The Songbook

Essay

The Songbook is the most autobiographical of the Church’s books, although I do not think of it primarily as autobiography. It is a book of songs and of the circumstances through which songs become possible: people, places, instruments, churches, recordings, mistakes, imitations, periods of isolation, and moments when music seems to arrive from somewhere other than the person supposedly making it.

The manuscript presently begins on Amboy Road in Wonder Valley, driving through the desert at night. Spatial movement begins to dissolve into repetition—the painted lines, the headlights, the darkness—and a low vibration gradually becomes music. What appears is a choir singing in such complete unison that no individual voice can be separated from another. It is one and many. The strangest conclusion of the scene is that the music somehow knows me better than I know myself.

A few years earlier, after a long period of musical isolation, the vice president of Copper Mountain College asked whether I would be interested in leading a choir. I said yes. She introduced me to Mariana, a singer who worked at the college, and we began talking about what such a choir might become. Then I lost my job there and the choir never happened.

Something better happened instead. Mariana invited me to church.

It was a small Black church in Desert Hot Springs. I went once, heard the music, and almost immediately they asked me to return with my guitar and amplifier. For quite some time afterward I played there every Sunday. That remains the best musical experience of my life.

Sometimes the band would slip into shouting music, or what people there called “going to church.” The beat went double time and everybody began playing harder. The preacher played Hammond organ. When he could not hear enough of himself he would open the door of the Leslie cabinet and the organ would become enormous. Jay would hit the drums harder. Everybody would turn up.

One Sunday Elder Fermer, who led the worship band and sang lead, began dancing around the outside perimeter of the sanctuary. She ran, skipped, shouted and sang around the room several times while the band lost itself in the music.

That experience became a song called El Olam—God Everlasting—part of the Names of God project.

“All Creation Choir” is a line from this song. It became a point of connection with the choir on Amboy Road as I wrote the essay.

The song asks God to become the heartbeat of the song. It asks to be released from what has already been and from what is still to come. The voice asks to enter the never-ceasing all creation choir, and eventually names El Olam as having no beginning and no end.

The phrase has a Kierkegaardian meaning for me. Something that merely continues forever still belongs to ordinary duration. It began and then failed to stop. But the only thing that truly has no end is that which also has not begun.

There is no rational route from the finite to such a thing. Nothing in the senses secures it. Abstract deliberation does not produce it. Faith gives no reward in advance that would make faith reasonable. It establishes a relation with an impossible phantom while exposing the individual who enters that relation to every kind of ridicule.

El Olam is divided into two approximately equal parts.

Part A is recognizable as a song in the conventional sense. It has a Bolanesque rock-and-roll rhythmic contour, verses, chorus, bridge, changes, modulation, climax and resolution. It takes about five minutes. It moves forward through differentiation. Something happens because something else happened before it. Expectations arise, are delayed, altered or fulfilled. The music proceeds toward an ending and eventually produces one.

Then the song has, in one sense, finished.

Part B begins.

Almost all of the formal complexity contracts into a short, very funky instrumental cycle. It is dance music. And it continues for approximately as long as the entire song that preceded it.

The asymmetry of information and equality of duration are important. Part A spends five minutes going somewhere. Part B spends five minutes continuing.

The groove contains no internal demand to end. Once it exists, another cycle is always possible. It stops because the recording stops. The tape runs out, so to speak. The boundary is imposed materially from outside the musical logic of the groove.

Part A is finite by composition. Part B is finite by capture.

And Part B returns the song to Elder Fermer’s dance.

The first half can sing about El Olam. It can name the eternal, develop propositions about it, move through changes and finally resolve. But no amount of musical or conceptual development can produce a rational bridge to that which has neither beginning nor end.

The transition requires another practice.

You dance.

This is one reason I have started thinking of music as a technology of traversal. I do not mean a device for transporting something else. Music is closer to an encoded practice of passage. Its rhythms, repetitions, harmonic movements, physical gestures and formal expectations organize ways of moving through time and space.

Those two dimensions cannot really be separated. Music unfolds irreversibly in time, but sound always happens somewhere. It crosses a room. Walls reflect it. Bodies absorb it. Amplifiers establish positions and pressures. Open the Leslie cabinet and the spatial event changes; the drummer responds; the band changes; what happens next in musical time has been altered by what just happened in space.

Music traverses time by occupying space, and traverses space by spending time.

A song can therefore be something one enters and goes through again. Its identity need not consist in reproducing an identical sonic object. The structure provides enough continuity for another traversal while leaving open what that traversal will become.

We have begun using the word phonescence for this process: the coming of music into determination without the process ever quite concluding. To phonesce is to enter that becoming; something phonescent has acquired enough form to be heard while remaining capable of further determination.

A performance ends. Phonescence does not necessarily end with it.

A recording fixes something. It does not establish that nothing further can happen.

The manuscript was already circling this problem when it described recorded media as a disk spinning in place against the inherent linearity of musical time: there is only the present, and a spinning disk.

The album is therefore important precisely because it gives a finite body to something that exceeds that body. For the music of this church, the album rather than the isolated song is the basic unit. An album preserves sequence, performance, instrumentation, period, accident and atmosphere. It establishes one substantial determination of the music.

But it does not conclude the music.

El Olam makes this unusually clear because the song is still very much inside the musical present. The band has not learned it yet. Its collective form does not yet exist. What it becomes when other musicians begin inhabiting it remains unknown.

I also almost always compose songs in pairs. I like the thought that a new song should have a sibling, so that it has something else to learn from rather than having to learn only from me. Two songs begin changing one another. Their structures, moods and demands become part of each other’s developmental environment before the band has even entered the process.

This complicates authorship. The person writing the song is doing real work, but the song quickly acquires relations that the writer did not originate and cannot completely control.

There is another temporal experience of melody that I have noticed throughout my adult life and have never known quite how to describe.

A melody can gather up a stretch of life.

Suppose a melody belongs somehow to the fall of 2022. Years later, hearing or playing it may not return me to any particular event. Instead, it can gather together disparate experiences from those months—rooms, drives, people, weather, anxieties, habits, expectations, things that never occurred together—and present them as a single temporal formation.

The resulting experience is new. That precise aggregation never existed when the period was being lived.

And yet it is immediately familiar.

The comparison with Proustian involuntary memory is obvious, but melody does something slightly different from a scent or taste. Melody already possesses temporal organization. It does not simply trigger the appearance of something past. To hear it is to move through a sequence again.

Melody can articulate a chronotope.

It does not recover the past intact. It gathers what time left dispersed and gives the dispersion a new form.

This is another kind of traversal. A few notes can carry an organization of lived time across years and allow some part of that organization to become operative inside another present. The old world is not restored. It becomes traversable from somewhere it could never originally have anticipated.

The inverse occurs whenever I write something new.

Every time I write a new song I have essentially the same thought: the world was a different place before this song existed.

And I cannot go back there.

This does not mean that the song has changed the external world in any dramatic way. The room may be the same. The people are the same. The roads outside are the same. But there is now a melodic, rhythmic and harmonic relation that did not exist for me before. Once I have heard it, I cannot become again the person who has never heard it.

A new song creates me anew each time.

So the relation between music and time moves in both directions. A melody can gather a vanished period into a temporal form that did not exist while that period was happening. But the arrival of a new melody also changes the person who will someday remember the present through it.

The song makes a new past at the same moment that it opens a new future.

This may be why the problem of authorship in The Songbook eventually becomes a problem of ownership. The manuscript begins from the apparently useless labor of making music at all: the hours spent recording, the expense of equipment, the maintenance of instruments, the effort required to bring something into existence even when no audience or external reward could justify doing it. It concludes that asking music to become something else in order to earn its keep is already a mistake.

The musician works. The musician chooses. The musician practices, records, revises and performs.

But if the process was already underway before any one musician entered it, and if it continues after any one determination has been made, then the musician cannot plausibly own the process itself.

That belongs to the muse.

The muse is not merely another word for inspiration. The muse names what can be entered but cannot be originated.

A musician can make a song.

The musician cannot make music begin.

And when the groove finally stops, it may only be because the tape has run out.