Excerpt from the Clay’s Letter Collection
Gustav Clay was an English composer born in 1864. Following an education at Royal College of Music, Clay achieved early success through works including the famous “The Goliath Symphony” (1895). While his earlier works were influenced by 19th century romantic traditions, from 1896, Clay began to pioneer experimental composing techniques, best exemplified in his work “The New Suite” (1898). During this period, Clay became a close friend with Alfred Hartley, a music teacher born in 1866. Hartley had a less conventional music education, starting his career as a student of Physics at the University of Oxford but then deciding to switch to music. Clay and Hartley maintained intimate connections since 1895 and engaged in a prolific discussion on various topics of modern music.
The letter below was written from Clay to Hartley on December 31st, 1899 — Four days and two weeks after the Great Advent.
My Dear Fred,
God has granted us the blessing of ignorance. But little did we know such a blessing is a true blessing; so an answer we sought after. Now what God has given, He takes away.
Please pardon my absence of writing since the last letter. I too have been disoriented by the turmoils caused by the colossal Shells that descended upon the sky of London a few weeks ago. You shall know by now from the newspaper that these are the vessels of the Comers, visitors from a distant planet. Three days before the papers published about the Comers — that is ten days after their appearance — I was reached by a friend serving at Her Majesty’s Court, who revealed to me about the vessels and that they have descended upon the sky of 12 locations on all seven continents such and such. He told me the Comers have proposed to hold a demonstration of music in the United States, where one of the vessels had descended, and invited musicians around the world to attend; the Court’s list of consideration included me. Baffled, I asked if he could elaborate; he replied that it was inferred that the Comers hoped to establish further communications through equivalence of a concert but no more information he was certain of.
I didn’t learn more about the Comers until seeing one earlier today, but an urge to find an answer — not only to see behind the unknown Shell but of another question that I could sense but not articulate at that time — pushed me to accept the offer to the journey of unknown destiny. I was hastily shoved onto a steamship across the Atlantic and arrived in New York City seven days later just in time for the concert earlier today.
Now I have realised what the question was — the one that you kindled in me a while ago, and the one we have devoted our lives into — and I also, my dear Fred, unfortunately, know the answer to the question.
The concert was held in Carnegie Hall in the heart of New York in the evening today. The heart has pumped in streams of waggons, nobilities, officials, journalists and their flashes, and musicians — the finest of the world that I knew of: Mister Elgar, Monsieur Debussy, Herr Mahler and on and on. I also witnessed people of unfamiliar complexion and clothing seem to have travelled from Cathay, Ottoman, Egypt on and on. I was startled and honoured to witness and be among them. But now I have realised how void such honour was.
I was given a seat on the second tier and had a detailed view of the stage. The stage was dominated by a colossal and intricate object, which I assumed and later proved correct to be the instrument. First to my sight were 12 four storey high pipes with the widths ranging from that of a teapot to that of a waggon arranged in a circle. The pipes were oddly in a texture of not brass nor wood but a fabric that resembled mushroom. Inside were two rings three and half storey tall, sharing a bottom and vertically erected in a way that they intersect at the top perpendicularly, forming a spherical cage — of the mushroom texture as well. Further inside was a forge-blower-like box, two and half storey tall on one end. The other end narrowed down to rows of keyboard-like disproportionately small compared to the entire box yet familiarly in the scale of our pianos, arranged in three rows like what one sees with an organ. Inside the box, I could make out blurry shapes of a complex network of strings. Below the keyboards were round-shaped pieces that turned out to be equivalent to foot-pedals. Next to the keyboards was a usual bench of our familiar kind.
I held my breath when the performer entered, though this Comer’s (whom I will refer to as C henceforth) appearance did not surprise me as much as expected. I had envisioned a million ways that C could look like, but C didn’t look very different from ourselves. The concert brochure introduced the planet of C to be similar to ours, so C’s striking similarity in body and complexion to ours seem to be reasonable. What at one instant gave me an eerie unease was that the brochure stated the average lifespan of C’s people is around 2000 Earth years, and our performer was now 1039 years old. However, C walked in a steady gait and had wrinkle-less skin like one of us in our prime age of thirties.
But C’s physical similarity to us allowed me to soon forget about such eeriness and settle down with C’s existence in the hall — until C began to press fingers against the keys. When I had first heard Beethoven’s Fifth as a child, the first four notes acted like an arrow that penetrated through me and opened a landscape of roaring wonder. What came out of C’s fingers was comparably striking though in a different effect: the sound was like an invisible and unrecognisable and loud and dissonant cloud that creeped out from the most hidden corners of the hall to fill the space and encapsulate my existence. My ears, body, chair, and the hall and the room vibrated together with the sudden onset of an explosion like a war cry. The immediate description that entered my mind was a Tibetan war cry, though I doubt it actually exists.
Some around me were visibly disturbed, covering their ears or showing faces of disgust. A growing hiss among the crowds could be heard from below in the orchestra seats. I was among the ones who were trapped in a mixture of confusions, shock, awe and stretching our minds trying but failing to understand what we heard. The invisible and unrecognisable cloud of sounds was morphing into different shapes, none of which I could convey even a fraction in this letter. Submerged in it, I breathed in the cloud and the same cloud was breathed out as none could be absorbed.
But strangely among the blurry strangeness I could see a clear thought arise from my brain distinguishing the experience of C’s music as a new one. The ever-morphing cloud lacked a sense of clarity, which submerged us in a landscape morphing into a million possibilities. Even though all I felt was confusion, it was a million shades of rotating, inflating, contracting, exploding, blossoming, flattening, roundening confusions afloat in a space of a million dimensions.
Beethoven’s music seemed like a piece of sketch paper that emulated the landscape. The cloud from C’s finger was the landscape.
This was when the question — the one that you first prompted in me, the one that has haunted me for the past years and sent me onto this very journey — surfaced in my mind: what is missing in our existent music?
A few years ago my works had won applause but I felt a distant sense of something missing that I was seeking for — laid somewhere other than the crowds’ cheers — yet knew not what I was in the search of. You approached me, stroked the bubble that trapped my thoughts, and slid my vision into the future, from the past. You said you perfectly understood the harmony the rhythm the structures the scales, but you felt afloat, a lack of sensing a ground when navigating the principles. I said the principles were for the sake of creating sounds of pleasure. You questioned: a pleasure confined in a frame? I answer no. I said the frame was a waggon with which we march forward on the path of cry and laugh, awe and victory, life and death. What you then said permanently altered the route of my career, and my life. You said music was but a collection of sounds, a collection of vibrations in the air of certain frequencies among the spectrum of infinite granularity. To settle on riding the harmony the rhythm the structures the scales was like a blind riding on a waggon: one can go however fast one wants, but one is never able to see the land the waggon gallops on.
Following that day your words fermented in me. The more I pondered about what you said the more I realised how all my works have been but childish plays of naive blocks. Goliath was no more than a bloated grain of dust. I had lived under the canopy of the past. My musical expressions had been a puppet rigged by the traditions that you called a confining frame. What I felt missing was music of my own. Bach grew music as an art of transformations and relations; Mozart devised a form that built around themes and variations; Beethoven infused passions and sublimes into his melody. You ignited the urge in me to stand above them all, above all of the past — a divine task set forth by God for all great musicians. My works had muted me and only spoken for the dead, and now I needed to create music that speaks in my voice, a music of our time, a music beyond the existent boundary of music. I had never existed; now I sought after a declaration of existence. I needed to create an unprecedented kind of music no one had envisioned before, and your words torched the path laid in front of me — to take apart what they had built, like how the scientists that you once told me about take mountains and seas apart into what you called molecules, atoms, electrons and such and such. Only then by reassembling from the bottom, by discovering the new combinations in the ignored possibilites could I build a mature tower that I can truly, firmly stand upon. Because of you I embarked on the journey of discovering and inventing — a new music, the meaning of my existence.
So I isolated myself from the mass and devoted my life into seeking the answer to this one question: What is missing in our existent music?
From the invisible and unrecognisable cloud that encapsulated me with an abysmal impression, I sensed an offering of answer. So I listened. I stretched my ears and my mind into the shape of the bizarreness.
Then I found the sounds to be — though still elusive — not as unpleasant. I was reminded of the words of one of my old fellows at the College, which he claimed to have grasped from an Viennese acquaintance, a lad named — if I remembered correctly — Arnold. He said dissonance is but distant consonance. It is our cultural upbringings that determine which consonance is pleasantly close and which otherwise. Given sufficient amount of training, one would emancipate oneself from the notion of consonance and embrace the freedom of expressions within dissonance. I have attempted to train myself — both in listening and composing — in such a pantonal manner. I realised what I just experienced — the disappearance of the unpleasantness found in the cloud — to be this process on a grander scale. While at the moment I still did not comprehend — and possibly would never comprehend the gist of the music as I knew nothing about C’s people and culture — the more I listened, the more I began to make out the variations of distinct melody and rhythms inside the invisible and unrecognisable cloud. The flickers of tunes encapsulated by the cloud, and outside of them a dweller in Flatland straining his mind and beginning to see the ways of mysterious occupants of higher dimensions.
Struck me first was the scale the melodies were composed of, if such scale existed at all. The pitches I heard were obviously not do re mi fa so la ti that we are accustomed to. It was not even the 12 tones that I began to dabble with in a chromatic scale. As a matter of fact, I could not make out a set of discrete tones that consisted of the melodies. There was no spacing between one pitch to the next. The effect was not utterly unfamiliar as it resembled that of glissando when one slides fingers on violin neck. But glissando is mere ornamentation within the tonal skeleton sprinkled briefly here and there; while C’s music consisted of melodies of smooth curves that debuted with the first keystroke and never ended. A continuum of frequencies. They were a series of frequencies vibrating in the continuum — the continuum that you first enlightened me.
This was what created the absence of clarity in the cloud encapsulating me. A ghost’s cry winding in the air. A cry that morphed into infinite possibilities. I tried to compare it to the tunes I have heard or written in the past but found them dull as deadman’s creation compared to the cry that surrounds me. C’s music was not a still piece being played but a creature alive in the room that breathed the audience in and out.
I have wanted to create music that differs in all essentials from previously composed and express those yet to be expressed. Enlivening music with continuum of frequencies in C’s music lit a lighthouse to that end. So I listened more carefully, sailing closer to the lighthouse and yearning for more treasures that could answer the question: What is missing in our existent music? But little did I know that the lighthouse was a cursed one. God was bound to take away His blessing.
Moments later I found that C’s music toppled our custom of music in every possible sense. C’s music didn’t proceed in a regular and unambiguous tempo. The curves of pitches swam up and down through time at constantly varying velocities. At one moment a flat surface at next rapid oscillations. What was more startling, the transition between the tempos is indistinguishable from one moment to the next. The tempo variations of C’s music was as continuous as the pitches. It was as if a sun had risen from the horizon, gradually injecting energy into the creatures of the world, and slowly setting behind the other end of the horizon leaving the world to evaporate its energy back into stillness. And there were a million of such sun, colliding and passing through each other across an unfathomable and unpredictable sky.
But the continuous transformations of melody and rhythm did not impart the light, agitated, playful air that glissando on a violin would have produced. The cloud that encapsulated me imparted a steady stream of vibrations as if it existed there since the creation of the world. It was then when I looked around trying to see and to touch the cloud did I realise my sensory system had been overwhelmed by what I heard. After resettling into my visual senses, I noticed the colossal instruments on the stage again. The realisation came to me that only objects of such grand size could commensurate with the deep roar of the invisible cloud. I could vaguely discern sounds of different dynamics and pitches emanating from each of the pipe, the ring, and the box. Every part of the giant declared its existence with a strand of ghost cry.
The size of C’s instrument is not unique — I have witnessed pipe organs of similar scale. But sounds from a pipe organ only resembled the colossus in front of me in its stability. What the pipe organ lacks — the subtle variation of tempo and melody beneath the overarching cloud — was present in C’s instrument albeit inconsistent with the impressions imparted by its size which reminds one the sublime, stationary voice of a pipe organ. I directed my vision to the performer’s hands in an attempt to make guesses about the mechanism of the instrument. The resemblance of the keyboard to our pianos is utterly deceptive. Each key of C’s keyboard has a different height, ranging from the height of regular piano keys to five times that height. When striking the keys, C’s fingers did not press down each keyboard to its full length. Instead, the manner of the fingers’ pressing and releasing of the keys reminded me of how a violinist would move a bow back and forth on a string.
Further observations on the correlations of the fingers movements and the changing network patterns that I could vaguely see through in the forge-blower box supported my suspicion: the box was a giant network of string instruments controlled by C through the keyboard. Each keystroke was equivalent to a bow movement across a string, and the position of each of C’s fingers on a key determined the pitch of that keystroke. This mechanism allowed C to manipulate articulation and dynamics of the sound with startling precision and agility, and ten fingers allowed C to produce sounds from ten parts of voices, each independent from another and could qualify as a full instrument, all at once — an effort that would require ten men’s power if played by an ensemble of ours.
I then moved my sights to examine the 12 pipes on the outer rim of the stage. I followed my gaze from top of the pipes to their convergence point on the floor, which became 12 thin tubes that extended to C’s mouth. It was not difficult to infer the tubes to be some categories of pipe instrument. But how did C control all 12 pipes to produce different sounds — undulating in a similarly precise fashion — with C’s hands all preoccupied by the keyboard? The most apparent hypothesis was that the circular pedals that C manipulates with feet served the purpose. Then, I noticed that C’s mouth did not simply act as air supply into the tubes, C’s lips were covered by a mushroom texture mechanical device, which C deftly manipulated by shifting size and shapes of mouth and occasionally touching with tongue. How exactly such a device controlled the sounds of the 12 pipes I knew not, and the question to this moment I am still consumed by.
It was this colossal device that allowed C to power the sound more grandeur than an entire orchestra and at the same time intricate enough for incredibly precise manoeuvres to create the subtle undulations of continuum that bring the voice into life. So I thought, what we are missing in existent music must also have been such a spectacular instrument.
But even more unbelievable was the functioning of the two perpendicular rings. The deepest bass that delineated the contour of the invisible cloud seemed to have sourced from the rings. The vibration of the rings were powerful enough to stir the air of every corner in the hall. Some magic must have bestowed it the power to precisely toggle the air even at a distance which produced the invisible cloud of vibration that surrounded me as if I was sitting inside the two rings. Not only was the melody and tempo a ghost cry, the sound waves from the rings reached my ears in a similarly ghost-like manner. How C manipulated the rings was yet a greater mystery. No physical connection was there to bridge the performer and the rings, yet the bass varied in strength and texture that correlated with C’s body movement. I would never be able to know whether such correspondence is merely coincidence or that one is the cause of another. Regardless, only some categories of telepathy could have played a role in the interactions.
Perhaps to supersede all previous music requires invention of novel instruments — not only to build the spectacle as the box and the pipes that allow one man to control parts of voices with precision and delicacy but also technology advanced as the rings. The rings blended C’s body and soul with the music by freeing physical manipulations. It was also the rings that set up the intractable atmosphere of C’s music through a magical channel of sound propagation.
But that level of magic seemed an impossibility. A barrier has begun to rise between myself and C’s music. I continued taking notes on the complexity of the instruments; but the more I noted, the less I sensed the answers I found to be useful for filling in the missing piece of our existent music.
Even if I could be bestowed with such an instrument, I could not imagine how I would be able to begin to play. C coordinated between hands, feet, mouth, tongue and body movements deftly and effortlessly. Each of these parts hopped from one place to another smoothly and rapidly uninterfered by each other. Let alone all these parts, only thinking about the playing of the keyboard overwhelmed me. Each of C’s fingers modulates a key as fast and precise as how one moves both arms and all ten fingers on one violin when playing Caprice of Paganini. And with this we haven’t included the frequent jumps of C’s fingers from one key to another. The rapid movements — multiple times faster than the fastest human player I have seen before — blur C’s hands, but intermittently when C’s hand remains in one place for vibrato I could briefly grasp that C’s physical resemblance to us to be deceptive. The skin was only smooth and wrinkle-less when stationary. While playing, C’s fingers and hands were covered by sickly abundant traces of muscle strands and veins, morphing into different patterns as C’s hands moved and transformed into all kinds of gestures.
I once had the thought that pushing the edge of performance virtuosity would be a way to exceed all past musicians. Faster. Faster. And yet faster. But C’s physical development and technical dexterity rendered all virtuoso performances that I viewed in the past as trivial.
Of course I should not simply emphasise the instruments and the techniques as if the shock I discovered from C’s music only derived from these. Most of the time I placed my attention on the aforementioned aspects of technicality since the music sounded too strange for me to empathise with its message. But occasionally the cloud that wandered outside of my body found a way creeping into my soul. At these moments C’s music ignited shapes of visual images rising out of void into my mind. One time a linear and flat melody gradually dissolved into a million swirls which eventually stirred the entire invisible cloud into patternless motions. I saw a bright beam exploding amid darkness. I saw clouds of dust conglomerate into a gigantic bright ball. That ball then lost its lights and disintegrated into grains of sand. I saw each sand inflated into ethers of light. The brightest hotspots severed into more hotspots which severed again, some of which swirled around each other until into strands of helices. I saw waves washing them over. I saw a new sun rising out of the horizon. I saw a force. A force constantly convoluting. A force of inevitability.
When I heard Beethoven’s Fifth, I also had images in mind. Those images stretched my mind horizontally to as wide as my imagination could go. But these images ignited by C’s music were long and lingering in a vertical span. The music that I have deemed the finest of ours was theatrical. But C’s music adds a dimension to it. It was a strand of evolutions undulating while unfolding itself. It was a sound that didn’t only make you imagine the surrounding space but also gaze towards a distant horizon. C’s music oddly reminded me of the folk hymns from ancient ages, from which one could hear the distant tales of the past beneath the vibrations of each singer’s voice as the tunes travelled from one’s mouth to another.
Is the verticality, the addition to the theatrical features, what our existent music is missing?
But what was it that triggered my mind of the unambiguous images amid the alien sounds? There was something. Something that both we and Comers had experienced in common. Something that traversed across the endless darkness of heaven. Something that transcended the need of understanding each other’s cultures and languages.
The visions that I had from C’s music had never entered my mind when listening or composing any music in the past. Is that subject’s power what our existent music is missing?
Returning my focus to C, an eeriness returned to my mind. C’s similarity to us in the overall shape of body made it difficult to associate the music I heard with the player in front of me. If not carefully examining the details on C’s skin, one could easily have mistaken C to be any one of us. But that music, of multitudes beyond us, unambiguously denied the possibility of that mistake. The questions have crysaled into: What made it possible for the Comer to create and play such a kind of music that rendered all our previous music as dead and naive? The answer felt imminent, and, as I naively thought, if I could know the answer, I would be able to attain music of a similar magnitude, and to find what I have been devoting my life craving for.
My sight glazed over C’s eyes, which faced towards the keyboards but still showed every detail of reflections of the pupil, the reflections, the fibres. C’s eyes were the only place of C’s body from which I could see traces of age that I would see in an old Earth man. Not from wrinkles or loose muscles. But from the gaze. C gazed into the instruments, into the music with a calm penetration. The eyes see through it as if an old man gazes back on his life, back on the world which morphed from his birth to death.
C gazed through time. The gaze hovered through 1039 years of C’s life and sights.
Time.
The answer is Time.
My dear Fred, what our existent music misses is Time.
The image I saw in C’s music was the flow of time. What the vertical span pierced through was the dimension of time.
But only the Comers were able to fabricate such music of time.
Bach died at 35. Mozart died at 35. Beethoven died 56. Chopin died 39. You, my dear Fred, and I, even if all goes well, will have to die in dozens of years.
But these Comers. I could not tell any difference between them and us except one: Almost two thousand years in each one’s life.
Our performer doesn’t only look like in prime thirties. C is in C’s prime thirties. But it was more than one thousand Earth years that C has lived through.
You and I. After days and nights of studies and practices, we spent two decades trying to master one instrument. Then we spent a few more decades trying to wrap our minds around the art of composing. And then after a meagre number of years, after we finally grasped how to blend our soul with the art, we dissolve from the stage into dust, along with what we learned, we knew, and we desired.
But for the Comers, the year of each of our demise would only be each of their start. The entirety of our life time, or even double, triple of that, the Comers could expend to simply learn. It could only be such a span that allowed them to acquaint themselves with the mechanism the methods the textures of the pipe the ring the box that I found impossible to even think about. For hundreds of years, they could practice and practice and practice. The practices strengthen their agility and pop the muscle strands the veins from their skins. They could then perfect every minute vibrations on the key and every coordination that utilises all moving parts of their body to manipulate the colossal instruments.
We found it consuming to train our ears to read the infinite continuum of pitches and tempos, let alone composing or playing. But it must have been this long duration that allowed them to settle their minds, to train their ears and master the art of infinite possibilities. They could spend multiples of our lifetime to comprehend the dissonance that we humans simply do not have time to parse around.
Time must also have given the Comers the superpower to retain information for a period unimaginable to us. More than half of our human lives are spent in learning. Then we die. Then the newborns repeat that lifetime of learning — or, wasting time that could have been used to create on repetitive learning process. But a Comer has the time, infinite to us, to use the knowledge in creation.
Time would explain the impossibility I sensed from examining the instrument. I have observed my luthier friends who spend a lifetime mastering skills on making a violin or a guitar, whose complexity seem negligible compared to C’s instrument. Only a Comer luthier could have hundreds and thousands of years to push the boundary of complexity in understanding toward building instruments. That must be what made it possible for them to devise the intricate networks in the forge-blower box and the lip cover that manipulated the gigantic pipes with ultimate precision. And since the Comers could spend less time on learning from fresh, their accumulation of knowledge and skills roll and roll faster and faster ahead of time. It must have been such that allowed them to build technology advanced enough for the magical rings of vibrations that I could not even imagine of.
With that erasure of knowledge from one generation to another, it would not be as simple as with twenty human generations across two thousand years we could build what a Comer could in one lifetime of two thousand years. It will take multiples of two thousand years as we humans carry Sisyphus’s boulder of learning and forgetting again and again and again… It must as well have been this difference that allowed the Comers to craft the colossal Shells and reached us first, not the other way around.
Or perhaps at some point would there be a limit on how much knowledge our future generations could learn and remember in a lifetime? And with that limit will we ever be able to reach the Comers’ level of sophistication?
Most importantly the Comers could enjoy hundreds of years of intertwining their souls with music. Sparks of ideas have not been rare visitors to my mind. But to ponder and develop each one into a masterpiece overwhelmed me. Merely elaborating on one idea could consume the entirety of my lifetime. The Comers have the time to build a Tower of Babylon in imaginations whereas we only touch the base before we die. Throughout the nine hundred and more years, they see through evolutions of time that we cannot even yearn for. Longer longevity for each generation also means that the tales of their ancient time extend much further back into the past before they are forgotten. The music that we created and lauded as expressions of infinity is but one single moment of a Comer’s idea. Their memories, individual and collective, extend into the abyss of past and future. Their imaginations soar into the universe unknown to us. Their music encapsulates each audience with a million glowing possibilities — the possibilities forever inaccessible to us.
I certainly do not have to pursue the height of the Comers and could settle back into what I have and what I am capable of to create a New Music of humans. But the colossal while delicate creature that creeped out of the invisible cloud from C’s finger has left inerasable traces still ringing in my ears. Any musical idea that now rises in my mind, any piece that I could imagine creating, all seem dead and pathetic and insignificant compared to the infinite variations and possibilities in C’s music that the creature breathed in and out. The ideas that once excited me and showed me ways of hope now fail to create a ripple in my heart — shadowed in the shocks and disturbance from the concert today. I have devoted all of my life to music, but a dead end in the alley has now made its greeting to me.
When I arrived in New York yesterday, I looked up and was dazed by the expanding concrete jungles taking their shapes and soaring into the sky. But on the waggon back to the hotel room today, the newly built skyscrapers became no taller than a feeble, withered grass beneath an oak tree. We build faster lifts; we alchemize strong steel beams; we design novel architectures; we believe we could push and push and push the boundary of the next skyscraper higher than itself. The labourers bustle in the air. The architects revel in visions. People of New York and the world in awe of the magnificence. We proudly declare the uniqueness and supremacy of humans with the ever-growing towers, rail lines, telegraphs, motorwaggon, steamships… But they are but a bloated grain of dust compared to the Comer’s Shell afloat the night sky of New York, whose height we are forever barred from. The dead end of the alley will soon make its greeting to all of us.
My dear Fred, we always thought that at the other end of the search was a declaration of victory on the top of Mt. Everest. But one snap of fingers from one of the Comers would make any victory look mere child’s play. We sought for an answer and we found it. But time, the gatekeeper cruellest of all, forever forbiddens us from that answer.
Where ignorance is bliss,
’Tis folly to be wise.
A few seconds ago, the bell of a new year and a new century rang outside of my window. It is the deathbell of my career. It is the deathbell of humanity.
With Regrets,
Tavi
