Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Monday, April 11, 2011
16 Gardening, mp3 songs on shuffle, and the interconnectedness of all things
Some years ago I read a book called "The Celestine Prophecy" which was doing the rounds of all the "new age" book shops in Stockbridge when I lived there.
I imagine most people would find the whole premise - that the Mayans disappeared suddenly because they started vibrating at a higher rate due to their spiritual awareness and enlightenment - ludicrous but there were one or two things in that book which I found had some truth in them, particularly the bits about coincidence.
To cut a long story short, coincidences are not truly coincidental. Rather, they are ordained and are meant to be. They happen for a reason. The author encouraged everyone to take note of these "coincidences" and to accept them as having more meaning than one may think.
After reading this I started to notice things which may have otherwise passed me by, usually when doing something outwith my normal routine. For example, when I lived in Stockbridge I used to catch the bus home from work in Morningside. Sometimes, according to which bus I caught, I would get off at the bottom of Dundas Street but usually I would get off on Princes Street. Usually I would walk down Frederick Street but just occasionally I would wander along Gloucester Lane. On very, very rare occasions I would walk from Morningside to Bruntsfield before catching a bus.
Every time I walked either to Bruntsfield or own Gloucester Lane I would meet someone I knew and hadn't seen for a long time. I mean every time! Inevitably the other person involved would be taking a different route from their usual one.
Anyhow, that's just the preamble. On the weekend I was doing something outside my usual Saturday routine:- I was doing some gardening! I have some music uploaded to my phone so I was listening on headphones as I chopped away at branches and so on. I have an eclectic taste (and also have the A-level set works on my playlists) and set the tracks to play in a random order, so Status Quo was first (OK, no surprise there) with a song called April, Spring, Summer and Wednesdays. Apart from the "Wednesdays" bit, as it was Saturday, this song seemed an apt way to start the afternoon in an unseasonably hot Edinburgh April.
A couple of tracks followed this until some of Stockhausen's Stimmung performed by the Theatre of Voices came on. Stimmung is an OCR A-level Music set work and I have spent ages taking my students through it, the background to it and related vocal works from the late 20th Century.
It was only when Stimmung came on that I became aware that there was a huge amount of birdsong going on in the gardens surrounding me. The strange thing was that the birds were singing in tune with Stimmung (ie in Bb). Hmm, that's a wierd coincidence I thought....
The next song, straight after Stimmung was a song by Lenny Kravitz called Eleutheria. It starts with a sort of reggae vibe and, as I don't really like reggae, I was going to skip it but, as I had muddy hands, I thought I'd just let it run. Half way through there is the line "birds are singing". Not the most original lyric ever written but quite apt given what I had heard during Stimmung.
Eleutheria (Greek word for "freedom, apparently) also contains the line "bells are ringing" but there were no bells ringing, not even a neighbours intruder alarm.
I was now actively waiting for coincidences to occur. The next one came not long afterwards. As I was using my shovel to get leaves and dust into the bin, Let It Die by Foo Fighters came on.
After a while I was aware that when my shovel hit the tarmac of the driveway, it rang on the third of the tonic chord of Let It Die (I don't know what key it is in and I don't have perfect pitch but my shovel was the third!). It rang clean and true, like a bell ringing. "Bells are ringing" as Kravitz had put it a little earlier...
(Coincidentally, part of the reason I was working in the garden was that there was some overgrowing plants from our next door neighbours and some debris from a now dead plant. Our neighbour had explained that they were going to dig up the dead plant and replace it with something else. My wife later asked me why they had "let it die" as it had very nice blooms in the summer)
A little later I decided it was time to stop, to put the tools away and tidy up. The last song I listened to was Let Love Rule, again by Lenny Kravitz. Just as I was about to enter the house, and just at the chorus, two butterflies flew past, chasing each other in a courtship ritual.
Make of this what you will. Hippy-dippy claptrap? Or proof of some sort of order in the universe? Maybe it ties in with Stockhausen's own beliefs. He believed he was born and educated on the star Sirius and that all human religions have truths which unify. This is one of the reasons for the use of a huge number of deities' names in Stimmung. The names have no hierarchy of importance and each name is really used for the sound it makes. For Stockhausen, each deity is a manifestation of a universal truth.
To finish, here's some more Stockhausen with one of his lectures on human evolution. Have fun...
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