Seastones

Music as Metaphor 

 

In the late 1970's I lived at 35 Harrison Avenue in Northampton. Here's a picture of the house that I took this morning. Like most of the old Victorians in the area during that era, the whole house was broken up into rented rooms. A red arrow points to where my crib was. 

 

 

At the time I was working in an office on Pleasant Street at a job helping to put together the City Directory published by Price & Lee. 

 

Today Harrison Avenue has been transformed by gentrification into one of the most expensive streets in town, but when I lived there it was a student/hippie ghetto where the rents were so cheap you could actually panhandle for a few days and raise the rent. Personally I was above panhandling, being a good capitalist, and so paid the bills with my own marijuana joint selling  business in Pulaski Park. Most of us living at 35 Harrison Avenue were former students who dropped out of college to pursue a life of getting high, getting laid and seeking adventure. 

However there was one person living with us who was a physics major minoring in mathematics. Ours was not a household conducive to serious study. On the contrary, there was loud music at all hours of the day and night and lots of drinking and bonging. Yet the physics major was always in his room studying with the same weird music playing. It didn't even really sound like music, as it was electronic noises and seemingly aimless voices and sounds. One day I asked him about the music, and in doing so found out how he managed to concentrate on his studies. It was also how I discovered Seastones. 

 

 

Seastones is a Grateful Dead record, sort of. It has Dead people on it, in particular Phil Lesh (above) but also Jerry Garcia and Mickey Hart. David Crosby was a participant, as well as Startrippers Grace Slick and David Freiberg. That sounds like a great musical line-up, except that if you didn't read the liner notes you would have a hard time recognizing any of the artists. The "vocals" often consist of a single spoken word that appears at random, and except for the fact that Slick has a female voice, it is impossible to tell who said what word. It sounded to me like musical gibberish, but the physics major urged me to read the liner notes by the composer of the music, a man connected with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named Ned Lagin. When I did so I realized that something very purposeful and intense was behind the sounds on that record. Here's Lagin:

 

seastones sea stones seas tones 

Whenever I walk along the beach, at the magical boundary between land and sea, I find myself, like so many others, picking up stones and pebbles cast up or uncovered by the waves. With wide-eyed wonder, I feel each stone calling out and insisting on being picked up, to be held and experienced. Each one different, with its own shape and color, and surface texture. And each charged with its own mystery and meaning, its own storied experience of the ever changing environmental conditions of the ocean and atmosphere, of rain and heat and cold and wind, of sunlight and darkness, of the passage of individual living beings and of species. Charged, too, with the wildness of billions of nights and days, an immense of "timescape" (time "landscape", time spatialized) under the ocean or buried in the sand (micro-stones) or amongst countless other stones and pebbles. 

 

 

 

The stones and pebbles always seem to contain stories I need to read, parables to think about, meanings to absorb; a different story or parable or meaning radiating out of each and every individual stone. 

 It occurred to Lagin while contemplating these metaphors of nature created by the stones that it might be possible to recreate that kind of multiple time experience with sound arranged in layers, much the way the varying ages and experiences of the seastones are all lying together on the shore.  

From the wild seastones I learned some things I thought (and still think) very important. That every moment, including the multiplicity of present moments, belongs to a greater multiplicity of integrally enclosed contexts. And that beauty could come from a collection of carefully selected (or crafted) moments perceived not as a linear sequence or progression alone, in which the present moment is the consequence of the previous one and the prelude to the coming one, but perceived all at once.   

That of course is exactly what one sees when one looks at seastones in nature lying on the shore, each stone a representation of the vanished time and place when it was formed, lying among stones formed at other times, all combining to represent a mosaic of varying times and places that are united into one moment. 

 

 

During the summer of 1970, I started the sketches that would eventually over the next four years become the formal musical score for the varied and alternative "moment-form" realizations of Seastones. Expressible musical materials (rhythms, pitches, notes, melodic fragments, harmonic clusters and chord patterns, sung and spoken words) were composed into a score of self-contained but musically connected "moment-forms" or timescapes, in many ways metaphorically like the wild sea stones on the sea shore. 

   

My housemate explained that while he studied his physics and math he played Seastones and that the music helped him to focus on his difficult schoolwork. I went out and bought a copy of the record for myself (I found it in a bargain bin) and started listening to it regularly. I found myself feeling as though it helped me to focus as well. Maybe I just imagined it, but my housemate was getting A's in all his courses, so it was hard to be completely skeptical. 

Anyway, I recently got access to a copy of Seastones and intend to start listening to it again. I want to experiment and see if Seastones helps me in general with focusing my mind on the things I want to contemplate most seriously. I'll let you know what my verdict is when I've given it a long enough try. 

 

 

In the meantime, if you're curious to get your own copy of Seastones click here.

 

 

 

It's an American dream, includes Indians too....