clip of its three forlorn notes, chromatically huddled together.

The reason the shell’s song slumbered unheard in a museum for 80 years is that it had initially been catalogued as a mere drinking vessel. Now, as anyone knows who has ever blown across a beer bottle or tapped out a tune on a row of wine glasses, there’s no such thing as an unmusical drinking vessel. There’s only incurious drinkers.

BONUS 

This week’s playlist awakens the songs of water, a conch shell, toys and a whale. Maybe it inspires you to turn a Beginner’s Ear to your next meal, drink, or bath time?

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Image: Orellana’s imbalunas in front of a video by Carlos Amorales at the Americas Society (screenshot from a video on the society’s website.)