Cartography and Musical Forms

There’s a moment, as the conductors arms rise, a pause, that a musical piece is a nebula of possibility. The conductor’s arms dictate the tempo — he places an abstract score (ink on the page) into the physical world of vibrations, of time, sound. The musicians prepare to play the piece. He prepares to play the musicians. Arms up and he is an intermediary of idea to form. All focused through a pause. Arms up and —
That’s the western classical model of carving out wonder from possibilities in sound. On another hand, Jazz works from the heart and coordinates intuitions as explorations. Another: Rock follows old poetic structures and invokes a communal experience on 4/4 beats, scales, narrative pull and the energy of a band pushing themselves to a physical limit.
The blues: existential incantation. Salsa: movement as sacred play.
Traditional Lanna music shares tempo, movement, and phrasing with kickboxing, dance, and ceremony: it’s centering diction being Theravada Buddhist mantras, which in turn migrate from chants, deep human vibrations, world building connections of sound and consciousness.
The hopeful melancholy embedded into Traditional Irish music is only a stones throw away from the geography, the poetry, and mythic stories of Ireland. When performed on stage it loses some of it power. It is meant for a surrounding of people, often joining in, as each song maintains an incompleteness in its composition; a readiness for others around to sing. Like melancholy itself: which waits for others to harmonize in the openness, a recognition of a good sorrow, a moment’s belonging amdist all the nights alone. It begins with one, and spirals outward, until even the hearth appears to inflect the oldest harmony — one of warmth, of cold, of silence.
The world over, in order to compose music, a composer needs to make an initial step towards form: small order from large chaos: drawing tempo or tune from a somewhere: carving out a piece of wonder from a deliberate movement in space: against a time signature, from an understanding of the world, horizoned with the potential of silence.
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To my mind, cartography starts in a similar way. A living person adapts a sensory experience into a collapsed presentation — two dimensional maps, annotated, marked, typed, with routes, depths, heights, or artistic embellishments. By some method of mind the map marker charts our many dimensional world. Then makes it comprehendible at scale. Through listening and analysis: a flow of decisions about distinctions, borders and names, prominence, a dictionary to show best what reality is already offering, what needs remembering.
A traveler is both the conductor and musician of topography: in movement he or she finds tempo in a map’s score, deciding route like melody, returning the cartographer’s vision to place. A path is a song of, on the landscape. Walking is a needle drop; a improvisational moment; an embodied sutra; an orchestra recreating from ink, an instance of reverie.
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— the conductors arms drop. A harmony rings out. The traveler starts from a somewhere, moves into rhythm, rain hits the store windows. Following a winding, imagined route with the water. He walks a forgotten creek’s path down to the river. An old, already half remembered song. One that hadn’t been played much since this city rose up where the forest once stood.

