Tag: Music

The Ethnomusicology of the Last Dreadnought by Yoon Ha Lee

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Ethnomusicology of the Last Dreadnought by Yoon Ha Lee (The Sunday Morning Transport, 5th February 2023) starts with this:

It is not true that space is silent.
The darkness between stars is full of threnodies and threadbare laments, concertos and cantatas, the names of the dead and the wars that they’ve fed. Few people are unmoved by the strenuous harmonies and the strange hymns. Fewer people still understand their significance, the decayed etymologies and deprecated tongues.
It is your solemn task, as an archivist of the last dreadnought, to preserve its unique ethnomusicology for rising generations.

After this portentous start the rest of the story develops the idea of a space dreadnought as a musical instrument and its battles as performances:

In any case, the plan directed the last dreadnought, with its hypertrophied weapons, to open with a power chord against the more discordant forces of the Diamantines’ enemies. The orchestration manuals of the day called for a ratio of a single dreadnought to one hundred battle cruisers or equivalent. The percussion line alone should have demolished the other side, especially with the chimera missiles deployed as a basso continuo.

An unconvincing idea, and one made worse by the style, which seems to be a weird mix of pretentious academese and instruction manual.
* (Mediocre). 1,500 words. Story link.

An Important Failure by Rebecca Campbell

Posted on by Paul Fraser

An Important Failure by Rebecca Campbell (Clarkesworld, August 2020) begins (after a data dump about a particularly dense form of wood last formed in the Little Ice Age) with a man called Mason going to the illegal felling of a centuries old Sitka spruce in Canada—one of the last trees of its vintage in the world due to climate change effects (wildfires, etc.). After the men he has arranged to meet have cut down the tree, Mason daydreams about apprenticing to a luthier (violin maker) in Italy before going to select the section of wood he wants.
In the years that follow Mason ends up working for a Canadian luthier called Eddie, and during this period a teenage virtuoso called Delgado comes to prominence in their area. When she is thirteen she gets a loan of a very high quality violin (it is made with the dense Little Ice Age wood mentioned in the opening of the story).
Eddie is the Canada Council for the Arts’ custodian for the instrument, so he and Mason become professionally connected to Delgado. Then, when Delgado’s three year loan expires, she has to return the instrument. Mason sees her bitterness about the loss, and determines to make her a replacement.
Most of the remainder of the story takes place over the following years, a period of continued environmental degradation that sees Mason improve his violin making skills, take trips back home to see his friend Jacob and a woman called Sophie, and harvest the various woods he needs to make a violin for Delgado (he saves money for some of the last Nigerian ebony in the world, scavenges old furniture, and, later on in the story, badly damages his shoulder when he falls out of a willow tree while felling it for material).
Eventually, a decade and a half later later, Mason finally completes the violin after he (sacrilegiously, to him) robs a part off of another instrument. By this point Eddie is near death’s door, and Delgado, when she turns up at their shop, now has her own child. She admires the violin that Mason has created and plays it for him and Eddie. Finally, she asks who it is for, and it shocked when she realises that Mason has made it for her. After she has finished her protestations, she asks what name Mason has given the violin. He thinks for a moment about everything that has gone before, and what may lie ahead:

Mason heard the oceanic crash of falling spruce, his own cry as he hit the dirt at the base of a shining willow in Stanley Park. The market garden and the homestead, the lake, the abandoned subdivisions and the burn lines that still showed through the underbrush, the ghost forests, the dead black teeth of what had once—a long time ago—been a rainforest. And among them, Jacob still cutting lumber and helping out at the garage when he could, fishing and hunting. Sophie in the greenhouses and the gardens, with her new Garry oak trees and her transfigured arbutus, the beetle-resistant spruce that would never, ever, be the kind of tonewood he wanted. The firebreaks of trembling aspen, the return of cougars. The steady erosion of human shapes: foundations and roads all lost to the burgeoning forest.
“Nepenthe?”
As he said it, he wasn’t sure what it meant: a physick that would make the end easier; a draft of healing medicine.

The coda of the story, which presumably takes place after Eddie and Mason are dead, and after even more environmental chaos, sees Delgado as a grandmother who has had to flee inland with her family after the failure of the seawall where she previously lived. Delgado considers whether to give the instrument to her daughter or her granddaughter, realising that one of them will be the first to hear the instrument’s richest, fullest tone.
This is an elegiac and bittersweet story about, I think, how humanity survives and adapts in a collapsing or changing world, and perhaps about how we hold on to what is important to us. It is a very good piece (it won the 2021 Theodore Sturgeon Award) but, if I have one quibble, it is that the beginning of the story should have started with the felling of the Sitka spruce, and the rest of that section shortened somewhat, or at least rearranged (the story takes some time to get going).
**** (Very Good). 9,600 words. Story link.

Christmas Trombone by Raymond E. Banks

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Christmas Trombone by Raymond E. Banks (F&SF, January 1954) is set in a future world where Venusian creatures called “singing cones” can curate and produce “wafer thin discs of Venusian heavy water” which store perfect musical recordings. The story’s main character, Shorty, is an ex-musician who was put out of work by the cones, and the tale begins with him grabbing his trombone from the cupboard and going down to the church on Christmas Eve. On his way there, the chief of police, who has previously warned Shorty about playing in public (“disturbing the peace” in this new musical world), confiscates the instrument.
Shorty continues on to the church to exchange gifts with the clergyman, Dr Blaine, who asks if he will be coming to the service. Shorty tells him no, as Blaine has a singing cone to provide music:

Dr. Blaine took him by the arm and led him into the nave.
Across from them rested the only true singing cone in Blessington. It was almost eight feet high, a tapering mound of pure whiteness, just as it had been on Venus. It “lived” on sound, not talking voices, not explosions or discords. It “lived” on music adding every sweet sound it heard to its repertoire until all its water was solidified and it could no longer hear and remember.
[. . .]
“Here,” said Dr. Blaine, “I’ve got all the great artists who ever recorded Christmas music, Shorty. The best voices, the best arrangements.”
“I know.”
“People need the solemn pageantry of the greatest church music to find the Christmas spirit in these commercial times.”
“Yeah.”
“This cone was a foot-high mound on Venus the night Christ was born in Bethlehem, Shorty. It’s been on earth now for twenty years, adding only the purest and best church music to its being.”
“It’s only been in Blessington five years,” said Shorty, “while I been here 45, man, boy and molecule.”
Dr. Blaine sighed. “Nobody wants the old choir and organ anymore, Shorty. When the cone plays we go back along the centuries to Bethlehem, we watch the miracles beside the Red Sea, we are in the room where the Last Supper was served and we walk with Christ up that final hill—”
“A couple of times I got ’em pretty excited with that old organ you got stashed in the basement.”
“Then play for the cone, Shorty,” said Dr. Blaine. “Play for the cone and make it hear and remember your notes alone with the world’s best musicians.”  pp. 120-121

Shorty doesn’t engage, and tells Blaine his air car needs a new rotor blade (Shorty now works as a mechanic).
The next part of the story sees Shorty arguing with his wife Edith, who tells him he needs to move on, and stop being so bitter about the fact that he has been replaced by the cones. Shorty angrily leaves the apartment and goes to the police station where, after some chit-chat with the desk cop, he slugs him and retrieves his trombone.
The last scene (spoiler) sees Shorty go up a hill near the town and play his trombone, a few notes of Joy to the World. Then he hears the cone at the church play a few of his notes back to him. Shorty starts playing Silent Night:

The cone was silent, listening. He could feel its presence in the background. A moment before it had been scouring out the valley with its sound. Now it was comparing his notes with all the wonderful music stored in its memory.
Softly, you son-of-a-bitch, he told himself. This is final. Shorty, by God, now we’ve got to do the thing!
For 45 seconds he reached the great plane of art that he’d been trying to reach all his life. For 45 seconds he made music that no human or nonhuman agency had ever made before or would ever make again. It was one of those moments. It was clear and clean, human but not gooey. It was one tiny notch more than satisfactory.  pp. 124-125

After Shorty has finished and listens to the cone playing his music back to him, he realises that, after comparing his performance to everything it has stored, the cone has changed nothing (“In Bethlehem, on Venus and beyond to outer space it was a thing of perfect uniqueness.”)
Shorty, finally at peace with himself, throws his horn away.
The story’s cone gimmick is a little artificial (and confusing to begin with) but the last scene is very good, and the story’s arc of a troubled soul finding solace works well in this Christmas tale. One for the ‘Best of the Year’ lists, perhaps.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 3,900 words. Story link.