Elaine Barkin

Sandaya: The Spellbinding Piano of Burma
Featuring: Sandaya U Yee Nwe.
Shanachie. CD 66007
www.shanachie.com

A knockout, an absolute wow: utterly wild, wooly, strange, and far-out sounding piano playing and “piano music”. But….

At first hearing: chaotic, random, anarchic, enigmatic—someone’s, but not-yet-my, “music”. For sure, I hear someone playing on an instrument I am familiar with, playing something in a way hitherto unimaginable. At times as if I’m hearing a free-floating, heavily surfaced ‘foreground’ with no inkling of any ‘background’. How would it matter if there was one? Just how much and what kind of a listening-comfort zone do I want or need? If I ‘get’ it will the freshness—always a plus—of strangeness—not as sure about that one—be lost forever?

Listening for a way in:
Imagine hearing a recording of someone playing a piano slightly re- or dis-tuned—or maybe not—, playing the white-note keys 99.5% of the time, here and there a black-note key—an inflection? a Thelonious Monk-like flub?—at times as if each hand is being played by a different person, at times in octaves or staggered octaves or a recognizable r.h. melody with l.h. accompaniment—, white notes being struck together any & every which way, way up high much of the time, prickly-sweet-sounding and sounding at times as if any tone can be played with any other, windup-toy-like outbursts unrolling like Mr. way-back-when-lickety-split Tobacco Auctioneer—, each slippery-fingered hand busy, at times as if doodling, noodling around, ripples & runs & riffs, scribbly stops & starts that seem to happen anywhere, fracted contours, unmetered & metered freely scattered, like the sowing of wildflower seeds, like those ‘play-by-ear’ folks who sneak into basement practice rooms, spread their fingers on the keyboard and flap away.

(Bewilderment and incredulity accompanied the discomforting awareness of my being all-unknowing and incognizant. Yet the concomitant awareness of still being able to be baffled, stupefied, and shook-up became a source of great elation. U Yee Nwe is not playing on a piano in any way that is construable to me as “piano music”. Rather as if a piano is being played in an alternate reality, in another time, from another planet, not in the time of my time. He sounds to know what he’s about and I am clueless, it all being ontologically unfathomable to me.)

OK. Someone is performing a garrulous, loquacious music—more yackety-yak than those yenta-like piano sonatas of Franz Schubert’s—, going on & on yet knowing when & how to finish. Someone, somewhere far away, in a milieu unknown to me, who finds ways to sound as if he’s being individually expressive [1] as well as collectively responsive: Interspersed among the solo piano tracks are Songs (in which singer and pianist go their own way meeting up now & then), and Ensemble music (comprising piano, Asian flute, oboe, tuned drums, & timekeeper clapper), all with stretches rendered more or less in unison, a togetherness revealing planned “piecehood”. [2] U Yee Nwe must be extemporizing, yet I’m on shaky ground insofar as not-yet-music is usually heard as unfettered to new ears; how then to distinguish between extemporized—not yet known—and predetermined—already known? What does it take to know a thing from a non-thing?, to grasp boundaries? What’s all this ruminating about and why’s it sticking in my guggle?

Detour:
Somewhere along the way, a listener determines her best way to hear and listen-in as not-yet-music/music unfolds. Some like to have a scenario in hand, others don’t. My uncertainties about listening to and ‘getting’ Burmese Piano Music “as a music” would not be mitigated by reading liner notes or the available literature—however fascinating that might be—, nor by accounting for it as having been transcribed from Burmese harp, xylophone, or tuned gongs or drums. To paste such recognition onto/into my experience of listening might get me somewhere but would remove me from what I want to have as “music”. Which is not “not-music”; which is “my ‘someone’s’ music”.

At the heart of the matter, at the heart of my quandary, lies a barrier between just taking Burmese Piano Music in and not being able to; between grooving on it and not being able to internalize it as “piano music”; pondering over with whom and with what I can identify. When I am ‘gotten’ or ‘taken’ or ‘moved’ or ‘touched’ or ‘awakened’ or ‘enlivened’ the “effects” are direct; no other “demands” are necessary; all channels of my person are open; all is taken in everywhere. But as I listen over & over to U Yee Nwe’s Piano of Burma, I am flummoxed, confounded, nonplussed.

“ ] something needs looking into ” [3]

Another way in—in which I attempt to begin again:
Burmese Piano? how come? are all those white keys right notes?, are those black keys blue notes or grace notes?, one hand shoves the other, like letting someone with rubbery fingers loose on the keyboard; I try to visualize hands & fingers in order to see the keys popping up & down like a player piano, like someone spattering the keys and making them dance & sound; jagged-asymmetric-spasmodic, regularity infrequent, being made up on the spot?—as in, who could remember that?—ends signified with quasi-arpeggiated ripples, anything else happening along with it?, what else could go on?, music for whom? for what sort of occasion?, pauses-fits-snatches, a refrain or sequence now & then (specks of recognition, but are they enough?), West-East jazzy syncopated licks, re-cycled same tones in short & long strings & curls; it has to be improvised within as-yet unknown constraints, how to account for (especially to a devotee of dissonance) what sounds dissonant—blatantly rubbed together Major 2nds, 7ths, 9ths—and how much of what there is is determined or hindered or abetted by the piano? [4]; is it something reincarnated?, why does it often sound like twaddle?, like reconstructed albeit damaged troubadour-trobaritz music?, now & then really really fast, now & then an ‘Alberti-bass’-like passage, and songs and instrumental trios or quartets which reveal that all is not either random or improvised: pianist and instrumentalists play the same melody in the same rhythm in an almost—given a few cents here and there—unison! [5] Tuned percussion punctuate ends—or beginnings?—of segments and always prior to the entrance of the vocalist, a relatively slow piano passage ensues (but hard to tell if it’s ‘introducing’ anything), and when the singer sings, the pianist leaps about willy-nilly, as if in his own time & tune & space. (Could be that I’m breaking through the erstwhile opaque unfathomable, on my terms and in my voice.)
Looking for a way out:
U Yee Nwe’s piano playing has, no doubt, been internalized as Piano Music by Burmese audiences, yet no matter what I am able to grasp, to recognize, to remember, to identify as ‘thing’, a formidable chasm between ‘knowing’ it and ‘getting’ it remains unbridgeable. [6] Identities and name-thing-calling resolve little, discomforts and difficulties linger on. Perhaps something else had been expected? (Piano of Burma is unlike any other SouthEast Asian music I’ve heard.) Bumpy roads & bumpy rides still attach to crossing-over.

In The Body Artist, Don DeLillo writes about conversation gaps; despite disparities between speech and music, the disquiet I continue to experience with Burmese Piano Music is reflected in DeLillo’s passage:

“There’s a code in the simplest conversation that tells the speakers what’s going on outside the bare acoustics. This was missing when they talked. There was a missing beat. It was hard for her to find the tempo. All they had were unadjusted words. She lost touch with him, lost interest sometimes, couldn’t locate rhythmic intervals or time cues or even the mutters and hums, the audible pauses that pace a remark….There were no grades of emphasis here and flatness there….all the references at an unspoken level, the things a man speaking Dutch might share with a man speaking Chinese—-all this was missing here.” [7]

Whether you have already heard or might decide to listen to Burmese Piano, do let me know your thoughts, your takes, insofar as I might be barking up both the wrong and the worst tree in a misguided effort to maintain—so as to nourish rather than lose—the state of amazement (philistinic pique?) that has been companion as well as bete noire.

January-May 2002

Notes:
[1] Puzzling, given Myanmar’s 12-year rule by the military, international economic sanctions, and censure by the UN. Then again, such attributions of ‘expressiveness’ are of “my own invention” and, as I was to discover subsequently, improvisation and free variations have played and still play purposeful and significant roles in Burmese music. Hence a simple 1 : 1 correlation between artistic expressiveness and “free speech/free thought” is unfounded. (Even as I write this, efforts are afoot to reintroduce less oppressive policies in Myanmar, the recent release of Aung San Suu Kyi a sign of progress.)
[2] The singers and their songs are stunning, easily heard as music and not as troubling to me. Joel Taylor says: “#4 is a great piece of music…the vocalist is awesome [“The Power Rains Down Upon the Kingdom”, Ko Kyaw Swe, male vocalist] and it’s probably worth the price of the CD”.
[3] From J.K. Randall’s “how music goes” (II.), in Perspectives of New Music, 1976; reprinted in Being About Music, OPEN SPACE, 2002.
[4] (which I have since discovered was brought to Burma by the Brits more than a century ago and which was rapidly assimilated into Burmese musical culture)
[5] The vocal and instrumental music is not at all as culture-shocking as is the solo piano music, an experience that recurred during the writing of this text, when I received White Elephants and Gold Ducks, Shanachie CD 64087 (1997), Burmese music played on traditional instruments as well as on piano, slide guitar, banjo, mandolin, and violin. Many of the same performers are on both CDs: pianist U Yee Nwe; vocalists Daw Yi Yi Thant and Ko Kyaw Swe (female and male vocalists, respectively); Ko Ba Htay, bamboo flute and percussion.
[6] Other responses to The Spellbinding Piano CD ranged from “weird” [T] to “annoying” [J] to “wrong” [L].
[7] Don DeLillo: The Body Artist, Scribner Books, 2001, p. 67.

Postscript 1: Marc Perlman and Robert Garfias recommended that I listen to the Burmese pianist, U Ko Ko. (Piano birman/Burmese piano: U Ko Ko. Productions UMMUS [University of Montreal] (1995).) U Ko Ko ripples and flies over the keys using the entire range of the keyboard; he sings and accompanies himself—his voice relatively smooth, his piano-playing as if in some sort of time-warp. Although I still don’t really ‘get’ it, neither am I totally bewildered: I moved an iota closer with the final track, #17, 36 seconds of “Oh when the Saints…” in which U Ko Ko deeply embeds the tune in a flurry of flashy flourishes, and for the first time in all of these months a crack fractured the wall of all-unknowing, Now, at last, I was aware of the complexity and intricacy of Burmese Piano. And now, too, I realized the concentration necessary for U Yee Nwe and U Ko Ko, as they listen to voices from deep inside their heads and freely invent on “Beautiful Angels” or “Mountain of Heavenly Flowers”, tunes known to their audiences. But without the “…Saints…” title, I’d not have been able to excavate the familiar tune, it being buried so deep within. Thus, recognition of something familiar, access to an “already known” ‘background’ tune, was needed in order for me to be extricated from the morass of utter mystification and incomprehension, to say, yes, that’s music. But….