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“When you and the sound become one,” wrote Zen master Seung Sahn, “you don’t hear the sound; you are the sound.” I sit with my instrument, the Iranian hand-drum called zarb or tombak. It’s a simple instrument: wooden, goblet-shaped, with a skin covering the larger end. Its technique is the opposite of simple: a complex weave of rolls, snaps and strokes that use all ten fingers to draw out every nuance of sound. Despite my New York Irish roots, I am an accomplished performer and teacher on this instrument, with a musical lineage that traces directly to the tradition’s greatest innovator, Ostad Hossein Tehrani. |
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Matt Hannafin
“When you and the sound become one,” wrote Zen master Seung Sahn, “you don’t hear the sound; you are the sound.”
I sit with my instrument, the Iranian hand-drum called zarb or tombak. It’s a simple instrument: wooden, goblet-shaped, with a skin covering the larger end. Its technique is the opposite of simple: a complex weave of rolls, snaps and strokes that use all ten fingers to draw out every nuance of sound. Despite my New York Irish roots, I am an accomplished performer and teacher on this instrument, with a musical lineage that traces directly to the tradition’s greatest innovator, Ostad Hossein Tehrani.
I begin with my eyes closed, playing a simple pattern. Soon I start to ornament the rhythm and elongate the phrases, letting the music find its own breath. I begin to fill spaces, to bend notes and add textures. Gradually, the instrument disappears and I am coaxing music from the air. Finally my hands are gone too and the sound—by turns roaring and purring, skittering and leaping—is creating itself without me.
When it ends, I open my eyes.
The next night I’m at a different venue—say, a loft space in the East Village. Around me are bongos, tom-toms, Korean gongs, Chinese woodblocks, Turkish cymbals, an antique bass drum and various oddities, including a tin serving tray and an L-shaped iron rod from Siberia. Tonight, I’m performing a concert of non-idiomatic free improvisation, an abstract art that begins without preconceived plan and unfolds largely without rhythm or chord structure. Momentum is carried through shifts in texture, harmony and velocity. If all goes well, it proceeds like conversation from statement to counterstatement, question to answer, reference to cross-reference to final conclusion. My partners could be any of a thousand groupings, either established ensembles or ad-hoc groups brought together just for this evening. We may never have met before.
The music starts. I close my eyes.
Hazrat Inayat Khan says “The knower of the mystery of sound knows the mystery of the whole universe.”
Sound is my keystone. It is a complete mystery and also my closest friend. As a percussionist, one of my great delights is seeing an object and knowing, even from across the room, exactly what it will sound like when struck, rubbed or shaken. Sometimes I’m surprised and that too is a delight.
For Persian concerts, the tombak alone suffices because it is so perfectly wedded to the music, a body of traditional modes and melodies within which players are free to improvise. But in non-idiomatic improvisation, where the music’s form and mood remain uncertain right up to the playing, a percussionist wants more options of tone, range and texture—options equal to what a pianist can create with her 88 keys or a guitarist with his 24 frets. He wants an orchestra at his fingertips.
Though the music will always vary depending on the other players, the room’s acoustics and the evening’s overall mood, my personal philosophy requires two constants: beauty of tone and purity of gesture—meaning that each stroke, each sound, each harmony of tones and textures should be able to stand on its own as a complete and emotionally satisfying statement.
This might produce a Kabuki-like pointillism, where a single, well-placed hit on a drum or woodblock is all that’s needed. At other times, the sound can be huge: a roll on the bass drum or gongs filling the space with an all-encompassing rumble or a cloud of metallic ghosts. Sometimes the sound is a spider web of arrhythmic bell tones or a thick, earthy rattling. Sometimes it’s rhythmic in the simplest sense of a pulse and sometimes it eschews strict time signatures in favor of cyclical phenomena—an approach I’ve derived from working with electronics players, who create an elastic sense of time by slowing down or speeding up a sample as it recurs.
Often, a sound will dictate the duration of its playing, existing with the monumental force of a Richard Serra sculpture but then ending as abruptly and fully as it came into being, leaving an equally powerful silence. When the music is going well, each sound presents itself when it is necessary.
In free improvisation, as in so many disciplines, musicians often speak of “learning the rules so you can break them.” In learning Persian music, I chose a set of rules that opened a door to beauty and inspiration.
In our society, worth is almost always judged on the basis of production and consumption. Through improvisation, I create music that exists only in the moment, leaving nothing behind but vibration and memory.
In Sufi mysticism, revelation is found in the saut-e-sarmad, the sound of the abstract plain. Usually it is drowned out by the distractions of the world. But sometimes, if we’re lucky, we can open a door to it.
