As a cue from both Boubacar Traore and John Fahey, I spend a lot of time with my left ear pressed against the body of my guitar. Especially when I'm writing. I've discussed the Chorus Effect once before, and I didn't do it justice. The physics here are integral to Oltremare, both as an abstract composition and a throbbing mammal experience. The key concept is Sympathetic Resonance, something that just happens to relate directly to the origin and nature of the Universe as you and I know it.
For now, though, just listen to this great live version of Oltremare by the composer himself...
Listen to the huge floating cloud of sympathetic resonance that reveals itself whenever Einaudi pauses. Listen to how it actually, audibly moves. You can hear those final notes spreading out in both directions and through specific, radiating intervals. It's gorgeous beyond words and it perfectly illustrates two completely different stories about the history of music theory. The first one starts in the Sahara.
The kora is considered a hybrid instrument by musicologists who should know better. The instrument is not a "world music" curiosity but a proud & unbroken cultural lineage. It exists in a generational ecosystem of luthiers, musicians and ritual context. The Mande Jali knew about counterpoint harmony, pentatonic modes, and tonal gravity a thousand years ago -- yet music history gives Africa curiously shallow treatment.
Let's begin with an important addition the ancient griots made to the fundamental recipe of wood and strings: goat flesh. While your guitar is built around a resonant chamber constructed entirely out of dead trees, the kora is built out of something more like a drum head: a taut membrane of treated goat skin stretched over a calabash frame.
When critics refer to Toumani Diabate's recorded work as "African classical music" I think that owes just about everything to the huge waves of sympathetic resonance the kora can summon. It's not so much the ornamentation and chord changes as the raw sound itself. The tonal space is unmistakeably similar to a piano, especially in the midrange counterpoint lines (umbengo, non?) -- less so on the droning bass dives. The high end has the short, stabbing attack and almost instant decay that gives the kora away as a harp instrument. It's worth noting that, connected to sufficient signal chains at sufficient amplitudes, the kora becomes something very different and probably superior to all other stringed creatures. That's not what this is about, though.
Let's bring it back to pianos. Big, booming, beautiful and expensive ass pianos. There is a remarkable amount of foot action going on in apparently simple pieces like Oltremare, but our TV generation has been trained since birth to watch hands, closely. Piano players make their art faces and caress with cultivated care, but come on, the basics of a piano trigger escape mechanism mean that there's actually not much fine control going on above waist level. In fact, even with three foot pedals the basic acoustic impedance and ASDR envelope of any given note doesn't change a whole lot. For the most part, low bass pedal tones "float" because they are usually strung with two or three strings of unusually heavy gauge which vibrate very slowly -- which means the tone spends more time transferring to the soundboard and the wooden frame of the piano itself, teasing out overtones and hidden colors that tend to stay the same no matter what you play.
Writing about music always reduces me to run-on sentences. If only soloing was as simple as talking too much.
Here's an example of how this applies to transcribing. This phrase in E minor shows up a lot and it can be played a dozen ways. Here's two, and I think they demonstrate the importance of careful phrasing and active listening when you're writing something out. Lately I try to keep phrases and runs in three or four string groups. It forces me to learn the fretboard and I really like how it keeps longs passages sounding consistent.
Play 'em both as repeating loops; savor the flavors. If you think the version on the left sounds better, you are objectively out of your mind. The switch to the timbre of the G string is jarring, plus the ringing open string is loud enough to compete with the low drone of the E tonic/pedal/root. The E thing, man, that. Keeping it on the 5th fret of the D is awesome because it makes your pinky get into the damn ring and fight like a man, and doubly so because it sounds like it's part of a distinct counterpoint phrase that supports the open, ringing low E. Blaow.
Let's bring it back to pianos again. Those low notes move through the body of the piano slower than higher register waves, and this is colored further by 1) post-Industrial conventional cross-strung pianos designed to enable mass production, 2) Aliquot stringing, which makes harmonics ring out louder and longer, and 3) Railsback Curve equal temperament tuning. The result is a very specific set of constraints.
The instrument is tuned toward the middle of the keyboard, so most melodies and classical solo pieces carve themselves through that center C line. Most of all, though, it's the ringing sustain of the piano's sheer elephant mass that dictates what chord changes "work" and which definitively do not. If you shift to something that doesn't have enough harmonics in common with what you just finished playing, it's like throwing a light bulb at a brick wall. On a nice big piano, those waters run deep and you don't win when you fight 'em.
Oltremare, front to back, is architecture. It sounds like a piece that was worked out carefully, late at night. Even the nicest in "digital piano" keyboards can't do this song much justice. Einaudi plays both with and against the washing overtones as they drift out of audible range. The stage itself seems to play a key role in giving the live version so much dirt and character. It's far from an original observation, but there's still so much to unpack from that simple insight I'm going to have a busy life.
NEXT: Finally, some guitar tabulature.
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