"If I had a theory of noise it would contemplate substrates akin to the murmuring whale, and those substrates only." (Peter Milne Greiner on Sforzando)
Peter Milne Greiner is a contributor to Half Mystic Journal’s eighth issue, sforzando. He is the author of Lost City Hydrothermal Field, a hybrid volume of poetry and science fiction short stories published by The Operating System. His work has appeared in Motherboard, Dark Mountain, Fence, So & So, Big Echo: Critical Science Fiction, and will be anthologized in Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight (forthcoming from University of Arizona Press). Peter teaches at a high school in Manhattan from his kitchen table in Brooklyn, gardens on the roof, and is working on a new book of poetry and other forms about the paranormal. Visit pmggoestospace.com for all the things.
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We asked three of our Issue VIII contributors to share with us their personal definitions of sforzando: how it’s formed, where it’s been, what it could be. Here is Peter Milne Greiner’s vision of the car-struck dissonance—the backslide into wreckage—the single note of shattering…
In 2007 my little brother and I formed a noise band and played one show at a Finnish restaurant in the hills. We had built a pedal—and with those words our own modest cosmology under Noise—with a recording of what was then called the 52-hertz whale. Through this pedal, this dubiously divine instrument, we ran our earthly telecaster and a series of mics that documented the sounds—reports, events, what have you—made when Geoff touched, with papier-mâché pectoral fins, the drum kit.
Onstage, we prodded and scraped at our respective sources of friction, the fins swayed, and the whale sang its looped fragment of song through our machinations for ten and a half of our allotted 11 minutes. After our set, a hedge witch played a glass harmonica, and after that a high school student sang a song about tackle football, accompanying himself on an Ovation guitar, the kind with an array of sound holes near the neck like a crop circle. At a show in the sticks at the end of the universe where miscellany reigned supreme, cetacean noise was born on land.
For the uninitiated, or as a reminder, or as a rite of summer now that it is summer, the 52-hertz whale is either a mutant whale or of a species not yet described by science. Its strange and singular song was picked up by war-era hydrophones in the large and poorly-understood Pacific Ocean. There are those who sought in vain to find this whale, but at least and at length something of it was brought before a live audience, before my brother and I crashed the Mazda on our way to the train station and our nameless noise band went on indefinite hiatus.
But a tale I lived to tell is this. If I had a theory of noise it would contemplate substrates akin to the murmuring whale, and those substrates only. Jupiter’s magnetosphere, baby monitors in science fiction, and the speculative reconstruction of dead languages—all of them forms of field recording—would serve as the empirical and sacred foundations of my Noise. As a young person encountering the whale and its relic, I believe I might have been taken in by the gist: a strange but identifiable sound, a sea creature that had never been seen, loneliness, and so on. But what interests me most is the anomaly. With 30 seconds left to play, Geoff casts off the fins, kills the pedal, and I put the strat down. All that remains is the whalesong, its hertz, its hurts. He turns the volume all the way up. Mark the signal sf.
Since then I have searched and searched for true sforzandi. I would like to believe I know them when I hear them. It’s not complicated; don’t overthink, I tell myself, that which becomes louder suddenly. But—agony—what of the false sforzandi, the pseudo-sforzandi? How not to confuse them with speculative sforzandi or para-sforzandi? It is a balancing act I must act on. But first: other truths. To begin, we travel to Jupiter, and we almost make it.
Jupiter
Some say sforzandi are half notation and half sensibility of the player. If this is true, then it follows that to pilot a spacecraft into Jupiter’s magnetosphere is to play it, and in order to do that and survive you must be inside a radiation vault—like the Juno probe had, so that the planet’s song can now be heard. Entering the magnetopause’s threshold of particle densities, safe inside the vault, one might hear what Loren Grush writing for The Verge called “a gaggle of banshees”. Carl Sagan and Saul Peters, working together at Cornell, suggested that such banshees could evolve into a “floater” organism, living high in the atmosphere and growing to the size of a city. It is the chorus (or perhaps cacophony) of their, if you will, exocetacean song that I hear in the Noise encountered by Juno despite the physics. Mark the magnetosphere’s boundary sf.
Baby Monitors
Many fanciful machines have been used to receive signals from non-human intelligences. James Merrill, in The Changing Light at Sandover, famously recounted his decades-long successes with a spirit board “so as to measure by triangulation / heights up there beyond the height of self”. Are not the sound of his planchette crossing the board, and that of his partner’s pencil transcribing the words of the dead, sforzandi? Sudden amplifications of voices in one realm carrying to this one?
In M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs, and more recently in James Wan’s Insidious, voices from a kind of beyond are carried through baby monitors. Here, too, otherworldly vocalizations, as with the 52-hertz whale. With Signs, we come to realize that the mysterious sounds on the baby monitor originate in the vocal apparatuses of hydrophobic alien invaders, and it is hearing these sounds’ registration through the device that deepens the characters’ dread. Is sforzando the registration or the dread? Mark them both sf. The baby monitor in Insidious registers the vocalization of a demon inhabiting the body of a young boy whose soul became lost during an astral projection event gone terribly wrong. The boy lies upstairs in a coma with his infant sister in the next room, his mother downstairs at her piano with a baby monitor. At first nothing is heard except the mother practicing a song. And then a rattling—an indistinct muttering—and finally a hellish screaming. All a bit screechy through the baby monitor. The families in both films find themselves audiences to the songs of entities and their passage through the membrane between realms, their strange fates triangulated in the comforts and discomforts of home. Mark the monitor at the moment it registers ultraterrestrial Noise and its penetration into reality sf.
The Lyre Ensemble
Whatever the timbre of those malevolences—be they the timbre of rage or of desperation—it is a miracle that they arrived at all in a realm resembling this one. Traversing the unfathomable gulfs of space to carry out a quaint imperialist plot, the creatures in Signs are almost deserving of our pity, not fear; nevertheless, felt in their Noise is the urge to inhabit this planet. I can hear it in their words on the baby monitor, if those are in fact words. I hear it in the inflection, unmistakably one of desire. The demon in Insidious shares this inflection. Language, motives, origins, modalities, gulfs, stairs, radiation vaults, whales, Finnish restaurants in the hills aside, it is emotion that breaks the barrier between beings, no matter the material of that barrier, even time. Which brings me to the Gold Lyre of Ur and our most esoteric sforzando yet: time-travelling emotions.
I have always been fascinated by archaic musical tablatures, so you can imagine my excitement when I learned about the Lyre Ensemble, a group that not only transposes music from ancient Mesopotamia written on cuneiform tablets, but also builds replicas of millennia-old Sumerian and Babylonian instruments. The Gold Lyre, shaped like a bull, was found in Iraq in 1929. The Ensemble perform a song with their painstakingly reproduced lyre and painstakingly translated lyrics from the “Epic of Gilgamesh”. Hearing the strings of such a lyre plucked, hearing the dead language and dead notation reanimated, I am awed by the processes by which the voices of these ancient peoples have carried and been carried into our age, awed by the Ensemble’s steep enunciation of emphases aroused from their great slumber, awed by the reversal of silence, awed by the archeo-emotional hoards and hordes brought forth from the mist, the dust, the crushing and magnetospheric layer of centuries, serenading me now in all its glorious anachronism. Mark its awakening from suspended animation sf.
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In 2011, the Center for Fiction in New York City hosted a month-long series of symposia, talks, and screenings in celebration of science fiction and fantasy. The festivities coincided with the publication of an essay collection by Margaret Atwood, and I went to see her talk about it in Midtown. She spoke at length about her recent novels, her personal and public positioning in the science fiction genre, her childhood. A series of slides showed the audience drawings she’d made when she was young, and she likened their composition to those of Breugel. And then she told her own story about sf.
When she presented her essays to her publishers, they balked at the title. That word in the middle, the one without vowels—how was it pronounced? In Other Worlds: Sfuh and the Human Imagination? One imagines her looking the publishers straight in the eye, pausing, and drawing that pause into an infinity full of vowels instead of dark matter. I can’t remember how she told us she responded, but it was probably just to spell out those two letters that stand for “science fiction”. I think the answer was less important than the pause that came before.
People raise their voices and ask their questions in many ways, for many reasons. I suppose one purpose of an issue like sforzando—and a publication like Half Mystic Journal—is to enunciate the existential differences in the mechanics from one medium to another, and ultimately understand how those mechanics share common dimension. And so we gather around the hearth of Sfuh, a kind of sneeze in the mind. Poet and theremin player Andrew Joron once remarked:
Poems participate in the fate of letters before words. Of patterns before meaning. This is one of the definitions of a hieroglyph. The science lies in seeing the hieroglyph (and by extension, the poem) as a complex system, overboiling its own parameters, and moving unpredictably toward an ontological rupture.
Any sudden emphasis does it for me on most days. But the real magik happens at the moment of overboiling, the moment of amplification and transformation when we mark the ontological rupture sf no matter what it stands for, as when the song of one medium rises up out of any of this world’s sweet abysses and—even for a moment—makes contact with another.
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Peter Milne Greiner’s poem “Baleen”, along with twenty other pieces by contributors and three columns by the Half Mystic team, are compiled in Half Mystic Journal’s Issue VIII: Sforzando, a stunning collection of contemporary art, lyrics, and writing dedicated to the celebration of music in all its forms. It is available for preorder now.