It is said that nonhuman animals have no consciousness of their own eventual death. We don’t really know whether this is true, and maybe it’s better left a mystery. Perhaps trees, connected through root networks, understand death on a communal level. In any case, we humans are free to contemplate death, even at times when it doesn’t appear to be imminent. But most of us avoid such thoughts during those precious times when life is not insistently presenting us with suffering and loss.
It is said, also, that modern Western culture is unique in pushing the presence of death far into the background of daily life. We avoid such thoughts because we can. We live longer, with fewer infectious diseases threatening our communities, compared to the world in which previous generations lived. Even as a global pandemic intrudes upon our refuge in the manner of Poe’s Masque of the Red Death, we resist its claim upon our consciousness.
But there are other voices, from religious, philosophical and cultural traditions, insisting that a disinterested awareness of death, or even a sentimental awareness, is good for the soul. And there is a kind of counter-tradition in modern American culture that seems to accommodate the thought of dying, which we can now refer to as ‘mortality salience.’ That term comes from social science, from a subdiscipline called Terror Management Theory, which developed in the early 21st century, following the 2001 terror attacks in the US. Ordinarily, mortality salience appears as a threat to the egoa. But if we can acknowledge that catastrophe is always somewhere within our horizon of possibility, and be comfortable with that awareness, we might become calmer, saner persons.
It is said that death comes upon us like a galloping rider, leaving in its wake a ghostly wind. The bracing chill of that wind can sharpen the mind and focus the will. To this purpose, we have works of art that evoke, directly or indirectly, a sense of mortality. Shifting our focus away from the mundane sequence of busy moments that occupy our attention, they can suggest an interruption of the flow of time, evoking either death itself, or the possibility of another realm, “a life less thick and palpable than ours, warmed with faint fires and sweetened with dead flowers, and measured by low music,” as Swinburne put it in his epic poem Tristram Of Lyonesseb.
Abel Meeropol’s song Strange Fruit, familiar from Billie Holiday’s searingly low-key interpretation1, is explicitly a meditation on death. Meeropol said that the song was inspired by Lawrence Beitler’s grisly photographc of the lynched bodies of two young Black men, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, in Marion Indiana on 7 August, 1930. This was the last reported lynching that was done outside of the South in the US. Meeropol took the liberty of transposing the locale, since at that point mob lynching had become a Southern phenomenon, dedicated to terrorizing Black people. The lyrics draw their power by dwelling not on the injustice, but rather on the eerie contrast of burned and decaying human flesh against the “pastoral” backdrop of poplar and magnolia trees, the moral neutrality of the natural forces of rain, wind and sun, and the crows who pluck the human remains indifferently. The horror of the scene contrasts with the tranquility of the setting, and the languid melody, which is sorrowful and bluesy, and yet withholds the ultimate release that the blues provides, extends that uncanny tension. If Strange Fruit is a protest song, a call to action, it arrives there by way of a profound engagement with stillness and mortality.
Radical acceptance is another adaptive response to suffering and grief. Defined by psychologist Marsha Linehan in 1993 as an element of Dialectical Behavior Therapy,d it encapsulates insights that many age-old traditions have maintained. This same wisdom seems to pervade Dark Was The Night, Cold Was The Ground2, the slide guitar masterpiece recorded by the gospel artist Blind Willie Johnson on 3 December, 1927. It’s based on a hymn, with words by the English cleric Thomas Hawies (1734-1820)e. The hymn text refers to the agony in the garden of Gesthemane, immediately following the last supper, in which Jesus implores God to remove his suffering, and adds that if God wills him to suffer, he will accept it. Johnson’s guitar playing and nearly wordless vocalizing have a similarly imploring tone, as do the few words that he sings, “oh, well... ah, Lord.” The glissandos produced, probably, by sliding a pen knife over the open-tuned strings, have a bell-like timbre, while Johnson’s voice is deep and gravelly; in combination they suggest a reckoning with grief and death. This work has a famous after-story; it was one of 27 pieces of recorded music included on the Voyager Golden Recordf, launched on the Voyager I and II spacecraft in 1977, with the intention of providing an impression of life on earth and human civilization, to be discovered eventually by extra-terrestrial beings. What they will learn about us from Johnson’s music, and how they will hear it, is anybody’s guess.
How can a purely instrumental piece of music convey a mood or an idea such as mortality salience? Composition titles and other clues can help to set up the listener’s experience, but the music itself must somehow elicit a specific emotive response. How this works is something of a mystery, and the relevance of any extra-musical point of reference to the content of the work can be hard to specify. John Coltrane’s Alabama3, an instrumental recorded on 18 November 1963, may have been a response to the Ku Klux Klan’s bombing of the 16th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham two months earlier, but Coltrane, questioned by his producer on that point, deflected, saying "It represents, musically, something that I saw down there translated into music from inside me."n Regarding Coltrane’s dirge-like, gospel-evoking melodic line, Ismail Muhammad wrote in the Paris Review (online edition, 17 June 2020) “It winds its way toward a theme but always stops just short, repeatedly approaching something like coherence only to turn away at the last moment.” g The tune ends, however, with a release, a few bars voiced in a much higher, more impassioned register, before settling back to the somber.
As Mahatma Gandhi had discovered, restraint coupled with urgency can be more impactful than a rage-filled response to oppression. The 16th St. bombing was, in retrospect, one in a continuing series of blows dealt to the body politic of the US in 1963 and beyond. It’s not easy to make music that can function as a response to atrocity, to encompass pain, anger and transcendence all at once. Coltrane’s composition might have been prompted by that horrific incident, while also seeking answers beyond it. ‘Alabama’ has been positioned several times as soundtrack under photo montages in civil rights themed films. To really hear this work, however, it is necessary to take Coltrane’s comment seriously, to jettison the effect of all of these associations, and simply feel the music’s emotional trajectory.
The act of attentive listening can, by itself, refresh the mind. In Morton Feldman’s Durations4, a series of five chamber music pieces published in 1961, a general tempo is indicated, and pitch sequences are given for each instrument, but note values are unspecified, so that each performer must determine their entrances and phrasing. The result is a sparse, continuous stream of sound. Any sense of harmonic or melodic movement is obliterated; one sound simply replaces another. This was the composer’s intention. For the listener, Durations can produce a sense of being in a continuous present moment, a kind of timelessness. In the jazz idiom, Miles Davis achieved something similar in his recording of Wayne Shorter’s tune Nefertiti5, made on 7 June 1967, where Davis and Shorter simply restate and revoice the languid 12-bar melody while the piano, bass and drums improvise variations, gradually becoming freer, more emphatic and inventive behind the impassive horns. Mark Rothko’s untitled paintings of the 1950’s and 60’sh, in each of which a large, indistinctly outlined square, monochrome but varied in density, floats above or sometimes below an equally wide rectangle of another color, do with space what Feldman and Davis do with time, creating fields of color that seem alive and as vast as the horizon, but utterly empty, allowing the viewer to imagine stepping outside the frame of their quotidian perspective.
In Thelonious Monk’s tune Misterioso, the melodic line jumps between two registers separated by the interval of a major sixth, as if a stepwise melody is being doubled on the off beats, which gives an uncanny effect. First recorded in 1948 with Milt Jackson on vibes6, Monk kept Misterioso in his group repertoire, as a basis for blues improvisation. In the 1970’s, after Monk had stopped performing, two versions by other artists appeared which expand on Misterioso’s eeriness, one from 1975 led by Frank Lowe7, with Lester Bowie, Abdul Wadud and Charles Bobo Shaw, and one from 1978 arranged by Heiner Stadler8, With Thad Jones, George Adams, George Lewis, Stanley Cowell, Reggie Workman, Lenny White and Warren Smith. In the Frank Lowe version, the two registers of the melody are divided between the two horns, hocket-style, slowed down and played staccato, like little jump scares, then further slowed to the point of fracture. The Stadler recording takes a similarly deconstructive approach. Workman takes an extended bass solo using a range of techniques, including bent notes and glissandos, culminating in a bowed passage that begins with an altissimo wail, followed by the muted return of the brass. In ratcheting up the dissonance and staccato dynamics implicit in Monk’s tune, these two versions impart a spectral dimension to the blues. That eerie sensation, which seems to intimate grief and death indirectly, is what I call the ghostly sublime.
Like Billie Holiday, the trombonist Grachan Moncur III doesn’t just approach or explore the ghostly sublime, he seems to inhabit it. In the summer of 1963, he spent six weeks by himself, playing and analyzing Thelonious Monk’s compositions, which laid the groundwork for his own compositional practice. The Intellect9, a live recording from 28 March 1965, with vibist Bobby Hutcherson, bassist Cecil McBee and drummer Beaver Harris, comes from a benefit concert at the Village Gate nightclub for Amiri Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theater/School in Harlem. The concert featured John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra’s Arkestra, Betty Carter, Charles Tolliver and Moncur’s group—a who’s who of the jazz avant-garde at that time. Given that Moncur’s was perhaps the least well known of these names, I suspect that his group’s set came early in the lineup. Their other tune, Blue Free, a swinging up-tempo number, probably came first. By contrast, The Intellect has no pulse—Harris’s subtle drumming propels the music without marking off a steady rhythm. There’s a quiet intro on vibes and bowed bass, then a statement of the sparse, mournful-sounding theme, which is built around a three-note descending motif. For the next twenty minutes, the quartet explores the tonal landscape they have laid out, in a series of improvisatory episodes that flow together but don’t necessarily build on one another. Moncur is a diffident-sounding soloist, tending to repeating fragments and sequences, but this reserved quality opens a space for the others to fill in with brilliant ideas. There are a few moments of tension, as when Hutcherson plays accented staccato chords, but the general mood is pensive, shimmering, fluid and unpredictable. By eschewing the impassioned purposefulness that characterizes much of the best jazz performance, they beckon the listener into a sonic refuge from the familiar and the expected.
Judging from his statements and those of his colleagues, Albert Ayler thought of his music as a form of prophecy or revelation. His tunes have titles such as Ghosts, Spirits, Angels, and Truth Is Marching In. The themes are usually short and catchy, often resembling calypsos, anthems or marches, which open into wild, frenzied solos. In Universal Indians10, recorded on 13 February 1968, the four-bar theme, played repeatedly on trumpet by Donald Ayler, is built on a single interval, a perfect fourth, over which Albert vocalizes and plays saxophone honks, squeaks and multiphonics. The theme sounds like a distillation of Taps, or bugle calls in general, and Albert’s embellishments evoke the chaos of an ambush. Yet we can discern no victors in this rout, unless it’s the second law of thermodynamics that emerges triumphant. In this instance, it’s prophecy as satire, mortality salience as gallows humor. By contrast, Omega11 (a.k.a Omega Is The Alpha), from the same recording session, which features Call Cobbs on harpsichord, conjures a self-renewing universe. The theme resembles that of Francois Couperin’s harpsichord piece Le Tic-Toc Choc, ou Les Maillotinsi, which evokes a clockwork automaton, but this may be coincidental.
One of Ornette Coleman’s first jobs as a saxophonist was in a nightclub in his native Fort Worth, TX that served as a front for gambling and prostitution operations. The recklessness, violence and exploitation that he saw there made him wonder whether the rhythm and blues music that he was playing might be “adding to all that suffering.” He believed that music can have a moral valence, and his playing and writing evolved as a search for a sound that would be both pleasing and uplifting. He took to bebop as an alternative, and then developed his own idiosyncratic style, abandoning the chord-based harmonic structure of modern jazz, but retaining much of the emotive flavor of blues, and its vocabulary of bent notes, off-beat phrases and repeated riffs. Richard Brody has called this sound “avant-gutbucket.j”
In a conversation from 1997 with the French philosopher Jacques Derridak, Coleman explained the inspiration for what is probably his most famous composition, Lonely Woman12, which his quartet recorded on 22 May 1959. "Before becoming known as a musician, when I worked in a big department store, one day, during my lunch break, I came across a gallery where someone had painted a very rich white woman who had absolutely everything that you could desire in life, and she had the most solitary expression in the world. I had never been confronted with such solitude, and when I got back home, I wrote a piece that I called Lonely Woman." In this telling, the young shelf stocker recognizes the loneliness and yearning in the expression of the painting’s subject, in spite of the trappings of opulence. Obliterating the social gap that separates him from this rich white lady, he transmits to his music a recognizably universal emotion.
Lonely Woman’s melody consists of two phrases, one of twelve bars and the other of eight, played in an AABA pattern. The A phrase builds to a climax with two sets of descending semitones followed by a resolving cadence. This melody, which listeners almost invariably describe as “haunting,” is as memorable as that of any classic popular tune. Coleman’s solo on the 1959 recording is fairly brief in comparison to the thematic sections that it is sandwiched between. The last statement of the theme is a slight variation, leading to a two-bar coda. It seems that deep empathy and mortality salience are both in effect in this work, convening a universal community of solitudes.
Coleman’s recorded solos gradually grew longer and more complex. He recorded The Garden of Souls13 during a 29 April 1968 session with Dewey Redman on tenor sax and Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones—John Coltrane’s long-time collaborators—on bass and drums. In contrast to the 1959 Lonely Woman, the solos tell most of the story here. The theme consists of one phrase, played twice, leading immediately into Ornette’s eight-minute solo, followed by a brief solo from Redman and a restatement of the theme. Ornette’s solo is bluesy, lyrical and joyous. It seems to unfold like a gently persuasive argument. Redman’s entrance, in which he produces multiple tones by humming and blowing into the mouthpiece simultaneously, is eerie and startling but somehow perfectly apt. The restatement of the theme again leads to a brief but eloquent coda from Ornette. Comparing The Garden of Souls with Lonely Woman, one senses that years of deep exploration led to greater coherence as well as a hard-won tranquility in his playing.
Mantra14, recorded on 26 Jan 1970, is the capstone of Alice Coltrane’s album Ptah, The El Daoud. Its chief characteristics, as I hear it, are synthesis and exaltation. In place of a theme there are chords, articulated collectively in a manner that seems to present them as elemental vibrations. Then two tenor saxes, Joe Henderson and Pharoah Sanders, begin to converse over an accompaniment that swings more deliberately than any of the other performances that I’ve discussed. Henderson plays an ascending sequence of descending minor thirds, as Sanders fills in the chords behind him, and then Henderson lets loose a John-Coltrane-like stream of notes. Henderson and Sanders have effectively swapped styles here, or rather, as Sanders shows when he takes the lead voice, combined their two very different methods of structuring a performance. Alice Coltrane’s playing likewise builds on blues, gospel, marches and bebop, but rather than pastiche, the combination produces a stylistic alloy strong enough to support the spiritual aspiration that she intended to present in this music. Taking the Ptah The El Daoud album as a whole, mortality salience becomes a step on the path to enlightenment.
Music does many things. It enlivens poetry, it beckons us to dance, it punctuates various public acts and rituals. It primes us, somehow, to be receptive to changing our emotional states. Although its purpose and function have been debated for millennia, we still don’t know exactly how listening to music affects our awareness. In Ornette Coleman’s account of his writing Lonely Woman, for instance, we follow a chain of feelings and reactions extending from the sitter to the artist to the painting to the composer to the musical idea to the musicians to the performance to the recording, all the way through (as Charles Olsenm put it) to the listener. Note that each step in this process is a translation, an analogy, an activation or an approximation. The listener’s reaction upon hearing the record, which is the final link of this chain, does not depend on comprehending the contents of the previous links, as long as something is felt.
Stravinsky, in An Autobiography, wrote that “music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc. Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence.”l In other words, something that the composer or performer imagines or feels may serve as inspiration, but the score, or the performance, does not contain that imagery or feeling, and cannot transmit it directly to the listener. Music does not encode its meaning in the way that language and imagery do. And yet, we can be moved by it, and even, somehow, learn from it. In the absence of a satisfactory account of how music operates on the listener, metaphors such as those I’ve explored here, alongside close attention to the moment-by-moment structure of musical performances, can point us towards a partial understanding of how music can affect not just what we feel, but also what we understand, and how we face even our greatest challenges.
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