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Marriage/Disease/Divorce and Why Am I As I Am With Women?
Marriage, Disease, Divorce, seven-part poem read to trombone improvisations against scored pieces for K2000 synthesizer. Mike Heffley text, composition, voice, trombone, synthesizer. First public performance at Wesleyan Composers Concert 1994.
Heffley: This piece reflects my interest in exploring trombone timbres with synthesized sounds, improvisations with a taped piece, and the ways words and story can work with the music.
Yul Agee: The next pair of single CDs--this one and Why Am I As I Am With Women?--brings us to the first discussed so far of Heffley’s original music. That first is a vast extension of the synth work begun with the first CD discussed (Nine Medieval Troubador/Goliard Songs); the second builds on all the piano, trombone, and vocal-lyrical work begun with The Oily Daze, before Songs of Nature and Love and Double Bill Heavens. The piano work on Why Am I is thus significant for preceding the covers we heard on those later piano trio & solo CDs).
Marriage’s substance as “vast extension” stems from the time Heffley had in the studio, and used to optimum advantage. Like Troubador, it was born under the aegis of a class project; unlike, it allowed for three months rather than one week of unlimited access to both hardware and software.
Also like Troubador, the aesthetic it plied to the synth--the same K-2000 model--was that of the free improviser. Heffley ignited each of the seven pieces of music here by making computer soundfiles of dozens of spontaneous, experimental improvs on the grand piano preset, then picking the ones he deemed most successful, during the first few weeks of the project. Then he set about altering each not only by assigning the real-time notes to the preset sounds he felt most suited them, as he’d done in Troubador, but by synthesizing his own sounds, then combining them, reconfiguring and multiplying the combinations, juxtaposing, inverting, diverting, collaging and transmutating in other various ways aided and abetted by the technology. The result is a brilliant gem (given the artist’s relative newness to the gear) of technical command, reach, and chance at creative play.
Once the electronic part was in place as substrate, Heffley wrote the text to each part against it. The process was to play the music on a loop while freewriting the thoughts and inner visions the music suggested--sketching, then developing and refining them to completion. What began as a thick poetic image jungle morphed in rewrites into a narrative, as such things will do.
Emerging thus unplanned, organically so, it reflected the thing weighing most heavily on Heffley’s mind, in his life, at the time...at the same time remaining in the background, in the flashes and gleams of the music’s twists and turns, seizing center stage overtly only at crucial moments of meaning. After the tale had told itself to its teller, he knew what to title it. Absent that tripartite metaphor of an afterthought, we might never have suspected his narrative to be one of (his own) “marriage, disease [?], divorce.”
The piece as literary statement also reflects the themes of Heffley’s concern in his early Western music and American songbook CDs, explored in their notes, of romantic and family love’s ups and downs. While more the “text painting,” or long prose-poem set to music than a song, the narrative arc it does convey, as experienced from the inside, reads as follows:
1. "Unbodied, I am Without Eyes"
A disembodied awareness floats in space somewhere in the vicinity of Earth and its sun. The far-off stars compare in size and visual impact to their own (and all) light’s photons, up close. The words spoken slow and deep by Heffley’s male voice reflect, resonate with, allude to the sounds that chart this place.
The awareness moves...toward Earth? It seems so...yet hovering and still in the busy thick of “empty” space’s plenum of energy: consciousness’s core, its unbodied preceptor.
Does awareness move volitionally?...or does it rather drift? Is its no-body, skeletoned by mutually negating void and plenum, on the brink of plunging, or of being plunged to the planet?
2. "We Move, my Beloved Enemy and I"
Ohhh...: something new. The float and flurry have organized themselves around a beat, a meter...a slow up-and-down four. Whatever that may mean, it is followed by a second new thing: Heffley’s age-darkened silver Bach trombone, a slide tenor horn, light and fleet of foot.
(This is the first we’ve heard of it in our parade of his CDs through our words about them...far from the last.)
He is audibly improvising this line--unmuted, gently, softly--having prepared for the performance in his usual way, by playing to the music until it was internalized, there for him to feel his way through automatically, unthinkingly. This duo with the synth lasts long enough to familiarize us with the new voice of the horn and its extension of the organic and spontaneous nature of the human voice, both in contrast to the (relatively) more fixed and encompassing cosmos of the electronics.
Heffley’s first return of words and voice to the piece tells us he is not alone in his disembodied hover: now he and a “beloved enemy” are both moving and being moved both “by the draw of gravitational intrigue” (a two-word image he picked up from Braxton’s writing). The piece’s trinity--self (voice, male), other (trombone, fe/male [both low and high), and world (synth)--has thus been established.
As the track unfolds, the story told is that of the journey from cosmic spirituality to earthly incarnation, in order to have a fight to the death, and then a flight back to spiritual life together. We are regaled with a succession of more and smaller details of the planet: Nature, as the descent through clouds, mountain tops, forests, and seas finally lights on the human scale, of a “Dust Bowl shack” in need of repair (Heffley’s grandparents and mother moved from Oklahoma to California before his birth). The narrator loses sight of his fellow traveler in this process, but never faith in her (?) presence and proximity. He regains the sight in the moment of losing it again, after this track’s richness of vision, at the moment his last line defines as their “well-twinned birth.”
3. "And That was a Fall, to a Snare"
The music changes radically to reflect the sense and spirit of the words, slipping and sliding, flying and falling, at the mercy of the monkey wrenches of gravity and flesh added to the consciousness of the floating cosmic I. She--trombone, other, beloved enemy--who never was a preset, is no longer present; the man and his world talk about her rather than to her, as always, present or not. We hear the shock and horror in both tone and tale; he didn’t know what he was getting into...didn’t know it would be so raw, crazy, volatile, strange...didn’t know how long time could take once in it (outside it, in infinity, it looked so much less than infinite)...didn’t know he could feel both love and hate so intensely, each so fast on the other’s heels, even simultaneously...yet he did know there was no going back now, only through. The baby, conceived but not aborted, must bear life and grow, to die. The couple howls from InFancy on, with in their “mutual longing and loathing”...
4. "Once Bitten, Ever Shy"
The young man, grown but still a virgin (archetypally...not yet married, archetypally), must love and marry in earnest. “Bitten” by life and the world--childhood over, manhood about to commence--he shies away from both by the very act of giving himself to them. He does so by knowing life and world, naming them, finding his place in them and planting himself there like a seed. Their East, their West (North and South unmentioned, implied): Nature, again, now incarnate, personalized to him. Once plumbed so, mystery dies into new knowledge; the lover dies of his love, into it, thus shying away from it for good. He pulls his horn, the twomban, into that fate with him...or rather she pulls him...or rather they both drift together, and into it...
5. "It's Hard On Ruth"
Ruthlessly devoted to his husband love, he makes the strongest peace with his Beloved Enemy, the peace that must match and surpass the strongest war. sHe brings art into the discussion...Ruth (someone’s name? more? less?) is both the subject and object of his discourse.
Once expressed, marriage then gives way to divorce (the disease we never really hear about, directly). Both states start as personal issues, topics...and emerge in the talk as social, historical, transpersonal--impersonal--ones. This leaves the bitterest tone and taste in the mouth of the person, the man; what social-historical “ship” must he board (and risk going down with) as the bearer of his now-broken person/heart? Nature--as shoreless ocean now, it seems--is superceded by an unwelcome but necessary Culture--the ship--which he has plumbed and discerned even more thoroughly, though not with the same pleasure, as he had Nature.
6. "Blest be the Ties Unbound"
The title signals it: the only shore possible now, where such ships that pass each other in their nights can dock, is separation, death...disincarnation, disembarkment from the ship of culture to the state of nature, where life and death cease to be “issues.” We are back to the same measured pace the second track began...only now the trombone voice seems superfluous, irritating, not belonging; the male voice and synth (Miles Davis once called it an instrument that could sound the “world chord” when he first started playing it himself), we feel, is all we should be hearing...they’re vibrating, harmonizing in pleasing sync, while the trombone is just a wah-wah-blah-blah noise on the side (think of the sound of the adults in the animated Peanuts TV specials). Still, it hangs in there as if it did belong, and gradually it comes to, merges with the others again.
The man’s narrative to which it does so explains the process: he is facing his loss, summing up the love and marriage, saying his divorce’s goodbyes...and as he does so, the woman is reintegrated into his psyche, internalized, where she started, in a union born to split and reunite. This is the man in midlife renouncing the world, family, erotic and philial love, turning to God, the forest, the path to his grave, long or short as it may be.
Heffley’s trombone style does lend itself to some kind of woman’s voice. Like Miles Davis’s wounded cry, or Anthony Braxton’s whimpers and whines, it often swoops up into a high-register moan—something like a cat who’s learned (preternaturally, but truly) to change his nighttime yowl into a lone wolf’s howl, or an elephant enraged at the outrage of some small poacher’s attack. Other times it’s as soft and gentle as Nat Cole’s voice gone lady-high; although it moves just as naturally through the low and medium ranges, even there it avoids the blatt and bluster the horn more usually attracts to itself. His work with the bucket and the harmon mutes likewise compare better with female than with male voices. We will see this brassy feminism play out in other ways in the later CDs.
The measured pace winds down. Having lived the marriage, the disease, the divorce; having been thrown Heidegger-like into such life helpless and willy-nilly, to then struggle and suffer there to find some sense of control, power, place; having then found as much of all three as he knew he ever would, in surrender and loss even more than triumph and gain...only to find himself a captive of his own designs and force, borne along by the “ship” they had become, as helpless a passenger as he was when first born...he reflects on that fate, on his love and beloved/enemy (his killer/victim, the [archetypal] Woman who withdrew her body from his love). The ship of his personal state he speaks of as a church; it is all relationship, all community, starting from the marriage and radiating outward to all more populous collectives...all those impersonal banks personal identity draws on, deposits to...the community of saints, of friends, of artists and scholars, of professionals and amateurs, of anything and everything...he withdraws all he can from them--his body, himself--and takes his leave.
7. "Unbodied, My Eye is now We"
Note how the male voice is slightly higher here (an electronic effect, slight raise of the pitch). Also, the sound of the synth is re-panned to be more spacious, more surrounding, untroubled by the pesky bone. The metered beat is done with, he’s back hovering in roughly the same place as he started. Shall he dive or drift in again? No, no more life-and-death-wheeling-and-dealing...enlightenment is the next stop, away from both gravity-dark earth and light-heavy sun...to more distant, lighter lights, through more intimate darks. That thought ends with a “brass” solo--the synth, sounding like a trumpet, or the spirit of a trombone dialed way up...
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Tracklisting of HR002
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