Chapter Fifteen: Randy Raine-Reusch

Previously on Randy Raine-Reusch...

Interview (2007)

To read  footnotes and back for easiest reading, open this page in two tabs, and scroll down to the endnotes in one of them, to refer to while reading the text. The links there no longer work.

Chapter 15: Randy Raine-Reusch

We glimpsed a significant bit of Randy Raine-Reusch’s story in his wife Mei Han’s chapter (Chapter Seven); here we put him at the center of his own for his work as purveyor-cum-player of Asian-traditional instruments in creative music.

This chapter is something of a prequel, as indeed are all of the Part II chapters on the men, in a way: Tatsu Aoki is the only one among them not American born, and he and AIR established their presences and gestures early enough in the culture, as did Fred Ho, then Jason Kao Hwang, to be in place as Asian-identified parts of the creative music scene that would serve as natural entry points of early contact for Wu Man and Min Xiao-Fen to work with on projects before initiating and taking off in their own fresh directions.

Raine-Reusch was also in place and similarly positioned and prepared to meet another of those women's generation from China on common musical grounds, though not with the same ethnic cachet wedded to familiar Western instruments and styles as his Asian-American male counterparts. When he met Mei Han and started working with her, he had already spent some years and attracted some attention in his western Canadian scene in Vancouver, British Columbia, for his work as a composer for and player of traditional Asian instruments in various Western genres/contexts (rock, world beat, creative music). That work met hers more than halfway, where she was also ready to meet from her own point of origin in Chinese traditional music for zheng.

While this is placed last in the list of artist chapters, I am writing it first. I want to launch my own intellectual dreams-in-words about this information new to me from just such a (presumably? presumptuously?) familiar place, and then see whether or how writing up the others spurs me to change, add to, or delete whatever I write down as “known” about Raine-Reusch here. After writing up Mei Han’s chapter next, since it’s so closely connected with this one, I plan to do Pauline Oliveros’ for the same reason, while placing her last in the Part I list of women for the same reason as Raine-Reusch is last here.

Oliveros--with Raine-Reusch, one of the only two non-ethnic-Asian artists here--has a long history of collaborations with Asian culture, spiritual practice/philosophy, and music in various ways, but also in the context of her own path as idiosyncratic “musickosopher” (the “k,” recall, pace Christopher Small,¹ signals a performer as well as composer-cum-theorist of music; “musicosopher” sans “k” fits rather the non-performing composer and/or music theorist); also like him, she lived and worked on the heavily Asian-tinged North American coastal culture of the Pacific Rim, for the first few decades of her career.

(Written first, presented last, prequels add depth, direction, detail, and nuance to stories written later, presented earlier. The Asian and Asian-American voices here are centralized as transmitters of Asian elements, claimants of Western ones; these two Euro-North Americans, one of each gender, stereoscope in miniature for me that process working in reverse, in two metonymic individuals. Not sure what if anything that may mean for the story I want to tell...but it definitely beckons as an experiment worth conducting.)

In going back to Raine-Reusch’s coming of age on the North American West Coast in the 1960s, I am opening my engagement with my larger subject of music and musicians from Asian cultures here from my own most familiar home turf. Like me, he’s a North American white guy from roughly the same ethnic background, born and raised in roughly the same regional (Northeastern Pacific Rim) culture; we’re close in age, similar in socioeconomic background, both carrying memories of abusive violence and alcoholic adults in our childhoods. We took similar countercultural paths through and beyond those backgrounds into similar-to-overlapping musical experiences and communities through similar aesthetics of improvisation and experimentalism as therapeutic and enlightening approaches to music for both individuals and their many collectives large and small. We both, like the men in the lives of several of the women featured here, have had significant-to-intimate bonds and histories with women from their transnational Asian gene pools and cultures.

I see all those common subjective and objective grounds as foundational and illuminative to the unique roles we play in the service of this music--I as a writer and he as a musician, certainly, but he even more as a kind of self-made curator of the many traditional instruments he plays (see his online InstrumentGallery)—curator of them not as objects only but as objects-in-action, and of the voices, styles, and music they make in that action…the action, of course, being not theirs but his, of composing for and playing them, in both their traditional and his new creative contexts. As I’m doing here as a writer, he investigated and mined the traditional contexts “selfishly” (his word) for those elements that would best serve his personal expression’s needs, appropriating and altering them freely to do so.

Ending my survey of musicians with him, then, serves as my full circle reconnect with the personal voice and history with which I opened this study, and wove in through its fictional parts. Given that closest resonance of his story to my own, I’m inclined to hear/read and tell/write his story more with my own understanding than I did the others—they I tried to learn from as “others,” more than, let’s say, commune with as a fellow “self”—for what it has to tell me of my story (and many similar, no doubt) as much as his.

If one can be “more unique” than another, Raine-Reusch is that one among his fellow sui generis musicians in this study. His recorded work, while of impeccable quality, is not as extensive nor as central to his career (calling?) as is that of most of the others; what is so is rather his role as one who has sought out and immersed himself in a broad spectrum of Asian-traditional music and instruments, specializing in a few the most, all of which he freely adapts to serve his own original expressions as composer and improviser in the creative music scene.

All but one of the other artists here have either come from and brought such traditions to forge their own hybrids thereof with/in the West, or have connected with them somehow ancestrally, as Asian Americans. Raine-Reusch is rather more like the notable tradition and long list of Asian artists who embrace and master Western idioms and instruments –Yo-Yo Ma, say, or Ling Ling, or Seiji Ozawa; or Masabumi Kikuchi, Aki Takase, Toshiko Akiyoshi, or Tatsu Aoki; or Susi Ibarra, or Okkyung Lee, to name a few from the cross-section of the conventionally classical, jazz, and creative genres—only in reverse.

Raine-Reusch’s role as an advocate of traditional instruments for creative music also suggests itself as prequel in a more globally historical sense. Traditional instruments from both East and West in newly created contexts have been a major theme here; zheng, pipa, voice, violin, geomungo, sax, bass, koto, accordion, and trumpet have all been spotlighted in the hands of specialists, masters at and on their various stages. As such, their portraits suggest and draw forth a familiar topography, one of a happy few such widely known masters of a hallowed few long- and well-developed instruments with their own storied histories, towering over a field of many more people and instruments of narrower renown.

Raine-Reusch’s more generalist array--some 1000-strong by now, with two-and-a-half dozen on his CDs, a handful featured prominently--includes a few of those main ones too, but many more that are more obscure in the West, some of which are among his most prominent ones, and threatened with extinction on their own native turfs. Their designs, voices, and histories evoke their antecedent grassroots of local instruments-in-cultures that served as precursive prototypes for (without ever being completely overrun by) those high-civilizational instruments such as China’s pipa and zheng, Korea’s kayageum, Japan’s koto (all familially related string instruments); and their Western counterparts from ancient lyres to modern guitars and pianos, along with similarly precedented modern pipe organs, brass and woodwind, and percussion instruments. By implication, they also suggest a world of human culture before literacy and high civilizations and later nations rose, a thousand-flower-blooming terrain of a pre-/a-historic (in the sense of pre-/a-literate: oral-aural/opticentric, pictographic, tonal-linguistic rather than logocentric/semasiographic world and media for composing and performing musical statements)...a quilt of a world that likewise has never completely “been disappeared,” in which, says Raine-Reusch,

there is a deep drive in  humans to make music, and they will create instruments out of anything in their environment.  In this rapidly shrinking world we are seeing less diversity in music, and instruments are disappearing at an alarming rate.  Flutes or lutes that only play one or two notes are thought of as useless, and yet their voices are so unique and speak music that no other instrument can.  I try to find these instruments and take great joy in voicing them and thrill to hear them speak.  It is part of a life disappearing, yet when these instruments speak it is magic.  Improvisation, and especially those who continue to break the barriers of convention, are the people that are keeping the diversity of life alive.  And if you believe in Darwin, diversity is essential for survival.

Raine-Reusch has told well and thoroughly his own story, primarily on his website, which includes some press summations of it, and interviews; and in his interview with me. His website presents both mature (Biography page) and childhood (History page) accounts in roughly the same amount of his own words, suggesting the equal weight he gives to both. As did Fred Ho, whose story also includes an excavation of childhood trauma to illuminate his feminism and other cultural-political facets of his work in music, Raine-Reusch devotes far more of his words in interviews and his own writings to the details of the adult work itself.

That said, he clearly does give that personally traumatic part of his narrative what he sees as its due, which begs a first look here at its influence on his life in the music. His detailed and candid presentation of said adversity in those sources signals both a personal and an aesthetic reality significant here. The personal is suggested in the writing style and telling of the story itself--confessional, dissociatively told in the third person in the writing (per professional convention, perhaps, but no less striking as psychological affect for that), conscientiously bringing all the primal trauma to light to effectively move on from it, and to establish it as context for his breakthrough to his first serious epiphany with the Asian music that spawned his signature calling.

Accordingly, I’m also inclined to start his story not with his mature and current work and products, but at its beginning, to trace through his childhood and youth with my own writer’s “eyes” the source of the path out of no path through adversity to and through his work in music; the journeyman period of study and collaborations stemming from that root system and grounding and surrounding his output as a musician (scores and recordings); and, finally, those products themselves, examined for their nature as both stand-alone expressions of his most personal creativity, as well as for the voices they are from Asian traditions, philosophies, and mythoi--his philosophical and musical fruits, present and accounted for in our future-bearing transcultural world, and the healing musickosophical world within and beyond it.

Trope 1: Purblind, Abused, Neglected

He also recognizes people from their body language rather than their facial features, as this is how he located his parents in a crowd as he could not see their faces with his poor eyesight. Also his sense of hearing, touch, and smell are very acute, which have become useful in his careers as a massage therapist and musician.

                                    --Randy Raine-Reusch (History)

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz called culture “the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.” ² My own engagement with Raine-Reusch’s personal such stories sees it as a series of what I think of as mythossociations--biographical narratives that resonate with larger cultural myths and tropes. The first such is the precocious child struggling through adversity--most specifically to music, the adversity of handicapped sight forcing greater auditory and other sensory acuteness that leads to an almost preternatural musicality and persona.

His History’s words:

Born in Halifax in 1952, Raine-Reusch was raised with his older sister in a small house in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. His father, a farm boy from Saskatchewan, struggled to find work after serving in the navy during the war. His mother, from a small town in Scotland, retired from the Royal Air Force when she moved to Canada to work as a part-time model. In search of work the family moved to Vancouver when Raine-Reusch was only five.

His words to me:

A very important part of my music is my sense of ‘spirituality’, or how I interact with the world. I was born with very bad eyes...into an often violently abusive family...Somehow I have developed some extra senses that I don't talk about much, as often people don't believe that I have them, and they make people feel uncomfortable... I was born to a Scottish mother who always had a sixth sense about her (she knew when company was coming and would put the tea on so it was ready just at the moment when there was a knock at the door by someone just driving by)...I think because of my bad eyesight and abusive family I developed a way to sense what people were feeling without seeing them or hearing them.

I’m re-sequencing these passages out of the flow of our interview to focus on a few keys of the theme they sound together, for the subjective reality at the root of Raine-Reusch’s attraction in youth to the Asian philosophies of Taoism and Zen Buddhism. They specifically identify his “sense of spirituality” as an interaction with the world that started in an environment that was troubled and challenging, at best, threatening and dangerous, at worst. They suggest a compensatory survival/coping strategy on the border between the paranormal and the heightened sensitivity of a normal (yet also handicapped) empath having to be alert to the unpredictable emotional storms of the adults who might harm or neglect him.

The whole situation of having to “read” and ride with/out/around such behind-the-scenes forces, and that with less-than-reliable eyes, led Raine-Reusch to affirm and respond strongly to the Taoist and Zen explanations of the world of appearances as treacherously deceptive, masking friendlier and more reliable realities. The usual assumption about Taoist and Buddhist insights about the illusory nature of the sensory-rational world is that they presume healthy, fully functional senses; it is another meditation entirely to think of how they might speak to one struggling with a sensory impairment, and the unreliable perceptions it engenders in that one’s world of other people.

Rosemary Mahoney, a teacher in a school for blind students, writes:

I’ve learned from my blind friends and colleagues that blindness doesn’t have to remain tragic. For those who can adapt to it, blindness becomes a path to an alternative and equally rich way of living.

One of the many misconceptions about the blind is that they have greater hearing, sense of smell and sense of touch than sighted people. This is not strictly true. Their blindness simply forces them to recognize gifts they always had but had heretofore largely ignored.³

That said, her article also touches on the deep-seated and widespread fear and ignorance directed by the sighted toward the blind in the Asian and African cultures she worked in, and which Raine-Reusch would turn to as an escape from his own.

Throughout history and across cultures the blind have been traduced by a host of mythologies such as this. They have variously been perceived as pitiable idiots incapable of learning, as artful masters of deception or as mystics possessed of supernatural powers. One of the most persistent misconceptions about blindness is that it is a curse from God for misdeeds perpetrated in a past life, which cloaks the blind person in spiritual darkness and makes him not just dangerous but evil.

And that said, his own Western culture is not without its own versions of such inhumane beliefs.

“Born with extremely poor eyesight that was not diagnosed until he was six years old, he was often treated as if he was mentally challenged,” his website declares. “Although he was often still treated as having very low intelligence, Raine-Reusch was an avid reader and quite precocious.”

To me:

Because of my eyes my musical training has big holes in it, and I have compensated. But these gaps have given me the freedom to embrace other musical cultures in a deeper way as they did not have to compete, or fight with what I had already learned from western training...Without my glasses, I saw things that other people couldn't, and had microscopic vision (I could see an eyelash on a screen door 100 feet away, yet I couldn't see even a single word on a book in front of me). Even with glasses I could not see things clearly (which is why staff notation is difficult for me, as the staff lines move and wave)... If I play a written score it seems that the world keeps tugging at the notes, wanting them to respond to the world around...The Japanese notation that I learned was traditional script (in Kanji, Chinese characters), so these were easy to read. Chinese music is in numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, so also easy to read.

“My eyes see emotions shifting and changing within people much like dried leaves or shifting snow in a wind storm,” he tells me, about the eyes that can’t so easily see more physical things.

My ears hear a constantly shifting soundscape where, even though there are patterns that seem to repeat, nothing is ever the same. I seemed to have a vision of the world that allowed me to see beyond our immediate reality, and so when I discovered the Tao Te Qing  by Lao Tse I finally found something that related to what I saw daily.  My exploration of spiritual writings was intense and thorough reading every text of every major and many minor spiritual practices, and I still find the Taoist and some of the Zen approach closest to what I experience.  As this is literally how I see the world daily, this is a big part of me...

You would think this would draw me to the New Age folks, but what I saw and what they described never matched. I did try to fit in, and sent a tape of my music to a number of labels--some New Age, some New Music. This was the tape that eventually became my CD Bamboo Silk and Stone.  It was always rejected as “too deep” for our listeners. I got the same or similar response from anything I sent out.  Some were even a bit more honest and said my music was too scary, I should try to sell to a company making horror films!   New Music people thought I was too “world music,” World Music thought I was too “new music,” jazz folks thought I was too classical, classical folks didn’t know what I was. Probably part of my “fame” is that so many people in the biz know me from rejecting my music!

This observation takes on weight and specifics when contextualized with the CDs discussed ahead. Those are not likely to be chosen for the playlist of a radio station in the “New Age” category, nor for the background balm in a typical massage parlor; they rather range from the intensity of the primal scream and controlled chaos of sheer raucous noise to that of meltdown-level awe of spirit-drunken drones roaring like dragons on the wind ridden by mercurial filigrees of every other kind of sound, sonority, and song. Still, it is edifying to compare and contrast in passing the tepid shallows of New Age’s toy music with the seismic-volcanic depths and Icarus-trailing flights of Raine-Reusch’s brand of music-that-heals, and to flesh that dialectic out in the details of his recorded work.

First, more background.

Like him, I have both German and Scottish progenitors, including some women among the latter with a few versions of his mother’s “sixth sense.” But escaping a dysfunctional family through music is one thing; turning to completely different cultures suggests the thing being escaped is also the family’s own larger native culture. I wonder if the negatives in his Western childhood world came with any positives resonant with the Asian alternatives that drew him away from it.

“The German side of my family I’ve never related much to,” he says; “I can’t handle them, they’re too harsh. The Scottish side of my family...had more of an influence on me, I think; there are some of those mystical roots going back to Scotland that somehow come through.” 

His childhood experience with Scottish martial music was more positive than Mei’s with its Chinese counterpart.

Every Sunday morning, my mother would put on military tattoo, which is, you know, 800 bagpipes and 200 drums. Full volume on the record player, 8 a.m. Sunday morning—that’s what I woke up to for years and years and years. I think that did permanently affect me, because I do have a total fascination with drones. And, one of my favorite forms of music is pibroch, which is the classical form of bagpipe music. Very, very beautiful, especially heard from a distance; it’s just incredible.

I won’t turn this into an academic study of the European-national origins of slaveowners and elites in America vs. those of the poorer whites with family histories of their own as indentured servants and even as slaves to those same fellow European Americans; or of the far greater number not so bound but also not owning either slaves, money, or much property or power in America’s storied “dream”--except to say, anecdotally, that my own such family history on the Irish, Scot, Scots-Irish and German side of things tends to run down the lines of the one-down in that big central white patch of the quilt, rubbing elbows and other body parts with their non-white counterparts on the other patches, with a distinct run of lore and attitude about the English as the one-up part and designer/owner of the quilt, for both better (class envy/aspiration) and worse (class disdain/resentment).⁴

We’ve seen all three Chinese women and Sainkho work well and naturally with the Celtic and the white American country music elements that stem more from the Celtic (Irish and Scots-Irish) than the Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) parts of the British Isles. Raine-Reusch adds to my notice of this:

Right, and there’s also a guanzi (double-reed woodwind) and sheng (free reed bamboo mouth organ) player in town here who also plays bagpipes. He’s from China, and is playing in one of the pipe bands. There is a funny relationship there, somehow, I don’t know how, but there is a mutual attraction. A lot of those Northern British Isle people, like the red-haired people from Ireland, they all came from the Western edges of China originally. Wild tribes of red-haired people from Central Asia who got chased away everywhere they went, and they ended up in Ireland.

Raine-Reusch’s early exposures to music came through his short-wave radio (electronic music) and the library (jazz, blues, world musics). He took to all of it as a welcome relief from the frustrations of his daily life. Unfortunately, his first hands-on engagements in school only offered more of the latter. His bad eyes pushed his good ears and memory to fake sight reading in groups, and at home alone, he writes in his History, “he sat for hours listening to the complex chordal clusters produced by pushing as many keys on the accordion that he could at the same time.”

“I was playing accordion and saxophone,” he tells me, “...but I didn’t find them satisfying, was searching for something, even at that age. I felt I was in the wrong body as a young kid, and I didn’t know why...So when I started reading texts on Asia, and Chinese poetry...I went, Wow—this has something to do with me...”

More History:

To quell his questions, his (Anglican) family priest gave him Plato’s Republic to read at thirteen. By the time he was sixteen he had read the Tibetan and Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Bible, the Koran, the Baghavad Gita, the Tao Te Jing, numerous anthologies of world philosophies from Kant to Confucius, and was venturing into Hesse, Pinter, Sartre, etc. By the time he was eighteen he had added to his reading list poetry from Europe, Africa, America, Persia, China and Japan, with the latter being his favorites.

Taking in these words about Raine-Reusch’s coming of age in Vancouver takes me back to my own similar moments, unfolding around the same time some 800 miles south down our shared West Coast. My version of his helpful priest, as it happens, was my 7^th-grade teacher, one Miss Ling Mah, a naturalized immigrant from China. She was a favorite of all her students, for her youthful persona, humor, obvious smarts, and overflowing friendly desire to expose us to intellectual resources and vistas far beyond the prescribed curriculum, including the kinds of books Raine-Reusch mentions. She taught a kind of music appreciation/performance (singing and rhythm) class, basic English (!), and led a journalism club after school, both of which were important launching pads in my own young life down such lines.

I was also able to augment those beginnings she enriched with easy access to San Francisco’s Chinatown, where my friends and I would go to see Chinese New Year parades and other street festivals, and browse around the shops just to take in the sights and sounds and feel of the culture there. Close by were bookstores such as City Lights, in North Beach, and Cody’s across the bay in Berkeley, both of which the Beat movement had stocked with serious inventories of literature on all things Asian, and which the hippie movement was then maintaining and updating as diligently. Such texts and other Asian influences no doubt had comparable impact in some other parts of the country, but they were certainly more up-close and personal in the cities where Raine-Reusch and I came of age.⁵

Trope 2: Quest for Vision Beyond Eyesight

Again, like me and many others of our youth’s zeitgeist and demographic in that part of the world, especially those from less-than-happy/healthy/wealthy homes, Raine-Reusch’s transition from youth to young adulthood was marked not by a well-supported stint through college to career and middle-class life, but by a period of countercultural explorations in living, working, relationships, and a search for his own best ways through them all. Under the heading “Hippiedom” in his History, he writes:

Leaving home when he was seventeen [would have been in 1969--M.H.], Raine-Reusch lived on a number of communes, and hitchhiked across Canada and down the West coast to California...He grew his hair long, wore flowing clothes and was in constant search for himself. What he found instead was an Appalachian mountain dulcimer, which he took to immediately and learned to play well enough that he would trade playing it for meals, a bed for a night and other items of survival...Sometimes living in communes and sometimes homeless, Raine-Reusch learned to eat out of garbage cans, hand sew his own clothes, and survive at the lowest rung of western society.

And, having my own similar history, this part of his evokes for me several other of my mythossociations to add to that of the precocious child struggling through adversity:

• the story of Prince Gautama stepping away from the cultured world of his coddled, sheltered youth as from illusion, and into the most naked surrender to the outside wilds and winds of poverty, sickness, suffering, and death (except that in 1960s international hippiedom the step was not a giant one from palatial heights to bedrock ground so much as a few short steps away from modest-to-shabby shelters in boring-to-sketchy neighborhoods to a friendlier, more promising albeit yet-to-become-our-own wider world);
• the tradition of wandering mendicant monks and musicians, sometimes kept alive by the kind reverence of strangers for the highest lights, just as often snubbed as the lowest dregs, of the social order and human potential (recall Mei’s words about “musicians, beggars, and whores” in the Yuan Dynasty’s social hierarchy);
• the Native American vision quest, in which a boy is initiated into manhood by going off alone into the wilderness to fast and wait for a sign from nature’s spirits telling him what his adult character, newly named, will be (the “Raine” in his name was added “when I was living in communes on Vancouver Island. People couldn’t pronounce my name, but they knew it started with an R...so they just started calling me Randy Rain, because every time it rained, which it does an awful lot here, I used to sit and play music”).

Less fancifully, such associations ground themselves in my longtime meditation on the famous “veil of ignorance” thought experiment posed by political philosopher John Rawls. We young hippies who cast our bread on the waters to find better personal, social, and political futures than those provided by our cultures of origin were in effect testing Rawls’ abstract premise for designing the most just social system--that its designers should design it behind that “veil” ignorant of what part of the system they themselves might have to live out. How could there be a problem with any kind of inequality, want, or oppression if no one in the society could tolerate it in anyone any more than they could in their own and their loved ones’ lives? Counterculture, by definition, declared in its many young bodies then that “mainstream culture is not acceptable for this, this, and that reason; this, this, and that thing I choose to do instead will replace the unacceptable with the acceptable.” They zeroed in on the strong chain’s weakest links, broke them, and tried to re-forge them, to make the chain that much stronger.

To be fair, it’s also worth noting that in declaring thus how much better the system could be, they collaterally revealed how much worse it could have been. If it was true that insecurity, neglect, misunderstanding and poverty were prices to be paid for such freedom to explore and innovate, it was also true that the greater evils of full-blown starvation, imprisonment, and/or violence and death--more the reality elsewhere, including Asia--were not. If the poor and the meek intra/cross-cultural improvisers didn’t prove to be so blessed as to inherit the earth from its rich and powerful intra/cross-cultural controllers/orchestrators, they were, at least in our time and place then, operating in a milieu friendly enough to let them sink or swim, albeit without (usually) proactively aiding one or the other of those outcomes.

All such nuanced framings suggest themselves only later in retrospect, when callow youth has morphed into seasoned thinker, naturally enough; neither were they on Raine-Reusch’s mind at the time.

I just thought this is where I was. There was just an acceptance of that, and that’s what life was. Coming from an abusive family, you don’t really think much of getting ahead in the world; there was never any drive or motivation to get ahead in the world. It was survival. Every day you got up, and just lived. I was young enough...sometimes it was kind of miserable—digging in garbage cans and sleeping under park benches is not always a pleasurable experience, especially in inclement weather...

But you do develop survival skills...or the fact that I would do anything to get a roof over my head and a hot meal. I found that I had some skills; I could do construction work, or chop wood or something like that for people; I could play music for them, and I could do some massage on them or something. I just had all these little skills developed. I could do some mending and sewing for them; I could tie ropes, so I could tie things up, or fix things...binding...and everywhere I went, I picked up another skill from somebody else, so that just added to the pile of stuff I survived with.

Before the music part of this bag of skills took off, the massage part did. He chose it as the skill to get formally trained and certified in, with the goal of starting his own practice as a masseur. He graduated with near-perfect grades from a massage college in Toronto, passed licensing exams in both Ontario and British Columbia, and hung out his shingle in Victoria, B.C. That business never took off, due (he says) to his lack of business skills and capital--but a few months later...

...a physician that occasionally sent patients to Raine-Reusch asked him to join in founding Canada’s first holistic health centre, with two physicians practicing acupuncture and two psychologists, one of whom worked with biofeedback therapy. The Holistic Health Centre gained national press, as this was the first time that five health practitioners from such diverse disciplines worked together on equal footing. Raine-Reusch stayed with the Holistic Health Centre for three years until it changed structure and focus into a more traditional clinic. During this period Raine-Reusch lectured at a number of Humanistic Psychology Conferences in the US and various local conferences on health and healing. After leaving the Holistic Health Centre, Raine-Reusch set up a new practice in Vancouver, eventually becoming the President of the Massage Section of the B.C. Association of Physiotherapists and Massage Practitioners. (from History)

Trope 3: The Body

If his challenging childhood and first steps out to the world beyond it speak to my own versions of same, this next part of his bio-narrative piques my adult professional interests far more. Not because I ever tried, much less plied or professed, the art of massage or the science of human anatomy myself, but because I did develop a scholarly fascination, born of a good quarter-century of viscerally unscholarly experience as an improvising musician, with the concept and role of the body--the whole organism, from most physical (rhythms and senses) to most psychical (mind states personal and transpersonal)--in the generation, transmission, reception, and even the analysis and theory of spontaneous, unscripted improvisation.⁶

One major part of Raine-Reusch’s bodily experience that doesn’t sync with mine is the poor eyesight, and the concomitant problems with learning music in the Western-conventional ways. I was reading and writing (language) easily and early on; I got with music and learned to sight read in my private guitar lessons, then in school bands on the trombone, later on keyboards. On my own, I read books on Western music theory, learned to read classical scores with dreams of composing same, and paid equal such attention to such readings about jazz and its harmonic-melodic palette for composing, arranging, and improvisation. This musical literacy went fast and far in my adolescence, leading to an advanced proficiency by the time I was ready for college.

However, that smooth sail met its existential crisis around then too. Whereas Raine-Reusch’s eye problems facilitated his affinity for “other musical cultures” by ensuring they wouldn’t “compete, or fight with what [he] had already learned from western training,” my own keen and healthy eyes led me down a path they now saw all too clearly I had to leave, or redirect, to voluntarily go more down the lines he’d been more forced to take.

Those weren’t Asian, but African-American, when my education in the jazz tradition got past the skin of the American songbook’s Western harmonic-melodic formats for improvisations that conformed to same and was gobsmacked by the advent of free jazz. Much like Mei Han, Wu Man, and Min Xiao-Fen did as immigrants new to improvisation, I and many other American musicians, black and white both, then faced this development with equal parts dread and excitement, as a yawping void and abyss as well as a plenipotent promise of creative energy’s liberation.

To cut to the chase here, the challenge and seduction of free improvisation was convicting me of having theretofore engaged music unreflectively, as a system and series of gestures to parrot--something read, recited, learned by rote, created only formulaically, prescriptively. It was telling me my only way past that dilemma was to forget it as that “head” knowledge and delve deeper into my unscripted, spontaneous self for something that would be both uniquely mine and universally human, not solely constructed from without.

So--the body. My own first steps into the quest for an adult vision took me beyond the 20-20 kind that could read what Raine-Reusch calls the “rabbit droppings” of scores, parts, lead sheets; even beyond the healthy hearing so alert to what others were doing so as to mentally “read” and do it myself, again, like a parrot; and into the bright darkness of my own empty mindfulness set in the blinding light of the overwhelming world, sans scripts or strategies, to plunge in boldly in duly blinded faith to emerge with the golden ring of truth, beauty, and power therefrom that would be mine to share with the world from that time forth, my fountain of youth and immortality, ‘till death did us part...

HA! More like the first false step to correct, that. But it was a start: the awareness that I was an organism that had more to it to be developed than those eyes and ears that could be trained to perform someone else’s designs for someone else’s agendas. It fast became clear that that part never would or should stop or go away--but after striving and struggling as an improviser and composer for some two-and-a-half decades of my own, and writing hundreds of interviews, reviews, and feature stories as a journalist covering others doing similar work, I felt the need to write about the process as a scholar.

“The body” had always been a concept with its own obvious place in my American music acculturation, of course. Coming of age with rock and roll, specifically the shock of Elvis Presley, started me off with the idea that white popular and Western art music both sorely needed, and were taking, lessons and cues from their black counterparts about being comfortable, vital, and elegant in one’s own skin and world. From dance to expressions and attitudes about sexuality, that idea was increasingly confirmed by my (and my American culture’s) growing awareness of the history of American music in the 20^th century.

Set up thus to trust it as true and right, I felt blindsided by the turn that music took through Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and others in that time. They took it from what I perceived as masterful treatments of and contributions to the Western aesthetic premises, systems, and traditions I’d been schooled in into new practices and processes of their own and out of my reach. They defined “the body” as more than something that could express itself more or less freely and brilliantly within those Western parameters, as rather a force that could defy or ignore such constraints, devise its own codes and carriages, take its place as central and generative rather than marginal and derivative in its social-cum-musical world. It could break free into its full potential as unrepressed flesh, unfettered mind, and as embodying spirit and soul in its own cosmic right, free and far from any and all would-be overlords or dogmas from without.

I state no singular epiphany for the world to hail, just my own mundane instance of many such individuations then. “Once one has oriented oneself cosmically, the lifelong slog to terrestrialize one’s path accordingly begins.” Midway through that lifelong slog, it was natural to step back and start reflecting, to mine and appropriate “the improvising body” as a rubric to explain as an ethnomusicologist the nature of creative music.

I sifted through the literature that attracted me in my discipline and others for the bits that resonated and spoke; that research unearthed a discourse about music as a phenomenon that permeated and suffused the human body more than all other art forms, vibrating it sonically on a cellular level throughout, processed in the same area of the brain that governs motion, affecting it so both in transmission and reception, even more than sex, which took place mainly on its skin. The same phenomenon extended out to collectives of those bodies, entraining them together in its enveloping waves and rhythms. It was defined there by its scholars as both fully autonomous from and homologically reflective of the persons and peoples who created and sounded it, much as tea leaves divined by the right diviner (theoretically) both reflect and direct reality; it was discussed variously as more or less faithfully and richly so as either, by various criteria;⁷

it was discussed as a phenomenon as deeply embodied as language, maybe deeper, as a “proto-faculty” that might have given rise to both musical and semantic meaning themselves.⁸ One of these scholars had developed a whole book around his theory of “how such apparently abstract linguistic constructs as metaphor and metonym (and their musical counterparts) are grounded in a pre-literate (and pre-musical) corporeality.”⁹ Indeed, the birth of my own academic humanities discipline and discourse was intimately entwined with that of the hard science of acoustics--and the turn in Western philosophy away from the two-millennia-old dualism of “spirit” abstracted from “flesh” Plato and the Christians began to the (more Taoist/Buddhist-friendly) monism of the phenomenologists and existentialists who reunited them.¹⁰   

I took all that and ran with it. I did ethnographies that showed how different players/composers manifested different aspects of themselves as such improvising, sounding bodies; and I devised my own body-based constructs--units of breath, unmetered but regular pulses, spontaneous periodicities, patterns, and cycles of “biological clocks”--to analyze and theorize graphically and in print discrete unscripted spontaneous improvisations.¹¹

To end this summary review of the significance of the idea as it relates to creative music, and to bring it back to Raine-Reusch’s story, I’ll quote from one such recent essay for its assertion of the power of creative literature--by implication here, of all arts, most specifically creative music--over that of materialist science to reflect the mind’s integration with its body:

When subjective humanism is recognized (under some name or other) as a school of thought in its own right, one of its characteristics will be looking to great authors for information about what the inside of the mind is like.¹²

It was with that ongoing personal intellectual interest of my own in mind that I asked Raine-Reusch to talk about the relationship between his work as a masseur and a musician.

There’s no difference whatsoever. And there’s no difference between any of that and my daily living... Yuji Takahashi, the Japanese composer whom I interviewed for Musicworks magazine talks about how music is from a body to a body; it’s got nothing to do with sound, it’s got to do with energy that you broadcast from your body to another body. So a lot of his works were positional things, where you put your body in a position, and expressed, by playing notes...

My ichigenkin teacher in Hawaii was aware of that, and she would constantly say to me, “ichigenkin is played from your hara, or your center—the dan tian in Chinese, or hara in Japanese—and I took martial arts for many years, so I was very aware of what the hara was. So I would play from my hara, and she would say “no, too high or “too low...forward a bit, back a bit,” and she would know exactly where it was; she could sense it...

This is something that’s very common in Asian thought. In ichigenkin theory, as in qin, they talk about a note that’s played with the instrument in front of you but no action on the part of the musician is required to play music. The music is present if you know how to hear it. That’s all about energy.

(But there I have gotten ahead of myself, dipping into his words about his music before getting to that part of his story. Bear with me; a bit more on the body part of the body-music link, and ichigenkin, qin, and his other instruments and philosophy will be properly introduced and addressed.)

To get back to our similarities, another trait Raine-Reusch and I share is an aversion to being dismissed as less-than-reliable narrators of our own truths. He expressed this to me in several ways; this one will speak for them all:

I went from doing it as massage into more of the psycho-physical aspect of it, because I realized very quickly I wasn’t dealing with just the physical body. I was dealing with an emotional body, and a spiritual body...I don’t want to be pigeonholed as a New Age person, because this is a very real experience for me, and most people don’t know how to handle it, so...I still don’t know how to voice it in a way that people are going to not look at me as being a flake.

It is interesting to me that he’d be anxious about this, rather than proudly, even smugly, bearing the New Age torch. It suggests a respect for rational over magical thinking, while also compelled by experiences and theories about them that are rather beyond--para- rather than ir- --rational. The experience he’s referring to is of “seeing” those nonphysical aspects of the bodies he worked on--auras, acupuncture points lighting up the body like a Christmas tree, electric-like arcs between the needles plugged into them (corroborated by others present).

My version of his aversion to being dismissed as a flake is that of a reporter of said experience who hasn’t had it himself, and feels professionally duty-bound to go beyond the role of neutral reportage and comment on it both responsively and responsibly. Such reportage-cum-commentary is performed often, of course, in literature about such things, only not so often responsively/responsibly. Journalists typically manage to insinuate a slant, pro or con, on a questionable subject from behind a veneer of objective reportage; scholars do something similar, often by coupling the straight reporting with a discursive reference to the work of some other scholar, also either corroborating or contesting.

Rather than hide behind such strategies, I offer this take: having had no such paravisual experiences myself, my own body’s different kinds of brushes with the so-called paranormal incline me to take his account at face value rather than skeptically. It seems plausible that he’s developed aspects of one of his body’s sensory organs well beyond mine and others, just as I and others have developed our own different capacities. Still, I can’t help but wonder at how to rationalize them, just as he does, just as I do with my own.

Keeping with the motif of eyes and visions here, my mind turns to the old Aristotelian “emission theory” of sight--vision as “eye beams” projected out onto the world like some inner light, rather than an admission of outer world-illuminating light streaming into the eyes, as into cameras. While the latter has been deemed the scientifically credible theory, the parascience of a Rupert Sheldrake, or the paraphilosophy of a Thomas Nagel--suspect in the eyes of rigorous materialists, but far from “New Age flakes”--suggests that the emission theory need not be discredited as a complete error suggesting nothing “real” at all.¹³

Projection is something we all do, whenever we “see” something in our various biased ways; hallucinations themselves are projections, even more so, because experienced as real; even when we will ourselves to see some things and tune out others, our will is projecting itself through our vision. It’s not such a stretch to posit a projection of something subjective within our organisms that is matched by something objective in the world, unlike a hallucination, and like normal sight. Just as happens in normal sight when our retina engages with that part of objective reality it’s designed--and directed, consciously and subconsciously, by us--to perceive, is it such a stretch to posit subtler aspects of the same organ designed to be directed to perceive, say, the subtler phenomena captured by Kirilian photography?

Then, by extension to the ear, are there sonic subtleties “heard,” to then be re-transmitted, as music, sounds and music that are heard by less subtly attuned ears as only noise? Might such sensitivities, of both eye and ear, be experienced as something like creative intention, or will, subjectively, while being no less material, albeit subtle, objectively?

Raine-Reusch ponders similarly in his own way:

I sense energy in different ways than other people. For me it’s not mystical, for me it’s not magical or New Agey, its real. ...Sometimes I’m reacting to things I’m not aware of, and then I try to figure out what it is...Let’s talk about an aura, because it’s really easy to explain.

Lots of people see auras around people. They say, oh, I see purple around your ears, and red around here; but another person sitting right beside them will say, no, I see yellow around their ear, and brown around their eye. Two people won’t agree. I often wondered why that was, because I clearly saw what I saw...

Then I read a lot about Kirlian photography, which photographs the electromagnetic fields around the body—and then they change the voltage, and they get a whole different display. Aha—it’s about changing the voltage. It’s one person seeing it at a different voltage rate than another person. So everybody’s right; they’re just looking at it in a different way.

This is the very same thing about “energy,” and music in all this energy: it depends on what channel you’ve got the radio station tuned to, what you’re hearing and experiencing. It’s all about where you’re focusing and sensing. I may be focusing on a certain level and seeing a whole bunch of things; somebody beside me is experiencing it at a different level and doesn’t see anything that I do. So who’s got the “real” experience?

This long buildup in “the body,” including the “parabody,” to the central discussion of his music speaks to the thing about its nature that puts it in my area of interest, rather than in another that might have made for an easier and more lucrative life for Raine-Reusch. His frequent protestations that his is not a “New Age” kind of music or “flakiness” suggest how viable an option for him that part of musical/commercial culture might have naturally suggested itself to be. Again, while some of it does overlap with the aesthetics and affects of music therapy’s most anodyne gestures--specifically the CDs with Pauline Oliveros--even that is improvisationally busier and more intense, within its place on the spectrum spanning rough-and-tumble controlled chaos and drone-static awe. The kind of “healing” it suggests is more akin to late-‘60s recordings by John and Alice Coltrane, or Albert Ayler, to name some familiar touchstone examples.

That it is so indicates an intellectual and existential kind of integrity shaped by experiences such as this one:

When I was living in Borneo, I was always interested in music and trance. I’d done some Sufi workshops and things like that, but I never quite bought into what trance was, until I put on this first Rainforest World Music Festival in Borneo. One of the groups I brought was the Melanau people, who live on the coast of Borneo, have always been famous for their super-spiritual stuff. They were considered the most powerful shamans in Borneo, and historically everybody, all the headhunters, were absolutely frightened of these people.

They’re now modern people, but still a lot of the old ways exist. When I went there, I had to wait outside of the house while they did a ritual to purify my presence there. They said that since they had modernized a bit, since I was known I was allowed to come in within an hour. Normally, I’d have had to wait for 24 hours before I could come in.

I was invited into the house, and we talked about music, and they had a nice little drum there...and I started to play it, just sort of lightly. The woman there told me I needed to stop. I asked if I was playing too loud. She said, no, the person next door goes into trance very easily, and if we start playing this music, she’ll go into trance, and it’ll be very hard to get her out, because she hasn’t been prepared for it.

So I’m going, okay, this is kind of interesting. Didn’t think much more about it. I recorded some people there; a guy had led an ensemble, and I invited them to my festival. He said, what should I do? I said, you do anything you want. He said, can I do this ritual that no one normally ever sees us do? It’s very powerful. I said, sure.

I thought he was going to bring 4 or 5 musicians; he brought 20 musicians, put them all onstage; they started playing...very nice. Then he came on—dancing around. He’s just a normal guy, but all of the sudden he looked almost gay, really pixie-like and very soft and fluid. I thought, this is kind of strange. He was really light on his feet, almost like he was floating around onstage, and it was very unlike him. They had put this giant sheet down for him to dance on. He starts taking dishes and breaking these very thick old porcelain plates, which fractured into a lot of very sharp pieces. He smashed about 20 of these things on the ground, danced over the top of them, picked up the four corners of the cloth so that it was all in a pile...and he jumped up and down on these shards.

At that point, everybody was absolutely in shock. There was no trick involved, this guy was actually jumping up and down on these broken plates. He came off...there’s no blood or anything like that. Everyone was just like, that’s impossible, that can’t happen. Either this guy’s a great magician, or something else happened there.

Half an hour later, I went up to shake his hand and say thank you...he seemed a little bit dazed...I shook his hand, and it was like putting my hand into a wind tunnel. I felt like I had to hold on for dear life; there was just a massive amount of energy, pushing straight up. I pulled my hand away, and I realized that’s how he did it. He just focused his energy up—and this had happened later, so he’s already coming down a lot—with such power that he literally went floating. He was levitating.

At that point, I realized that I’ve got some nice little abilities to sense things, but I don’t have that kind of training or that kind of power, and that is real. I’ve met a lot of the Reiki people, and the New Age people, and I’ve met a lot of the big leaders in India....none of them had the power of the guy that I met, not even a hundredth of it. Phenomenal, phenomenal man. It’s real, and still alive in the jungles around the world...

From an outward/upward to an inward focus of such energy, Raine-Reusch found its manifestation in music in his body in a way probably familiar to everyone, in kind if not degree:

One time I did a thing in an isolation chamber. I used to go into isolation chambers regularly, because I found the experience quite wonderful. In an isolation chamber, having been in it ten times or so—so I was really used to it—I hear something, and I say, oh, shit, someone’s got the radio on. This is terrible; these things are really good, but now somehow I’m hearing a radio. The moment I thought that, all of the sudden the song changed. When I realized it had changed, it changed again. I realized then it was music in my head...so I started going through myself to find where there wasn’t music in me. No matter where I went, in my thoughts or my senses, in every single cell of my body there was music. Every single pop song I’ve ever heard, every little country tune, every little jingle I ever heard...all of it was in me somewhere.

There’s an association with this. In some of the music training workshops, which I called conceptual music, I got people to play just a note from a certain part of their body, or just to play a note for a long period of time, and to find anyplace where that note resonates. Everybody would actually come up with a memory: that brought up this memory of that time, or this time. Little tiny fragments. All of these things seem to be triggers, symbolic associations of something in our past, like mnemonic devices. You can trigger anybody’s emotions if you get that little key to that time. You can do it with smell, touch, a word, or you can do it with music, which is part of the power of music. As we hear melodies, they take four or five or maybe a hundred of our different memories and meld them together. It can be an absolutely pleasant or altogether horrific experience, depending on what associations are triggered at that moment. So I could play you a song that would transform you, in a beautiful way, and the next person will be absolutely terrified, another enraged, another sobbing and crying...

It’s there, and that shamanism in that culture is always with music; it’s the music that takes you into it. Very real, and not New Agey.

(The well-documented technique of “memory palaces”--imaginary rooms and objects therein designed to trigger designated memories when “toured” and “spotted”--also suggests this associative power of the mind, as does the equally familiar phenomenon of people who can remember details of virtually any day in their life when given its date.)

I started this section on “the body” as resonant with my decade or so of academic work on the subject, begun in my 40s after a couple of decades as a working musician; Raine-Reusch also hit a new turn on his path around the same midlife age, lasting about as long. “A lot of times people needed to deal with their emotional problems that were at the root of their physical ones, and unresolved,” he says. “As I delved into other people’s emotional problems, I realized, well wait a second, I can’t help somebody else until I help myself.” He elaborates (in his History):

It was not until Raine-Reusch was into his forties that he had the emotional power to undergo a decade of therapy to heal the trauma of his childhood. Like many other abuse victims, he had to overcome his over-confidence that masked his low self-esteem, handicapped social skills, emotional extremes, his own internalized rage, lack of trust and a host of other emotional problems.

Trope 4: Journeymanhood

Raine-Reusch’s years as a massage therapist stand in retrospect as the livelihood he was trying to establish while doing his music. After two successive business failures of that practice, the music came to the center both as primary and more financially successful occupation. Still in his 20s, the first such failure was followed by a few months at the Creative Music Studio (CMS) in Woodstock, NY; there, with a year of studies at the Victoria Conservatory of Music under his belt, he studied and played (an Appalachian dulcimer) with improvisers including the CMS founder vibraphonist Karl Berger, composer/bassist Dave Holland, drummer Jack Dejohnette, and composer Frederic Rzewski. Around the same time (late ‘70s), a small coffee house gig led to the Edmonton Folk Festival, which led to more folk festivals, and his work as a professional musician began.

To the dulcimer he added similar stringed instruments from around the world--African lutes, a Chinese zheng--that he found in second-hand stores, learning to play them by listening to recordings of them. In 1984, his first trip to Asia led to the epiphany that would shape his future course in music.

A small Canada Council grant paid his way to Thailand where Nukan Srichrangthin, a poor rice farmer, recognized as the best khaen (a free-reed mouth organ) player in the world, spent seven hours a day teaching Raine-Reusch.  "I practiced another four and I still couldn't grasp the rhythms or the feel of the music at all," he says.  "Then, one day with my teacher, I felt my brain turn sideways and I instantly understood, deep within myself, how the music worked, but I couldn't intellectually explain it.  My whole way of being changed then, and that's when my lessons really started... "I realized the context of the sound is more important, in some senses, than the sound itself," says Raine-Reusch.  "The sound is a medium; it's not the real content.  Where and what am I producing this sound from?  Why?  What is that sound's relationship to my environment?  These are all questions that musicians have asked for thousands of years, and I felt I needed to be mindful of them if I was going to make a sound."¹⁴

He continued collecting instruments and traveling to study with their master players in Australia, Malaysia, China, Indonesia, Burma, the Philippines, and with those designated "National Treasures" in Korea and Japan. I wonder how he could afford to do this handicapped with the “poor business skills” that had squelched his massage enterprises. His answer speaks well to this study’s emphasis on women:

Thinking back, it came through a series of girlfriends, actually. I had a girlfriend who balanced my checkbook, and started booking me into festivals. We had a very amicable parting, so she said she’d teach me how to do what she’d been doing. Next girlfriend got me past my writer’s block begun in high school. I couldn’t write a single line, and I used to dictate letters to her that she would write into a computer. Then she’d have me edit those, and pretty soon I was writing those. Then she left, and there were others, and they all taught me how to do all my business. Mei has helped me formalize a lot of my disparate bits of knowledge, so that now I’m doing a lot of university lectures and things that before I never did.

But I treat my career as a business. I get up and work a ten-hour day at my office six days a week, just getting gigs, planning tours, writing grants etc. In Canada to survive in the business you must wear many hats, so I am a producer, concert-promoter, writer, bandleader, consultant, all to stay afloat. 

Those many hats, detailed on his website’s Bio page, comprise founding, administrative, artistic, and/or advisory roles in events and organizations including the Rainforest World Music and Borneo Jazz Festivals in Kuching and Miri, Malaysia, respectively; the Cirque du Soleil; nationally televised Opening and Closing Ceremonies of the Western Canada Summer Games 1990; and World of Music, Arts and Dance (WOMAD), World Expo, and World of Music Exposition (WOMEX) concerts. In agencies such as the B.C. Festival of the Arts and Korean Arts Management, he’s worked both to mentor other musicians in the traditions and instruments he’s adopted and to effect opportunities for them, and for those who have mentored and taught him and made his instruments to market their work internationally. His own performances have been broadcast nationally in China, Australia, Germany, Spain, Singapore, Canada and the United States, and he has appeared in five documentary films on music. He’s guest-lectured on the music-related topics of his purview in universities and conferences throughout Asia, Africa, North America and Europe; he is a contributing editor for Musicworks magazine, and author of Play the World: 101 World Instrument Primer, for Mel Bay Publications.

In short, he’s grown his music down cultural-activist, educational, and business as well as artistic lines. All of this constitutes what I see as one of five different aspects of his three-plus decades of work as a musician. It is the one that grounds the other four in their real-world contexts, and would richly reward the thorough attention of an ethnomusicological study more conventional than this one. Those four are, in order of my own attention:

• genre (rock, world beat, electroacoustic pop) studio recordings featuring his instruments for their voices’ contributions to the concept at hand
• collaborations with master musicians of creative music
• scored compositions, and
• collaborations with Mei Han.

My concern here is more with the second and fourth than the others; again, those others would yield much of interest in a study that focused more on the context of genre-formulized and/or composed experimental art music on paper, but here they’re limited to some glances in passing to illuminate and lead into my longest looks at Raine-Reusch’s and his instruments’ voices and statements in creative music’s musickosophical action, especially those in tandem with the Chinese master of the zheng with whom he’s met most auspiciously halfway.

Speaking of whom, let us turn to Mei Han for her important aside about the musicultural ambassadorial work described above. It has to do with a controversy with 10,000 faces in the world of ethnomusicology, that of cultural purity-cum-authenticity v. appropriation-cum-exploitation. It weaves through the history of music original to African Americans made profitable to white managers and imitators of it; through that of indigenous, often colonized peoples’ music and Western scholars’ and companies’ similar kinds of thefts; and, from another angle, through that of artists who step beyond cultural, class, or genre borders within which some critics and fans presume to keep them, on pain of hostile attacks or malign neglect.

That latter kind is the most familiar to me, having worked closely with and on the work of one most famously saddled with it. Anthony Braxton has had to fight for his right to make a body of music that dances around and beyond all of the above such borders throughout the more than half a century he’s been making it. African-American composers in both Western art music and jazz traditions have faced similar cultural policing, from both sides of said borders; some white musicians too have struggled against the winds of such prejudice, also from both sides of the racial divide, even when accepted by fellow musicians from both sides.

This is yet another issue that might reward an investigator who cared to pursue it in Raine-Reusch’s story, since his experience not only as a player but also as purveyor of Asian music is so extensive and multifaceted. My sense of him, much like that of Braxton and many other such genre-busters I’ve been drawn to--including all those showcased here, for that matter--is that real creativity’s freedom and integrity trumps such “transgressions,” and that to find otherwise where that is the case is to hunt witches where they don’t exist. I will pass on some words from both Mei Han and Raine-Reusch on the subject, as well as from other parties of note, before finally turning to the main course and meat of this chapter, in the music.

Han:

Personally I think his contribution to this subject is equally important and meaningful as that of the Asian artists who came to this side of the world to use traditional Asian instruments to perform non-Asian music genres...I often see people recognize what I have done as breaking the music and cultural boundaries, which I appreciate greatly. However, I don't see same recognition going the other way...

Raine-Reusch:

A Chinese woman playing free improv on a Chinese instrument is a lot more exciting than a white guy, a white male playing a Chinese instrument and doing free improv. People automatically assume that the woman is going to be better.  Very few people relate to the fact that I’ve been playing the zheng for 20 years now, and have been doing contemporary music on it.

Han:

Randy started learning and performing Asian instruments long before I met him. He’s contributed so much for several Asian music cultures (sape, ichigenkin and zheng, to name a few). He introduced many immigrant musicians like myself to the new communities. Most of all, his own music, including both his scores and sound, are fine examples of "East meets West." They exemplify combinations of Western and Eastern aesthetics.

Han’s fellow Vancouver Chinese immigrant Qiu Xia He is a pipa player and Raine-Reusch’s bandmate in ASZA (we’ll get to that shortly). “He won't be the top traditional player because he wasn't brought up in the culture," she says. "But if you ask him to play for other Chinese people, they'll say 'Wow,' because of how he approaches the instruments.  He uses traditional techniques but applies them in a contemporary way."¹⁵

Pauline Oliveros (CDs with her reviewed ahead): "It's a delicate position being a white male, which is often seen as the exploiter.  I think of Randy as a bridge between Asian and Western practice . . . He makes every effort to understand the cultural aspects of his instruments."¹⁶

Raine-Reusch:

It’s not so much the traditionalists in Asia, it’s the traditionalists here—and they aren’t the traditionalists who are of the ethnicity of the tradition they’re trying to protect or whatever. It tends to be what I would call prejudice in the music scene as a whole. It’s about what it looks like, right, it’s not about what it is.

Paul Plimley (see Ume review):

Randy is performing a noble task in that he's utilizing Asian instruments, philosophies and spiritual mindsets that apply to centuries of playing music, but he's not replicating those classical traditions.  Rather, he's assimilating what's useful, natural and stimulating for him, so he can adjust and incorporate aspects of those traditional languages into his own, unique vocabulary and approach to making music.¹⁷

Raine-Reusch:

From my perspective, these are expressions of my voice. These are my tools of expression...The funny thing is that I’ve had a lot of bias about me playing an instrument here. But I’ll go to Asia and play that instrument, and people go crazy over it. Totally accepting the fact, and excited about it, that I’ve studied their instrument, learned something about it, can actually play...I’m not out there representing these cultures; I’m not saying “I am a Chinese musician playing Chinese music.” If I ever do play Chinese music, I’m usually playing it with a Chinese performer. I don’t present myself as the best at playing these instruments—far from it; I’m well aware of what great Chinese musicians are. There are, though, certain things that I have achieved—like on ichigenkin. I still haven’t learned all the traditional repertoire—I do have somewhat of an interest in it, but that’s not really my personal expression. But I do have the philosophy of the instrument...I feel that I can definitely go and represent this instrument onstage, because I can express something on this instrument that nobody else can. I’m not doing it as a Japanese person, I’m doing it as a person playing this amazing instrument.

[I]t’s interesting to me that the people who see me for who I am, who can totally relate to what I do, tend to be some of the top people in the business. That’s not a comment about me as much as a comment about the kind of awareness you have to have to be one of the top people in the business. You’ve already broken down those barriers; you don’t see the world in the same way.

Robert Dick (see Gudira review, ahead):

When I see trees growing on the roofs of burned-out houses in Harlem, or a vine's root hairs holding the earth through a tiny crack in a concrete wall, I think of musicians like us. . . Randy is an original, and is putting his life together out of a jigsaw of elements . . . He presents a unique voice that is like some kind of musical airline hub with undelayed flights to everywhere.¹⁸

So--back to that bullet list of said flights.

The Music of Record

Through all my endeavors, I'm expressing the many parts of myself and bringing them together into the one person that I am.  I'm actually doing one thing; I'm attending to many branches of the same tree.¹⁹

Genre

Those branches on record include guest-artist kinds of studio dates for four CDs from 1989-99 with rock groups Aerosmith (Pump), Yes (The Ladder), The Cranberries (For the Faithful Departed), and Jackl (Push Comes to Shove) all through the late Vancouver producer Bruce Fairbairn. Raine-Reusch’s entertaining account of them includes details about the instruments and how they were used. Ranging from “little instrument” kinds of effects (bullroarer, Kenyan rattle, others, gongs and bells) to evocations of 19^th-cent America (jaw harp, glass harmonica, Appalachian dulcimer), from the now-familiar Australian didjeridu to Asian instruments less so (Indonesian anklung, Thai naw [oldest of the Asian free-reed mouth organs, dating back some 4000 years] and khaen, Polynesian xaphoon, Central Asian tambura, Chinese zheng and ching [small bell]), the effect over twelve tracks on these four CDs is to add hints or more foregrounded sounds iconic of cultures and regions beyond the pale of the groups’ Western-conventional American rock brands. Raine-Reusch:

Bruce Fairbairn was a highly respected producer working with the world’s top bands.  It was great to work with him as he saw ways to use my instruments not just as incidental sounds, but as real musical elements, sometimes playing them backwards or slower to get a unique musical effect. He regarded my instruments as unique sound sources rather than exotica.

Another couple of CDs (Time is a Slippery Concept, 1988-2004; and Wave Packet, 2013), more eccentrically linked to the global rock scene, feature him on a similar smattering of their tracks. He describes their source:

Melodic Energy Commission is a strange band, seldom ever performed live; core members would gather sporadically and record at [musician/producer] Don Xaliman’s house...it is really his vision (ear) that puts it all together...Our original two records have become cult classics, as there are two members of the British Band Hawkwind on them, so all their fans have bought up the records...When the first albums came out, very few folks took them seriously in Vancouver, but the band is very popular these days, especially in Japan.

In addition to an audience beyond their Anglophonic Western origin, then, what these projects have in common in terms of Raine-Reusch’s work is that they were conceived by others who invited him in for the musicultural complements he could bring to their concepts. Their genre’s rock affects, from mainstream to eccentric, contextualized the Eastern sounds and statements as sonic-cum-musical glimpses from this or that part of the world or tradition or aesthetic, joining in on the side.

ASZA

Randy Raine-Reusch: dulcimer. khaen, dutar, didjeridu, kwii

Joseph 'Pepe' Danza: percussion, guitar, flutes

Qiu Xia He: pipa

Andre Thibault: guitar, oud

Laurence Mollerup: bass

1. Asa Branca

2. Teoi Khong

3. Live and Burn

4. Gao Yuan

5. Xiang Yang Hua

6. Dulcimer Stomp

7. Cancion de Agua

8. Drift

9. Nagual

10. Oudly Enough

11. ShaanXi Air

ASZA, both group and CD by the same name, was more the collective enterprise, and a better showcase for its members’ traditional idioms, instruments, and creative musicianship on fuller-throated and freer display. Its own neat fit into marketplace genre (world beat) anchors its more experimental mixes and matches of its several musicultural elements, Raine-Reusch’s generally being the least familiar.

“’Asa branca’ (title of ASZA’s first track) means ‘white wing’ in Portuguese; ‘ASZA’ was derived from wing (asa) in Portuguese, because we liked the freedom that an image of a wing suggested, and when we were onstage we would definitely fly. We chose to change the spelling to make it more distinctive,” Raine-Reusch explains (apparently unaware of the happy coincidence of that spelling’s own definition).²⁰

The group’s core of four musicians (here with guest bassist Laurence Mollerup on three of the 11 tracks) draw on their own different native cultures and others of their studied interest through their main and several dozen more traditional acoustic instruments, to sound a blend of traditional songs, techniques, and rhythms, “enriching each and diluting nothing.”

This CD serves as a good first step beyond Raine-Reusch’s Play the World book and its CD of sample sound bytes into a full-blown musical context half beyond the wholly traditional contexts it draws on. A casual and general listener can easily relate to the familiar “world beat” rubric through which to situate a first contact with the newly-heard instruments with the rather more familiar ones of pipa (played by Vancouver Chinese immigrant Qiu Xia He), world percussion array (by Uruguayan Joseph “Pepe” Danza, also the CD’s producer), and flamenco guitar and oud (Canadian André Thibault). Along with Raine-Reusch’s own most familiar offerings (dulcimer, didjeridu, jaw harp) are also the Thai khaen and kwii and the Central Asian dutar.

The khaen is one of my favorite of these ancient flavors new to me. In that fixed-pitch free-reed lineage between the 3400-year-old Chinese sheng and Pauline Oliveros’ accordion, discussed in Chapter Ten, it originated with the ethnic Lao people; similar precursors date from Bronze Age Southeast Asia. I can well understand why it might have been the first Asian instrument to turn Raine-Reusch’s head around and into trance music, on his first Asian journey.²¹

For starts, the fixed nature of the tuning itself--the tubes are cut to a length immutable, all other instruments one can tune manually must tune to it, just as with modern harmonicas, accordions, organs, and (effectively) pianos--is commanding enough to transfix, on a certain level. Its cluster of bamboo tubes of different lengths makes a nasally, edgy sound through its internal breath-blown metal reed; it echoes myths of the Greek god Pan playing syrinx, and suggests itself as the ancestor of every family of such sounds since, from Raine-Reusch’s own ancestral and childhood bagpipes to Western organs from Buxtehude to Alice Coltrane, from French-made Indian harmonium to American blues harp. For me, it also resonates with what Miles Davis called “the world’s chord” when he returned to music in the 1980s and started playing similar polyphonic drone-bytes on the synthesizer...and the chordal horns of trains and ships that really sound like the world’s chord in the dead of night in my own part of the world.

That wide open, breathy layer cake of tones topped by a slather of melos (improvised melody line) is indulged in the opening of the popular Thai-traditional song “Toei Kong”; it then shifts and settles into that rubbery rhythmicality of the breath blowing out and sucking in unique to mouth organs, for the more (Afro-funk) “beat” side of the world (again, that descriptor) beat.

The kwii, also Thai, is employed on a track called “Cancion de Agua,” “a tribute to the rainforest peoples of the world and to Iemanja, The Benevolent African Goddess of the Waters” (liner notes by Raine-Reusch and Danza, who also byline the piece). Also bamboo, it is an end-blown flute that includes a paper-like vibrating membrane that gives it a distinctly less flatly wooden sound than would otherwise occur. Ears attuned to the different sounds of the Western-classical silver, or the various ethnic flutes of wood, bone, or clay will likely recognize this slightly more ringing, fine-cut sound as akin to that of the Chinese dizi, widely recognizable as “Chinese” in sound, if not by name. In the context of this track’s evocation of the rainforest’s more percussive and scratchy sibilants (rain, birdcalls, insects), this overriding flute sings out a voice of hardy survival and pluck.

Speaking of singing, Raine-Reusch’s Tibetan undertone and Mongolian overtone singing qualify as two Asian sounds brought masterfully to bear on the concepts of their tracks. The former is joined with Qiu Xia’s arrangement and vocal rendition of a Tibetan folk song (“Gao Yuan [Highland])”, then woven in with other horns and percussion ranging from Australia in sounds and evoking Native America in rhythms...”to recreate the vastness of the Himalayas and their temples” (liner notes). “Nagual,” by Danza, borrows from Native America’s primal Mongolian ancestry’s tradition of overtone singing to help evoke its (Mexican native) invisible spirit world, popularized by Carlos Castaneda. Raine-Reusch displays a remarkable clarity, control, and power for the vocal technique’s challenges to same.

Finally, the dutar takes center stage on “Xiang Yang Hua,” a traditional song from the ethnic minority (Uyghur) people of Northwestern China (Xianjing Province). It’s a two-string (which dutar means in Persian) long-neck plucked lute native to Iran and Central and Southern Asia. Here it has that Middle Eastern dance feel we met earlier in the Silk Road-related projects of Mei Han and Wu Man, reminding us of the porous, overlapping borders between China’s Buddhist/Taoist/Confucian and Islam’s worlds.

So here the Asian sounds and stories are a step up from garnish on the Western dish: more like a part of the global salad bowl of ingredients adding up to a hybrid genre for the cosmopolitan modern musical tourist. The distinguishing concept is mixing styles, traditions, and voices together: Indian raga meets African backbeat, Spanish Flamenco meets Moroccan dumbek, Australian didjeridu meets Tibetan horn, etc. “Enriching each and diluting nothing,” granted--but perhaps also more like a day hike on the Cascades with a multicultural group of friends who all speak English than an ascent of Himalayan heights with strangers speaking in different tongues whose reputation as climbers preceded them, just met to join and climb, having that skill set in common. (That, in fact, is a comparison Raine-Reusch himself made, as we’ll get to shortly.)

Speaking musicosophically, my take on that comparison will serve as a summary conclusion of this glance at the nature of genre’s role in Raine-Reusch’s work. Returning to the body as the source of music, we can say that the way it works in these genre contexts starts so: one learns, assimilates, finally embodies a given tradition’s sound, either by enculturation or acculturation; one adds one’s own personal styles, patterns, innovations to it, still well within that traditional imprint; then one adds the results to this or that larger context in the cultural/social/political/commercial world, contexts ranging on a spectrum from thriving on and affirming to stretching or transforming the original “sound made flesh,” each to varying degrees of intensity.

Sainkho expressed this well when she--who started her own career singing traditional material in a conventional choral/solo context, then turned to several different cutting edges away from that over time--spoke of being a musician in the present who either looked back or forward in time through one’s art. Compared to Raine-Reusch’s subsequent recorded work, if any one thing can define the genre projects above as the homogenous Cascades to the latter’s heterogenous Himalayas, it is that much of the material was already conceived and/or realized--rock songs laid down, traditional material too, both simple formulized patterns of melody, harmony, rhythm. All he and his bandmates had to do was compose, arrange, and/or improvise music to fit the concepts and collaborations; what they did with their instruments in those contexts hinted at the larger skill set required, and even that was prescribed, even potentially proscribed, by said contexts.

Better for me than the mountain range analogy, building on “the body” as the musickosophical terrain, is that of transport vehicles as metaphors. If the body is the source of a given music’s “meaning,” “soul,” or “spirit”--the inflection of the string, voice, drum, or breath, the design of the instrument, that makes it the semusical gesture of one person, people, tradition, culture rather than another--let’s say that body can walk, run, ride a one- or more-speed bicycle, motorcycles and automobiles of various horse power, on up through ships, trains, and planes to space ships. Let’s say when it walks and runs alone, in private or public, it is performing its music solo, from first noodling conception to final realization; when it’s doing that on a one-person vehicle, it is putting itself at the service of that vehicle’s design--pedaling and steering if a bicycle; managing greater speed, danger, risk, and power if a motorcycle. If it’s doing it in a car with others inside, next to other cars on roads designed for their traffic; or in a mass transit system overseen by still others neither driving nor riding--all such vehicles being genres, traditions, in various degrees of musical complexity, cultural or commercial power, and natural design in the world--it is applying its musical skill set to a select one of that manifold complex of contexts.

If we might then call a folksinger singing a simple traditional song to her own guitar accompaniment a body on a no-gear bicycle, or compare a band of four directing their talents to the different roles of a sailboat crew navigating the wind in concert...what vehicle might best image the creative improviser-cum-composer/arranger?

That question brings us to the area I will look at most closely--his collaborations on recordings with seasoned masters in my main area of interest and knowledge, including Robert Dick, Barry Guy, Joe McPhee, Stuart Dempster, Bill Smith, Henry Kaiser, Torsten Müller, and especially (those singled out for this study’s focus) Sainkho Namtchylak, Jin Hi Kim, Pauline Oliveros and wife Mei Han. (His scored compositions will get the summary attention promised above, but in the context of the closer look at one of those recordings.)

While he plays all of his 1000-plus instruments with some proficiency from rudimentary to functional, he specializes in “at least a dozen,” a few of which are most prominent on his remaining CDs. When I asked him what distinguishing characteristics, if any, he would make between the CDs falling on our same creative-music radar screen, he replied, true to the last epigraph, that he tends to see rather the common thread comprising them. The door is thus left open for me to look at each for the lenses I can use to examine a few aspects of my interest here:

• his work as free improviser (Gudira, Kamüra), featuring roughly equal parts free reed mouth organs (khaen, sho), single-line winds (kurai [endblown oblique reed flute from the Ural Mountains], suling [Indonesian bamboo flute], and guanzi [rosewood double-reed, oboe-like]), percussion (Korean changgo drum), and strings (bowed ajaeng [Korean silk-stringed zither], bowed and hammered zheng, and biwa [plucked Japanese lute]);
• as composer/arranger/improviser from the  more or less harmonically-melodically conventional Distant Wind, featuring mostly zheng, in tandem with Mei Han; to the more conceptually experimental Bamboo, Silk, Stone, featuring mostly Korean kayageum (zither), one piece in tandem with Jin Hi Kim; and ichigenkin and nigenkin, rare Japanese one- and two-string zithers, respectively; and
• as trance musicker (Driftworks and Looking Back [khaen, sho, didjeridu, suling, ney [Middle Eastern oblique reed flute], bawu [Chinese single pipe free reed], and dan bau [a Vietnamese one-string zither]).

(We’ll get into more detail about each in the context of the CD reviews ahead.) Raine-Reusch:

There’s a quality that the instruments that I bring to these have that you just don’t find in other CDs. Even if you listen to Jin Hi Kim’s CDs, they’re not the same thing as what you see in mine. You might be able to find some similarities, but if you go to Fred Ho, it’s totally different, or like the Far East Side Band, or Miya Masaoka...some people are using the same kind of instruments, but there’s something different there. Yet I find that there’s a common thread. I sense a bit more air, or an ethereal quality to my work, but just slightly. For me it’s an elusive thread, but that’s what I like about it; I can sense that there’s something there that is almost like a kind of little emptiness. It’s like there’s a hollow tube through it all, or a breeze running through it that I can’t put my finger on, but I totally sense it.

Gudira

Barry Guy: double bass,

Robert Dick: flute (sometimes with 'glissando headjoint'), alto flute, bass flutes, piccolo

Randy Raine-Reusch: Asian zithers, Asian and Middle Eastern winds, percussion

1. Thithaways

2. Jupet Backagain

3. Ideareal History

4. Modulous Contrascene

5. Finnfinnotus

6. Kokopeli Dook

7. Diasporation

8. China Chambers

9. Luktooryzoidpak

Gudira is the CD chronologically following the genre projects; it’s also the first in the creative/improvised music area; and it is the CD that caught Mei Han’s first attention to Raine-Reusch’s zheng work, after which the subsequent recordings of both intertwined in various ways. I knew the work of Mei Han first, from her Ume CD with pianist Paul Plimley. I had never heard of her husband before that, found him in the process of researching her, on their shared website asza.com. The names of his CDs’ collaborators made that find auspicious, for this study, including as they did others of my focus here, and of my more general purview.

I was familiar with the inimitable bassist/composer Barry Guy, and the redoubtable flautist/composer Robert Dick, both of whom are stellar luminaries in the world of creative music. Another familiar voice, that of colleague Francesco Martinelli, well states my own first impression of Gudira in his liner notes for the CD: “...I was very excited when I learned about this project in which two of my favorite musicians chose to go on record for the first time together, completing the triangle with a musician with whom I was not familiar.”

Titled by combining the first two letters of each of the trio’s last names, for Raine-Reusch the CD’s concept and process and even personnel were not brand new, though it was his first released recording along such lines. He had played with Guy and Namtchylak in a similarly live-improvised performance at a festival...and that time was for him something of a shock of the new.

The first time I played with Barry, a guy named Eric Rosenzweig got me together with him...Eric had wanted to do this electronic thing, knew our work, and wanted Barry and me and Sainkho to play with their sort of miniaturized interactive video computer system thing, called Fleabotics. It was quite an exciting project, and it brought Barry and Sainkho and me together.

The first time I played with Barry, I just ran out of materials so quickly...I was astounded! It’s like here’s me, who had regularly gone and walked through the Cascade Mountains or something like that—all of the sudden I’m facing the Himalayas! Woops, this is a different magnitude!..So I just went home and I just busted my butt, just trying to increase my palette by listening to as much as I could, just work work work work work...so that the next time I was with him, I could stand up and deliver...But it was funny...with both Barry and Sainkho, I didn’t really come out.

These are two monsters onstage. You know what Barry’s like, he takes up 110% of the space. Not crowding it, that’s just what he does. There’s lots of room for anybody else, if you know how to move through it. And Sainkho did the same thing...she would sometimes bump into Barry, because she also was used to taking up all the space. So the two of them sometimes would fight (energywise); in our rehearsals, that’s what was happening. So I just started taking what Sainkho gave, and I would give it to Barry, and got what Barry gave and gave it to Sainkho. I would just sit there and translate for both of them, just to tie the two of them together; that’s just all of how I saw my role.

We did two tours together, and that’s what I did. I pulled these two together to make us a trio. Occasionally I’d come out for a little tiny bit—30 seconds here, a minute here, nothing extended. Those two were onstage, and I was just tying it together.

This is something about creative/improvised music I’ve heard about from others and thought about often, from the first free-jazz days—that it can foster a self-absorption of black-hole proportions, making for unreadable messages in bottles from individuals, and a sterile catharsis of them in Babel-like collectives. I saw Cecil Taylor have that effect on both audiences and some musicians who worked with him in Europe; Anthony Braxton’s strategy to avoid it has been through the composer’s role and tools, and regular reminders to keep the music “transparent.” The best musicians are always mindful of it as an occupational hazard, and stay alert to ways to avoid or manage it, as Raine-Reusch describes doing.

The same kind of moderating role can be heard on Gudira, not only in the musical choices he makes about content—what he plays—but in the meta-trialogue happening between the instruments themselves. The voices of the modern Western acoustic bass and flute, in all their technological prowess, are joined by instruments that often sound like their weaker, less developed Ur-prototypes. What they are as a trio sometimes speaks louder than what they say with such a configuration.

I was booked to play with Barry Guy and Robert Dick at the Vancouver Jazz Festival. Russ Summers, who runs the label Gudira is on (Nuscope) is the guy who set this up; he had heard me play with Barry and Sainkho, so he wanted to put Barry and me and a horn player on the same stage. He originally wanted Vinny Golia to play with us, but he was busy, so he got Robert Dick.

Robert Dick didn’t know me from a hole in the ground. All of a sudden we’re onstage, and I’m sitting here with all these weird instruments, long hair, West Coast guy in a West Coast festival...a local kid. So he didn’t really know much about me. We played; it was a great set. I had said, “By the way, Robert, one of the instruments I’d like to play is the ney, you know, the Middle Eastern flute. Do you mind?” He said, “No, no; if it’s right, go ahead and go for it.” Because I didn’t want to break into his territory; I didn’t know who he was about these kinds of things. So after we finish, and all the applause and all that, he just turned to me and said, “Well—you’re no faker.”

So, you know, it kind of summed up the kind of biases other people might have on first sight, but in this case it was total acceptance; he heard me play, and said fine. So we’ve been trying to get together and do something since. We’re really wanting to play more together; I really connected well with him.

Starting with the live-recorded free-improv performance on Gudira, then, I will myself freely improvise the “one thread” that it is by regarding the order of its tracks as arbitrary and mutable, and arranging them myself into a sequence serving the points and flow I want to compose and riff on.

Getting back to the “chord of the world” sound of free-reed mouth organs, it flowers fully in the sho on “Thithaways” and the khaen on “Finnfinnotus.” Played as polyphonic drones that wend and loop through their handful of tones, sometimes also stitching them into melodic lines, these ur-organs evoke that most primal music of human voices sounding forth entrained to transcend as a “sacred harp,” swallowed up in the sound they themselves are contributing to, as single “pipes.” They ignite trance by sounding stood-still in a moment more than flowing through many (though they do do both, like the group singing of the Aka and Mbuti people glimpsed in Chapter Two); they extend the technique of many bodies intoning so by putting their voices in the clustered pipes, for one body to hold in hands and blow.²²

Raine-Reusch lays that sho ground down for his partners’ more virtuosic dance; sometimes they mirror and add to its rich soil, more often seem to till it, seed it, sprout from it in curling shoots, uproot themselves and dance on it. As he stated about his role with Namtchylak and Guy, “There’s always a chance for me to play full out, but I also like to sit back and create unexpected links between what the others are putting out,” he writes in the liner notes. (“Full out” does describe better his work on the khaen: the same drone effect but more dramatic, with a melody line of his own spun out on top of the chord to do some dancing of its own.) I’m not sure I would call these links unexpected, as a listener…but I certainly would call them strong and suggestive stimuli that the others pounce on and off from lustily.

Having laid down that ground so, he then does join more fully in their fray of streaming information’s steaming exchange, when he switches to a bowed ajaeng halfway through the sho track. Raw silk strings and a resined horsehair-cum-wooden bow make for scratchy timbres, clucky taps and plucks and clatters that incite and go well with same in the low-floating growl and air/tap/key fluttertongue Dick draws on his flute; the zither and the latter duet gingerly and soft, mercurial, insectoid, over Guy’s jazz-bass-y moments.

We hear both bass and flute as extending technically from their familiar Western histories and conventions in the hands of these two; the ajaeng’s sound is timbrally much like what they tend to extend those techniques to—grittier, raspier, more percussive when bowed or struck with wood. The middle in which the two Western and three Eastern instruments meet leaves their respective traditional baggages behind more alchemically than if each were reaching beyond some “cutting edge” of his own Western or Eastern milieu without the other to connect to. Each seems rather to be there waiting in the other’s “beyond.”

"In the Western tradition, music is often considered to be found in the 12 notes of the scale,” says Raine-Reusch. “But in Asia, it's found between these notes. To play Asian music, it has taken me years to learn a whole new way of listening, thinking and even moving."²³

(Interesting fact: a heart monitor’s graphlines of interstitial periods between the spiking beats are not uniformly flat; they reveal the different states of anger, love, etc.)

If many notes make as many “betweens” (silences, different pitches, unpitched sounds), does the music made thus expand, like the universe via dark matter/energy? Unanswerable, of course, but not unquestionable. Guy and Dick do indeed tend to mine for music through maximum proliferation of notes, mostly the atonal chromatic palette of their instruments’ design/tradition, as well as all other kinds of sounds; and Raine-Reusch does indeed tend to anchor that with its opposite concept of drone rather than add to it. When he does add to it, Guy takes the anchoring role, in primal music’s one step up from drone—a repeated oscillation of two notes, Curt Sachs’ famous “one-step melody.”²⁴

About that “atonal chromatic palette,” “Modulus Contrascene” and “China Chambers” are the best examples of it to my ears. Dick and Guy hold forth most prominently in them, and all stops are pulled in the way they each get around on their instruments as highly trained Westerners who have long since internalized the chromatic palette, atonal and tonal both, to which, again, their instruments and/or fingerings tend. Raine-Reusch holds his own well enough on his guanzi and kurai (both single-line woodwinds, with their less-than chromatic capacities built in the finger holes), but this is clearly the métier par excellence of his bandmates, and here they fly the most. The overall effect of that voice of the trio, then, is something like an active, busy bilateral body governed by a meditative mind.

These tracks have a distinctly post-Webern kind of “new-music” feel to them—soft, spidery, quicksilvery-dusty, even when intense, on the Western front—offset by the more chthonic rustications sounded from the Eastern. They also evince that organic way of stopping and starting intuitively common to both Asian-traditional and the best-executed spontaneously improvised music, in their shared absence of Western-style meters and measures. Finally, their special blend suggests a human-scaled simulacrum of the natural scenario of birds, insects, winds & breezes—a Taoist tableau that might not have sprung so happily to mind by hearing only Dick/flutes (from bass to piccolo) and Guy/bass.

I’ve saved the remaining five tracks for last because all but one of them features Raine-Reusch on zheng, and that one on the related zither ajaeng, all putting his most interesting and exciting musicianship on most dazzling display. It was that deft performance that caught Mei Han’s attention and led to everything else in their musical partnership; and it works nicely as a kind of culmination of my own musicological musings here too.

The drone concept best sounded through the free reed mouth organs shows one aspect of East meeting West—here less as all-out trance (we’ll get to those CDs shortly) and more as harmonic carpet for the Western dance of the 10,000 notes, if you will. The ancient-meets-modern concept shows another such aspect, with the Eastern instruments that are technologically primitive but potentially more soulful prototypes of the Western ones.

With the zheng, especially, we have both of those aspects on offer, but much more as well. As a polyphonic instrument, it can effect the same Western harp-like lush harmonic ground; as a melodic instrument, it can pluck out single lines like modern string and keyboard instruments do, conversing with them as if one of their venerable ancestors (as I described Han doing with Plimley); but it is also an instrument that can sport many strings, many instant changes of tuning, and is one that rings out into the world with an electric agility, begging and rewarding as much virtuosity and imagination as players like Guy and Dick bring to their younger, more Industrial Age axes. (Raine-Reusch: “I’ve always been interested in families of instruments and the relationships between them.”)

“Jupet Backagain” opens with Raine-Reusch’s zheng. As with the sho, tones are launched into the air with much space between them, which the others fill; when they do, Raine-Reusch can respond in kind more facilely than on his wind instruments. From floaty-spacey to runs of luck throughout the piece, he sees and raises Dick’s whispered intensity to some high bird chirping, Guy’s bass plucked like a guitar to a solo that itself in turn plucks more energetic string talk out of the zheng, which tinkles it all out on a patch of Asian scale.

“Ideareal History” squares off the two string players most obviously as those dueling/duetting inter-epochal players of the same string family; Raine-Reusch is here more than holding his own on those pitch-rich terms of the West, holding it in the front and center even as Guy wails his best right along. Both break easily and suddenly from the pitch fest into chords, as if laying down new patches of carpet now and then to resume pitching the dance upon—bent bluesy notes, sometimes traditional techniques and lines, sometimes percussive noise, or note choices beyond such traditional lines. Both scale their playing from bottom to top of their respective ranges, often in savvy contrast, sometimes in tandem, like climbers up the steepest energy slopes tied together for safe ascent, sometimes slowing for breath and breadth of sightseering: little cries of birds flying over big rolling bottoms of terrain viewed from height…then more zithery flashes or arpeggios (Harp Age Eons—a title suggestion, Gudira-style), hairpin turns from bassic glissandos to plucky clatters, turns back to the chromatic pitch-chat…; no wind here, a duologue of strings, their music implied as often in sheer impulsiveness as in the actions those impulses shape. Raine-Reusch does tend to default to his instrument’s Eastern voice and identity, but spins away from it Westwardly too, into the improv, and back: East meeting West within his as well as between his and Guy’s gestures.

Those two tracks, especially, foreground the zheng played in its most naturally articulated state (as opposed to the CD’s two others with it, ahead, one in which it’s hammered, the other “prepared”). The clearest objects of Mei’s informed response, they get out of the more physically constrained statements of many of the other instruments into the most up-close-&-personal catfighting splashes of semusical information--content, beyond sheer sound of voices--improvised and generated by those voices.

Dick is back in the mix on “ Kokopeli Dook”; that mix is a continuation of the high-energy yet restrained jam begun above. Raine-Reusch’s ajeang sounds a virtuosic cuffing, curling salty thin and paler than the robuster Western power instruments, thin like a wire, wan like the gritty, gristly, grizzled grandpa of their wildest clan, still eking out his free-radical plucks and bows with their Oldest-Worldliest accent accentuating the beyond-perfect English of the souls and spirits he spawned. He bears them, they carry him, on a sound rending spacetime feistily, slyly, careful and careless (I recall Jin’s “living tones,” ponder how a tone can be living at both young and old ages in its life).  Much in Dick’s sonic vocabulary, again, evokes animal and bird cries, and provokes same in Guy (that high, slip-around cry…); there’s a good dynamic flux here, from different extremes…and much that’s similar to traditional Asian music in the unpitched vocal sounds, the rapid tongue and plectrum, and the noisier music between the pitched notes.

“Diasporation”: Raine-Reusch  hammers strings of zheng as the other two rip through their usual burns, burbles, and blows both windy and percussive. Midway it gets slow, after 5 minutes of energy; Raine-Reusch still hammering, all three more meditative in the middle passage...but then the metallic hammered zheng sound alone gooses the energy up again…slashes, clashes, pitches pitch, and are pitched (as a ship on a raging/calm/raging sea, pitched with a broad tarbrush to seal it tight; zheng strings of rain pelt the decks, bass clatters like its planks, also singes high; flute gargles, growls low, then sings highly birdlike; voices human are in these animal sounds, slaying their names and plecking out their order...things emerge, swell, recede, like the storm surrounding Noah’s Ark.

As if hammering it weren’t enough, Raine-Reusch  then “prepares” his zheng for “Luktooryzoidpak,” like piercings “prepare” a body: “with bamboo and metal clips, some wound with tape or thread, placed at nodal points, with varying tensions.” This inspires a wilder range of textures and attacks in both flute and bass, as the title echomimetically suggests. The zheng sounds like gongs, bongs, koto clucks, tings, tangs, tingling tangles, knocks on wood, teak tapped and ticking…the energy wanes to some sweet spots ten minutes in, three from end--long tones, broken meanders...the zheng strings choke up, erotically...

This track sounds places on land and sea where things creak and moan; trees in wind, animals and birds on wood...buzzing whistles become voices (vibrations through air, meat, things); tin cans and rusty metal can be evoked out of clean strings and rustproof alloys--jinglethornythicket brush. Creatures like to live there, because safe in sound. What if squirrels and raccoons and rats and nutrias and birds did sing these songs together, in just such ringing abodes and skittish scampers between them? Then to end in more peaceful, longing, praising song, bringing them to stand on hind legs, stock still, and hypnotize each other by singing minor seconds into interfering waves beyond all middling passagers?

My over-indulgence in the wordplay in that review is in fact my foreplayful segue into a look at a part of the CD that came after the music—the track titles. It serves the broader discussion about the relationship of both semantic and phonetic aspects of language to both music, especially improvised music, and to writing about it, one begun at length in Chapter One.

No music may prove Stravinsky’s famous dictum that music expresses nothing but itself more than improvised music, at least that which doesn’t include improvised or composed words. But that has never meant that music doesn’t join forces with literature, liturgy, visual and dramatic art—all expressive arts, as well as all things art expresses. Each art plays its part in that process precisely by being apart from it, in the integrity of its own nature.  Thus the correct way to discuss Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, for example, would be to free-associate creatively and assess judiciously, within the parameters of the composer’s and librettist’s implied and declared intentions, about the ways the text and the music do join forces for their overall effect.

In improvised music, one is free to improvise one’s own such “text”—narrative prose, evocative poetry—about the music, both as a listener and reviewer/critic. Such “texts” will stand or fall on their own, for their own reasons, just like the music. I can slip in my references to natural and animal sounds because they resonate with the Taoism overarching Raine-Reusch’s music; slipping in a reference about the Oedipus myth would make less sense in his context, even though I have poetic license to identify any way I want what is functionally a musical rorschach test (poetic license doesn’t guarantee the poetry will be good). I can indulge my inner Joyce with a phrase like “middling passagers” for those who have eyes and ears to pick up its significance in the jazz-related, Joyce-loving John Cage-related facets of this music, but it would be a nonsensical indulgence for another equally such spontaneously created music. Bodies like to sing and dance in their meaning-making parts just as in their physiques; as often as not the logic of that semiosis is that of glossolalia and/or “interpretation” thereof. Again, such songs and dances stand or fall on their own component and conjoined terms.

Raine-Reusch and Guy forged Gudira’s  titles:

I like to play with words, because they have symbolic associations as well. I try to find the element in the music and the element in the words that seem to work together well…It’s the same thing I did with the Ume CD, and with the CD I did with Pauline Oliveros. I wrote a whole bunch of names, sent it off to everybody—usually the pieces were related to me—and they made changes, sometimes radical ones. With Gudira, I sent off a whole bunch of stuff, and it came back from Barry, saying “forget that, that’s too West Coast; I want something a little more out there.” So he was the one who came up with these Joycean titles like “Kokopelli Dook” and other made-up words. Barry went to Finnegan’s Wake, I think, and this is where he got all those terms from.

Were those particular words chosen to reflect or match the music in some way?

Well, it’s not just matching the music; it’s more that I’m trying to do with the words what I do with the music. I try to put the music in a place, with the words, to somehow give a transformative experience in some way, to take you out of where you are into at least a step into someplace you’ve never been before. That’s what I try to do with all my instruments. I study the tradition so that I can use that to open up into another world or another place, another sound garden, another experience with psycho-physical associations, a symbolic place or whatever, where someone has never been before.

Kamüra

Henry Kaiser - acoustic & electric guitars, piano

Torsten Muller - five string acoustic bass

Randy Raine-Reusch - khaen, ajeang, biwa, zheng, changgo, suling gambu, prepared zheng, bowed zheng, sho.

1. Khaendid (khaen}
2. Azhe (ajeang)
3. Yapud (biwa)
4. You Know (zheng)
5. Aggu (changgo)
6. Gambu (suling gambu)
7. Clipoje (prepared zheng)
8. Xruti (bowed zheng)
9. Busheng (sho)

Kamüra, released 13 years later than Gudira, in 2012, is similar in nature: a trio of virtuoso free improvisers cooking up their unique blend of their music’s ingredients. We tasted amply from one of those in Chapter Eight, through Jin Hi Kim’s work with guitarist Henry Kaiser. Here he plays both acoustic and electric guitars, and piano, with German-born Vancouver resident Torsten Müller playing five-string acoustic bass.²⁵

Raine-Reusch caps off this string theory of their triverse with ajeag, zheng, and biwa; he gives it its breath with khaen, sho, and suling gambu; and its pulse with changgo.

Bookending the tracks are “Khaendid” and “Busheng,” featuring khaen and sho, respectively. Both are worth noting together for their similarly majestic affects. Kaiser’s electricity is the fourth instrument, entering the stage set by Raine-Reusch’s deft slicings and dicings of the chords and runs his castle of pipes is designed to sound, and Müller’s extra low string droning and high harmonic bowing. By the time all three exit that same palace of drone-zoned, stately-paced and frenzy-laced construction whose walls they’d scaled to enter, they had turned it from mysterium to home.

The latter two can be heard scratching and scraping away to begin that process on “Azhe,” bowing high and sawing low, beavering away doggedly while Kaiser takes the more measured measure of the acoustic digs, see-saw plinking plucks up and down the major-to-minor step on an easy-going whim. He pulls out his electric power tool for “Yapud,” works more in tandem with the spirit of controlled clamor of the prepared zheng and the feral peregrinations up and down one ill-tempered base.

“You Know” sees and raises the zheng’s metal-stringy panache with Kaiser’s foray under the hood of a piano, strumming and plucking the horizontal harp with pensive languor.  Not to be trumped so, Raine-Reusch sees that move and raises it with a biwa--a lute, not zither, with a buzzing edge balanced by its teardrop resonator--which he tears into with the same intensity as his partner in crime of such passion on the bass. Kaiser admirably maintains his pellucid posture throughout, letting his bandmates do most of the hardest work, since they seem to want to so badly.

“Aggu” levels and spaces things out somewhat, the energy more implied than let fly. Kaiser explores harmonics, Müller and Raine-Reusch (on changgo) both punctuate and quip, flurry more than flow, as a rule. It serves as a clearing, and a way to get bearings for “Gambu.” Raine-Reusch’s suling gambu intones low, lows those bamboo tones down over Kaiser’s mild vibrato of electric guitar playing parallel fifths a step apart, soon giving way to some synth-alterations around and with which Raine-Reusch and Müller weave more varied, still relaxed threads and wisps of thought. 

The musical construction project enters a new phase with Müller’s initiative on “Clipoje.” He starts the brash clunk and clatter of it loosely; Kaiser chooses to pick up more on the brash than the loose, blazing in with that heavy-metal guitar distortion that breathes volume like a dragon fire, only choked in terms of actual decibels unleashed; the screaming tone is thus set and restrained, for the acoustic partners (Raine-Reusch on prepared zheng) to rage on, out, and up as fully as felt.

“Xruti” climaxes this project by taking off into one long caterwaul, powered by Kaiser’s capacity to sound like the motors of airplanes taking off and trucks flying up with them, of radio feedback hijacked to moan and wail like human complaints and laments; again, Raine-Reusch and Müller jump on this ride with gleeful vigor, ripping the sandpaper and putting the elbow grease to its siren-not-quite-song’s more machined careening. Each guy gets several goes at freaking out unduly.

Here, then, is the best point to introduce my vehicle analogy for the non-genre of improvised music: a segway that exists only in imagination. The real such vehicle, trademarked Segway PT™ (homophone of “segue,” or “smooth transition”; PT for “personal transport”), looks like a push lawnmower, runs on a battery, and is gyroscopically sensitive to the body’s leanings and shiftings of weight on its platform, for signals of which direction to take at which speed.

Imagine, though, one that works on the same principle, only with much more advanced and subtle technology, to match the most advanced and subtle creative impulses generated by the, let’s call it, “improvising parabody”--the human organism from throbbing, breathing, sensual flesh, to thinking, dreaming, intuitive mind, to whatever “para” might lie beyond that “normal”--of the creative musician. This para-segway need not be the same shape as the real one; imagine it to be of flexible matter that shapeshifts itself to let the body sit, recline, fly high through air and beyond, dive deep into sea or burrow through land...and drives itself so not by battery but on the electrical/atomic/quantum energy of the body itself; and responds not only to the body’s outer motion and weight but to every vibration and pulse it emanates, from its brain waves to its autonomic and central nervous systems to its inner-organismal dynamics.

Now let’s see what vehicles the more composed/arranged next two CDs suggest.

Distant Wind

Gudira is a fork in the road of this chapter; one side branches off into Mei Han’s subsequent recordings as a post-traditional creative musician, the other to Raine-Reusch’s. The first such for both was the collaborative Distant Wind, already discussed in Chapter Seven in the overview and for her musical role in it; here we’ll return to it, to focus on his.

Mei said, when she first heard me playing [on] the Gudira CD, she just went “Wow! I’d never heard the zheng do that before! That’s something!” First, when she said that, I knew that here’s a person with ears, because if she can, first, listen to a creative improv for the first time, and find something in it that’s inspiring...that’s a person with ears. Second, that she could hear what I was doing, where nobody else had ever heard what I was doing.

All the compositions are bylined by both Mei and Raine-Reusch. He describes his process on the instrument, and as composer:

I got the zheng in Singapore, brought it home, took some lessons on it—and really was not inspired by the Chinese music I was learning on it. I had heard some of the Sawai [Japanese koto] recordings, and thought I wanted the zheng to have the same power I heard in them. I had heard the zheng many years before that, many recordings of it; it just took me a long time to get to a place where I could buy one. When I finally did, and started to learn it, I just found the music for it too pretty. I just felt it could do more…

The zheng music tends to be quite light, but the problem is we don’t hear what the older zheng pieces sounded like, because it’s all been changed by the Cultural Revolution. The zheng music has become this trying-to-be-uplifting, show-offy kind of shallow stuff, as if to say, “Here I am, or here this is—look at the greatness of the homeland” or something like that. There are these kinds of pieces that sound like those Chinese army paintings look, with everybody in these poses.  When we go back to the older zheng pieces, that’s where you start finding the depth of the pieces, and expression…

So I put it aside for awhile and let things gestate—which is something I tend to do a lot. Then I just picked it up one day, retuned the whole thing, and started to play. I tuned it to anything I felt like: different pentatonic scales, then non-repeating pentatonic scales, then whole-tone scales, four-tone scales—just messing around with it and finding different things. I developed a technique with which I could create an awful lot of power on the instrument, and that was a way of making the notes very staccato, by muting the strings immediately after I pluck. It’s my own personal technique...which meant that I couldn’t wear all the picks on my fingers that most zheng players do. I had a pick on my two thumbs, but no other fingers, which is highly unusual. I developed this extremely fast stacatto style of playing. It was a style that Mei was quite attracted to.

Then I applied other things to it, too. I had gone to Korea, in 1987, and did some performances there. While there, I studied the kayageum, the Korean version of this instrument. So I’ve got all these kayageum techniques, which I also then apply to the zheng. So my playing style was influenced by those three different cultures, but all on related instruments.

I get expressions from the zheng that I can’t get from any other instrument. I have certain places I can go, freedoms that I have with the instrument that nothing else will match.

After proving as much on Gudira, he uses it here to support and interact with Mei in the various ways of each piece. The support on the title track takes the form of an ascending  pattern of C#-E-F-A in the lower strings, cycled in steady moderato under Mei’s flowering statement of a melody both delicate and similarly mysterious in its selection of notes and chords to match that ostinato’s intrigue between whole and half steps. Raine-Reusch then takes the improviser’s lead while Mei provides her same-paced repetitions (of less suspenseful tonality) on the highest end of her range. His choice of notes is even farther afield from the tonality, and his instrument sings them in a range, attack, and decay that in fact sounds like the more male of the two zheng voices. He reverts back to the four-note pattern, now changing up their pitches slightly every other time through or so, eliciting a spicier choice of notes in Mei as they duet back toward the opening pattern and theme, and out. The feel of the piece’s structure, along with its obvious Asian inflections, is something like an early 20^th-century art song for guitar and voice (I’m reminded of Benjamin Britten’s “I Will Give My Love an Apple”).

“Nokoto,” the tribute piece honoring koto innovator Tadao Sawai (see Chapter Seven on that), again has Mei state the theme borrowed from Sawai, Raine-Reusch repeating a motif behind her; this time the ranges are somewhat reversed, Raine-Reusch staying high on the strings while Mei works a tighter, narrower midrange part. She even seems to be playing to a koto feel and sound, not as ringing and harp-lush, more clipped in tone, a bit more like Raine-Reusch’s sound. Raine-Reusch:

Koto music…is very square; if you listen to the timing of it, it’s very, very square. It doesn’t tend to move around very much; there’s not as much expression there. Expression is all very confined and restrained, which is very much the Japanese culture.

When, also again, they switch their background/foreground roles, his improv on the theme and her support of it don’t contrast as sharply as on the title track. Mollerup does some very tasteful work here, alternating patches of playing and laying out, something like a good waiter who knows just when to check in and when to leave the two diners alone—a fresh face of that Taoist dialectic between the sound and the silence.

“Dragon Dogs,” after a brief recitative, picks up another four-note motif from the same C# root as the title track; this ones a little faster (it’s a doggone dragon getting walked here) and jazzier (the motif suggests a blues 7^th chord). Mei disports herself with sassy flair through her improv on the minor-thirds themselves see-sawing a minor third apart from each other (thus undiminished as themselves); Raine-Reusch follows her in fine and slightly fiendish fettle (the rhythm of his lines gets downright boppish) through the raffish raunch suggested here. (We know from the liner notes that this is about the Chinese astrological signs of the Dragon and the Dog, “considered to be two volcanoes waiting to erupt”…and from Mei’s chapter that she’s the Dog and he’s the Dragon; the music here does suggest what that might feel like.)

Yao is the Chinese word for “soft tremolo,” here described and sounding as “thick and varied,” which the two zheng players effect by rapidly and lightly strumming different strings with both hands. “Forest Rain” is evoked by the sound, inspired by the rainforests around the Pacific Rim from Western Canada to Japan’s bamboo forests to the jungles of Borneo. Another ambling four-noter from Raine-Reusch—this one slightly syncopated, a ragtime feel, plunking the contours of a minor chord with a flatted fifth—for Mei to play with and above. Mollerup takes a bowed solo after her, with a full-bodied buzz in his low range and the slower time sense he hews to throughout; then Raine-Reusch, over Mei’s steady spellings of the minor modality, displaying his choppier, craggier sound and style. The piece reverts to the yao,  with bowed bass. Tonic, minor third, tritone…all engulfed in the DNA of the yao. It shimmers like a rain cloud blowing out to sea from the Pacific Northwest toward China…

…or maybe just to join more such “Clouds in an Empty Sky.”

(A pointed digression, before we do so: the arc of the tracks up to the yao has been all about two polyphonic stringed instruments conversing in the language of the tonal, melodic-harmonic, modal…the most deeply rational side of music grounded most deeply in the stretched string, from Pythagoras’s monochord to some of the instruments Raine-Reusch revives in his work, especially the Japanese ichigenkin, about which more soon.

That arc inspires me to declare the metaphorical vehicle for such music, specifically for those tracks, as a twin-engine Cessna, custom-crafted to double as a glider. The couple here has composed the plane driven and controlled by their two instruments and taken off from their Canadian home to cross the sea pacific to China. In order to make the trip on their one small tank of fuel, they’ve designed it to navigate the distance’s winds with their engines off except for take-off and landing. The yao is that first waft of currents caught to carry them through.)

Accordingly, Raine-Reusch forgoes the zheng for the air-blown sho, sounding its high wisps of the silence of an empty sky; he overdubs it with the hun, a Korean descendant of the Chinese xun,  of the ocarina family; he adds in too some kotzusumi drum riffs (a familiar part of Japanese Noh dramas) and a dash of Burmese kyi-zi (brass plate gongs, also familiar sounds of Buddhist rituals). Mei’s zheng spells out this Asian soundcloud in notes, lines, bends and sweeps of strings with a likemindful…action? How can a sky with clouds (let alone an imaginary glider) be empty? How can a silence sound, one way or another? Why do Raine-Reusch’s words—“…they talk about a note that’s played with the instrument in front of you but no action on the part of the musician is required to play music…”--return to my listening mind? Is Mei—am I—only thinking about that music I’m hearing be played?

This is the first track that has no regular pulse (again, suspended in that air-borne cloud, gliding sans throbbing engines). The Japanese gagaku (ancient court) tradition sounded by the sho, routed back to China through Korea, is not without a pulse…but it’s so attenuated and sublimated in its own suspension as to bring to life as iconically Asian the aesthetic of the sound unbound from rhythm (think of an endless sentence sparsely punctuated with commas, ellipses, with semicolons and dashes even more sparsely…and rarest of all the actual definitive pulse of a period). We are flying West toward an East that exists mainly in the mind, but if it did so in the word it would be called Asia (to paraphrase Peter Kowald on Roland Barthes on Japan [see Preface]).

Our first sight of land again, at last!—“Tokyo Crows.” Raine-Reusch (in liner notes):

Those familiar with Taoism and Zen would not find it surprising that in one of the world’s most modern cities crows have a very powerful presence, with their sophisticated conversations easily heard over the din of the city. Nature is an important part of the traditional music of the zheng and ichigenkin, and the contrast of the simple with the complex, the raw with the refined, and the traditional with the modern is at the heart of this work.

Inspired by those corvine conferences, this piece brings on another of the CD’s firsts—Raine-Reusch’s choice of the one-string Japanese zither ichigenkin to duet with Mei’s zheng. The contrast between the voices of the two is much like that between Jason Kao-Hwang’s Western violin and Sang Won Park’s ajaeng and kayageum: rough, raw, primal next to smooth, refined, cultured more than a few degrees removed from nearly naked nature. It is clear from Raine-Reusch’s opening notes which voice plays the crow, which the human city in this duo.

That said, it would be reductively simplistic to mistake the simpler zither for the less profound…which calls for another pointed digression.

As Zen is Buddhism stripped down to its essence, the ichigenkin represents a paring down to one from the seven strings of the Chinese qin from which it’s thought to be derived. As the qin was favored by the ancient Chinese elite culture of the Confucian literati, or scholar class, the ichigenkin  is historically associated with the Samurai, and its two-string cousin the nigenkin with Shinto priests, in Japan. More broadly, it is the standard accompaniment of traditional singers, but a smaller purely instrumental repertoire for it also exists.²⁶

Raine-Reusch’s use of it respects and serves its identity as the instrument most associated with the philosophical realities at the heart of Taoism and Buddhism. Like the Pythagorean monochord at the root of Western music, it is simply a string (of twisted silk treated with a stiffening glue) stretched over a fixed bridge from one end of a solid board to a tuning peg on the other. It’s played in the lap with a plectrum in one hand and a tubular depressant in the other to vary, bend, and slide the pitches.

Raine-Reusch has himself played a significant role in the instrument’s more modern history. He studied it with Isshi Yamada, the top student of the second Iemoto (Hereditary Grand Master) of the Seikyodo school (noted for its aesthetic of austere purity) of ichigenkin. He went on to promote its revival into more contemporary music beyond its relative obscurity as a traditional instrument. That led to an opportunity to play for and then with Issui Minegishi, the current Iemoto.²⁷

 

Knowing all that, it’s impossible not to hear the crow—the nature from which all culture emerges—in the ichigenkin’s solo ruminations, and that in a certain light. It suggests the first such sound ever played and heard as musical on a stretched string, something charged with archaic dignity. Mei’s sound on the same frame of notes (an octave then a half-step, held) suggests that of the civilized garden cultivated from that primal seed of sound. The two dialogue thus, like some craggy soulful grandfather and his more elegant but devoted daughter’s daughter, into a double-time saunter of the first slow pace, which Mei rides for her improv. The swishing chords she can play are splashes of beauty to counter the hard-to-harsh tunnel vision sounded by the man.

When he comes back in on the guanzi—that double reed that sounds something like the child of a clarinet and a duck call—the voice of the crow is more comical, coarser than craggy, as if the trickster highlighting by contrast the noble in that single naked string…to which he returns (and which Mei reflects more closely in her own closing notes, sealing the bond between nature and the city), to declaim a final mini-rant and then retire to the stately theme. (The ichigenkin was the shaman who became the guanzi crow, then returned to human form; the circle between nature and culture widens and shines in the journey.)

Finishing their flight through and over those Tokyo crows, the pilots restart their engines to touch down on Asia’s mainland. Once they do, in “Black Zheng,” the light aircraft analogy gives way to a simple walk in their two bodies through a buzzing tropic deeply known to each in their different ways, but brand new to both as the couple (within a trio with Mollerup, in this track) they’ve become. The zhengs here are bowed, and blended into a sonic stew of also-bowed bass, bowed ajaeng, blown didj, waterphone, blown hun, undertone chant…layered on multitracks, it simmers and roils like heat waves up from jungle ground, chatters like insects large and many, growls like mammals on the slow and steady prowl; Mei bravely plucks her zheng like the human being she is, but nature here is clearly much more than human…it contains and curtails the latter, rather than the reverse. It’s only mildly, momentarily impressed with human pluck, and swells to engulf it once it recedes, moaning with ghostly pleasures, rising to a frantic transcendence…then itself subsides.

Bamboo, Silk, & Stone

Of course there are my scores, which will give you a window very deep into my soul. My scores are the essence of me.

Mei and Raine-Reusch then part ways as bandmates, both to their own projects with others.²⁸

If Distant Wind was the gliding twin-engine, Bamboo, Silk and Stone is a train, each track a pre-fab car specially constructed for its specific passengers. Raine-Reusch rides in them all, in four alone and in four with one or more of five partners in (musical) time. The cars were designed by their respective passengers, composed to house the music they wanted to improvise on the instruments they wanted to play.

These compositions are of a kind that gather themselves most readily under the rubric of “experimental” or “new and improvised” (music composed, idiosyncratically more than conventionally, for improvisers), which makes this the natural point to look at Raine-Reusch the composer.

The first such look should be at his web page of graphic scores, with performance notes. There are 27, spanning the 22 years from 1991 to 2013. Each is a single sheet; some consist only of visual art—shapes of color, often suggesting visually the title of the piece (eg., Ice in the Wind)—others of bits of conventional notation, words, glyphs, graphics and phonemes, combinations of all the above…a potpourri of any symbols, signs, or gestures of ink or paint that paper can mediate and a musickosophical mind might translate into sound. The theme of the titles is overwhelmingly nature--eg., First Winds of Spring, Three Stones--reflecting the Taoist tenor pervading all.

I use a variety of materials to create the scores. Often first drawn on rice paper with Chinese calligraphy ink and ink stone, brushes are made by me from natural objects. On Pine and Silk, I used pine needles and Silk Leaf tree leaves as brushes.  Many other scores are made from different types of pine needle brushes, bamboo leaves, pine branches, dried seaweed brushes…then scanned in high res, and manipulated in photoshop or other programs. Later scores use up to 100 or more layers to get the effect I want.

Some are “for” specific people and groups, others not. All are accompanied by a bullet list of suggestions to the performer about the composer’s concept and intent with the piece; these all typically express a kind of self-effacement of any suggestion of authority inherent in the score or its creator, leaving its infinite number of fates in the hands of any and all who would as little as simply register them in a glance, or as much as act on them with the interpreting performer’s fullest commitment. The feel of the whole body of work is of a contemporary utterance of the traditions of Taoist and Zen thought and aesthetics (that ever/never-present/absent pair-o’-dox of either-or/neither-nor).

None of these scores are performed on this or the other CDs reviewed here, but this one feels closest to their overarching spirit.²⁹

Each is presented in the liner notes as a composition; the collaborators—William O. Smith, Stuart Dempster, Jin Hi Kim, Barry Truax, and Jon Gibson—are all seasoned artists contributing their own conceptualized/composed gestures (ie., not spontaneously improvising, as in Gudira) to join fittingly with Raine-Reusch’s.

“A Sleeping Rain,” first on the CD and first of Raine-Reusch’s four solo tracks, affords the perfect springboard into the next two pointed digressions—Raine-Reusch’s meaningful affinity with the work of and his brush with composer John Cage, and his relationship with the Korean zither the kayageum. The piece was inspired by Cage’s work for prepared piano, this for a kayageum prepared with alligator clips and chopsticks bound with bits of elastic.

Shortly after writing the piece, Raine-Reusch met Cage and performed for him on a few instruments, including the ichigenkin.

That experience with Cage was a very powerful one for me, because he passed away just after I met him, and I felt that meeting him had given me permission to be who I was as a creative artist. Growing up in Vancouver, I felt so many restrictions, even in the creative community. We’re sort of an outpost, in a sense, especially in those early years, and things were a bit conservative, even in the creative world. Cage gave me permission to be who I was, just by his acceptance, and his way of being...his enjoyment in what I played for him. He had a profound understanding of the ichigenkin when I played that for him. It was like meeting the man I consider to be my musical father.

Was he familiar with that instrument?

No, he’d never seen it before. But the philosophy he totally understood when I told him about it. He was a very elfish-like man; a little bit of a trickster, eyes always kind of laughing, like he knew something you didn’t, and he wasn’t going to tell you. But he’s going to lead you right to it [laughter].  Such an interesting character, and always busy doing stuff.

When I played the ichigenkin, that part of Cage just disappeared, and all of the sudden in front of me was just a man who was in a very faraway place, just really sailing. When I finished playing, he just stood there. His eyes had a faraway look, and he just went, “beautiful.” And then the elfish-Cage was back again. But it profoundly touched him. That also profoundly touched me. I wanted to ask him, as I left to write a piece for ichigenkin—and we didn’t have that much more time, you know...he made lunch, Margaret Leng-Tan showed up, we had lunch, and he said “call me in two days; we don’t have enough time today, I want to spend more time”...and he died the day after. So the day I was supposed to go see him, I couldn’t.

“A Sleeping Rain” opens and closes with some sweeps of the 12 strings (sonic calligraphy of a rain shower?). The rest is plucked bare-fingered, mostly a single line. The tone has a hollower, ghostlier ring than the zheng, and the crimps pinching the strings give it the feel of a duo with a percussionist at times.

“One of the things I read that Cage said that always stuck in my mind,” I tell Raine-Reusch, “was that one plus one equals one.”

I think one plus one equals absolutely everything and nothing at the same time. I fully believe that everything is, and nothing is. Nothing is everything, everything is nothing. It’s like a Taoist contradiction that is at the essence of everything. One of the old Taoist things is that if you can see a coffee cup sitting in front of you, the reason that you know the coffee cup is there is the space around it that is not a coffee cup. Once you realize that coffee cup equals “coffee cup and no coffee cup”, and that there’s a duality there, then you’ve become aware of that duality. Well, there’s another duality, which is that “that duality does not exist,” the absence of “coffee cup and no coffee cup.” Precisely because you’ve become aware of it means that there is a space that you are not aware of. So that sets up a second duality, because now you’ve become aware of that duality. So it goes on ad infinitum; very quickly, following that line of logic, you no longer can conceive of it. That says to me that if I can find a logical system such that in two or three steps I can no longer conceive of it, it shows to me the limitation of my brain.

Now you’re saying this in conjunction with the image of “A Sleeping Rain?” Because a rain that sleeps is like a Zen koan?

It’s like a Zen koan…I want to get the experiential part of the Zen koan. Part of it is that for me to say “a sleeping rain” somehow conjures something a little bit uncomfortable in people—they don’t quite understand it, but at the same time they do.

“Let me tell you this story then,” I say. “I never did meet Cage, but when I was at Wesleyan, I was involved with faculty composers Alvin Lucier and Ron Kuivela, who were legatees of Cage’s circle there, so to speak.  For a class project with them as a student, I did a performance of Cage’s piece Ryoanji—“

I know it very well.

“I did it with a rebab player, a vocalist, and someone who was playing wood blocks to make the percussive sound. We played it for about an hour, just going through the score. At the very end of the piece—which was a pretty quiet hour, the way we performed it, slow, relaxed—just as we were playing the last little bits of the score, there was this big huge rain squall that hit the auditorium: a perfect climax to the piece. Swallowed us up. It was loud, one of those kinds of squalls, beating against the windows. A sleeping rain awakened.”

“Forgotten Morning,” his next solo kayageum piece, features his own new tuning, a mix of pentatonic and whole-tone scales. The tone is firmer and cleaner without the crimps, but still distinctively more muted than ringing.

I love Korean music, I think it’s really wonderful, and when I got my hands on the kayageum, it was such an expressive instrument, and in a far more intimate way than the zheng is…For me, that particular instrument is a powerful voice of that Taoist, Zen philosophy that I’ve inherently had my whole life. For me, this is the voice of sort of the depth of my soul. It’s a very powerful instrument.

The zheng is a really outward, dynamic instrument; the kayageum I find to be more conversational, and a bit more introspective…[It] has raw silk strings that have a long sustain, but with a darker and musky sound. It traditionally has extremely wide vibrato and it has a very complex voice that makes it not as flashy as any of the others but certainly it is capable of being a much deeper instrument…

I love the vocal quality this instrument has, I love the kind of expression it has: a darker, smokier sound, in a way, and I really enjoy that—but I’ve always felt frustrated by what I’ve heard from Korea with it, because I felt that the instrument could just do far more things than it was. Also, the way the Koreans themselves were contemporizing it, I felt, took a lot of the soul out of the instrument, a lot of the potential. It became Westernized, and a lot of the subtleties were taken out.

There’s a famous composer and kayageum performer named Hwang Byung Ki, who made a big stir by doing these very mellow, so to speak, Western-type compositions. You know, he was an improviser as well, and he would do some improvs that were kind of wild and out there, which was pretty cool...but a lot of his compositions I felt took a lot of the fire out of the Korean music. But they were very interesting. But now that style of composition is becoming very big in Korea, and when you hear a contemporary kayageum, it’s heavily influenced by his music. The fire and passion that was in traditional Korean kayageum music is sort of dying away.

So I’ve taken my fire and passion—not that I consider myself a stellar kayageum player compared to some of the players in Korea—but I’ve found my own expression on the instrument, which I really like and enjoy. I find it really is a valid voice for the instrument, whether or not anybody else considers it that…

The very idiomatic style of Korean musics is that you’re trying to create a cry; your notes are halfway between the cry of pleasure and the cry of pain. It’s just sitting right on that line. It’s that kind of passion—a deep, powerful emotion that comes to that point that’s refined to the point where pleasure and pain are poised right there on that edge, and you just ride that edge, and it gets very exciting.

“Bamboo Forest…a Stone…Wind Bells” begs the descriptor “sound installation,” sounding a ground for a solo improvisation. Raine-Reusch made it for the opening of the Canadian Consular office in Kyushu, Japan, inspired by a garden in a Zen temple on that island. He used Granular Synthesis on some sampled sounds for the taped part, Chinese wind gongs and nigenkin for the performed part. Granular Synthesis is a method of sampling that adds in the element of time—slowing a digital sample way down or speeding it way up, to get effects both microscopic (from the “grains” of a sound wave, blown up like sonic versions of a hair, or a fly’s eye, magnified for a human eye’s scrutiny) and swarming (when the grains are multiplied and altered electronically to careen en masse  through changes of pitch and timbre). (It might be described as an electronic simulation of what Sainkho does with her voice, slowing and lowering it to its fundamental clicks and undertones, and speeding those up to their maximum frequencies in her highest harmonic overtones.) The samples are of a champun (a glass toy from Kyushu), three hurin (wind bells heard in summer there), and a single plucked note on the nigenkin. The overall effect is of walking through a stone temple with something whistling high in the upper acoustics, murmuring low at your back, creaking and scraping from this direction and that, and listening mentally to how you might play the music in your head within all that if you were sitting with a nigenkin in your lap…then discovering that you’ve been shrunk to microscopic size, and the temple is a tiny stone carving, the sounds inaudibly “small” on a normal scale…but at least your mental music was impervious to such shifts.

The nigenkin has an interesting history. Its immediate and very similar ancestor was the Yakumo-goto, which was used widely and exclusively in Shinto shrines. One of its players in the late 19^th century started playing secular popular music on it and was therefore asked to leave his Shrine and refrain from playing it again. In response, he altered its design slightly, called it an Azuma nigenkin (denoting the name of the Tokyo suburb of its origin), and started a new tradition and school of playing it in his own family. (Interestingly, under his name Tosha Rosen, the women in his family took the torch as Iemoto [Grand Master of Azuma nigenkin] from him, passing it down from mother to daughter until the last one died in 2004 without naming a successor.) Raine-Reusch:
 

The ichigenkin, and all forms of nigenkin were male instruments until the end of the 19th century. As these instruments were passed through the Iemoto system to family members, title of Iemoto (ichi) or Tosha Rosen( Ni) were passed to the eldest child, which were daughters (no males).  By early 20^th century, almost all performers were female. This also lessened the importance of the practice in Japanese society as the instruments were subsequently considered housewives’ instruments. Which was only partially true. Many housewives took up the instrument, but there were always those who still practiced the instrument as a spiritual practice, and there still are.

It’s constructed like the ichigenkin, only with a bridge on both ends and two strings, tuned to a desired pitch (often to match a singer’s voice). It’s plucked with a plastic or ivory pick and pitched with a tubular slide called a rokan. “As the nigenkin has two bridges on either end of the instrument, the strings on both sides of the rokan sound when it is moved, producing a ghost-like secondary tone, which is quite beautiful” (Nigenkin).

We end the CD and Raine-Reusch’s solo pieces with “October Moon,” for sho, chang’go, and ichigenkin. Those voices present in that order, each sounding forth in separate moments, standing forth in their own together. The sho makes its siren call to trance with that primal “chord of the world” in the wind through its reed; the chang’go drum honors that call’s timelessness with its gagaku-slow punctuations…and the ichigenkin takes its stage thus perfectly set.

Raine-Reusch mixes its notes in judiciously to effect what he calls “a subtle blend of traditional and contemporary techniques” employed to preserve “the traditional essence of the ichigenkin” in a contemporary piece (the first such ever written for these instruments, he says). It stands out as a reminder that Raine-Reusch’s mission as a composer is as much to serve his instruments, especially the rarer and even endangered ones, as it is to serve his own needs to express as both composer and improviser.

“White Room, Three Shadows” is the first of his collaborative tracks, with trombonist Stuart Dempster and clarinetist William O. Smith. “I did a series of improvisatory pieces for dan bau, which I called the White Room series,” he tells me; the liner notes further defines the series as one specifically for collaborations such as this. The three shadow each other in the white room of their trio…at least that’s what the title immediately suggested to me—the transience of life forms doing their shadow plays on the white screen of the deathless eternal (the image would have worked as well in such yin-yang terms had it been Dark Room, Three Lights). Raine-Reusch’s sense of the image of the white room is something more like snow blindness, or a sensory deprivation tank: “Because it’s an everything and a nothing kind of thing. It’s like, if you’re in a white room, are you really in a room?”

The sense of time is very much like abovementioned Ryoanji, with the same kind of slow tumbles of pitches articulated to then slide around and through each other like a lava lamp in space. The Vietnamese dan bau, another one-string zither, is Raine-Reusch’s voice in that sonic morph. Similar in construction to the other zithers (all, by the way, are pictured on the back and described in detail in the text of the liner notes), this one is unique for having its single string attached to a stick made of water buffalo horn planted in the wooden body. The player pulls or presses the perpendicular stick to vary the pitch of the string (Raine-Reusch calls it “the world’s ultimate whammy bar”).

The expression of dan bau is really wonderful, in itself; it’s a stunningly beautiful instrument, but it’s so much lighter than the ichigenkin, philosophically. Vietnamese music has this very floral kind of ornamentation that is very fast, very light, very fluid—and very tricky to get…All their bends are quite complex, and very stylized. That’s the unique aspect of Vietnamese music, the very floral bends.

Having had the experience of playing in Ryoanji the trombonist’s role very like Dempster’s here, I feel a bit more insight into this piece’s similar flow of musical time. The starting and stopping—someone plays something…then he’s silent; then another thing…then quiet—is not what I’m used to as a Westerner playing Western music, which is usually more about constant flow and motion, development, more alert to the outer than to the inner world’s surprises--riding time as though an arrow. The more cyclical time sense is more present in Western music of the post-Cage Maverick/Independent side of Western (especially American, especially West Coast, with it’s strong Asian influences) art music’s intellectual history…but it’s also prevalent in much of the traditional, often most ancient material for the pipa and ruan covered by Wu Man and Min Xiao-Fen and others glimpsed in Chapter Three, or in Mei Han’s solo CD (Outside the Wall).

This is a very Asian aesthetic. It goes back to the Golden Sutra, the whole thing about sound and silence. There’s sound within silence, and silence within sound. You have to find the space in both. If you look at phenomenal Western improvisers, they know that. Bill Smith. Here’s a guy who’s worked for a long time in the traditional jazz world--Bill was one of the founding members of the Dave Brubeck Octet, and has been playing with Brubeck ever since. Bill’s been part of that. He and Brubeck were students together. He’s a heavyweight; he wrote the book on clarinet techniques--and at the same time in the new-music world as William O. Smith. One of the first things I noticed at the recording studio, when I played with him, I went, ah yes, here’s a guy who knows what he’s doing. When we started to play, his instrument was in his lap. And his instrument stayed in his lap until he sort of picked it up, then put it down again. It took him a long time to get to the point of actually playing, and the reason was that he was choosing the moment. He was not scared of silence. He just used it really, really well...

On the piece I did with Jin Hi Kim [“Unprepared,” created by her in response to hearing Raine-Reusch’s prepared kayageum] I also played the [prepared] kayageum and the dan bau at the same time, switching back and forth between the two instruments.

That track brims with an exciting and novel supercharge. The two players here are equals on several deep levels: both as much the systematic composers as the adventurously wide-open and practiced improvisers, each as immersed in the native cultures and contemporary scenes of the other. They brought what makes those profiles rich to the moment of this music, and the chemistry resulted in a crackling, tangled exchange packed with information running down confluent rhythmic rapids.

I felt familiar enough with the styles of each and the sounds of their respective instruments to suppose I could track easily who was playing what and when. The dan bau was always distinct—indeed like a wa-wa-pedaled cat’s low warnings—but as Raine-Reusch observed, their musical mind-meld was sometimes so seamless it was no easy track.

Actually, surprisingly, there was such a blend of the two of us that unless you really know who was doing what, you can’t really tell who was who. A lot of people say, “oh wow, that’s you,” and I say, “no, that’s Jin Hi.” Or “that’s Jin Hi”—“no, that’s me.” It’s really hard to tell, because some of the sounds just...you think it’s coming out of one instrument, but it’s not. It’s kind of tricky. So it was a really wonderful marriage, I think, of those two sounds.

Jin Hi responded very well to my kayageum playing. She really enjoyed it. It was very interesting playing with her, because I realized something. You know, I’ve listened to a lot of people playing with Jin Hi, and I notice that a lot of people coming from the West will play with a sense of a four rhythm: or you cut it in half, then you cut it in half again, and so on. In Korea, even if they cut it in half, they still tend to play in kind of a triple meter. So you’ll play in threes, and if you cut it in half, you’re playing in nines, or sixes, or twelves, so you still have this three feel. Jin Hi has that, instinctively, being Korean, and growing up Korean, as a Korean musician…Some of her recordings that are phenomenal I think are so because the people have just clicked into the three. So I consciously approached playing with Jin Hi with more of a three feel. So when I play with her, for me it’s very very easy, and quite wonderful to do. I really enjoy it.

“Doorway to the Other” is an interesting title, given the demographic of the duo here. Raine-Reusch’s “other,” longtime friend and fellow white Western male baby boomer Jon Gibson, sounds to my ears from the very first note blown on his soprano sax—in tone, timbre, inflections, note choices--like a quintessentially Western jazz musician. In fact, his background is more in the Minimalist school of “new” music, as a founding member since 1968 of the Philip Glass Ensemble, and collaborator with a Who’s Who circle of similar luminaries Steve Reich, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Harold Budd, Alvin Curran, Frederick Rzewski, and Christian Wolff and other such.³⁰

Still, though Raine-Reusch noted a connection between Gibson’s Minimalist and his own Asian aesthetic, I didn’t hear much of that here (no obsession with triads or repetition). What struck me more was just the contrast between the sounds of the instruments—again, a clear East-West dialectic, which they seemed to be noticing and working too…mainly by staking out a common ground in an Asian-sounding scale, then flowering it over with provocative steps away from it in note choices (Raine-Reusch) and inflections on improvisations on it evocative of an Eastern style on a Western horn (Gibson; think Paul Horn). They seemed to decide early on to centralize and showcase their different sounds by defaulting to a typically Western-style free improv on a shared sensibility of an Asian scale, one playing the role of East more than the other, but both from the same Western world. It felt very much to me like many of the unrehearsed duets between Anthony Braxton, or Peter Kowald, and some other player with both marked differences and commonalities.

The title track of the CD brings in Barry Truax, a pioneer in the use of real-time Granular Synthesis. He made an ambient tape from samples of Raine-Reusch playing the Balinese suling gambuh (a longer, thicker version of the suling family of bamboo flutes from Bali), zheng, hun, and tam-tams and gongs; Raine-Reusch then composed and improvised over that on zheng, hun, and suling gambuh. The electroacoustic music ranges from otherworldly to energetic, the performance feeding hungrily off of the tape; the arc of it alternates between the stillness of interstellar space and a sudden rush thereof by a gust of solar wind. Raine-Reusch brings the zheng to its most brazen glitter of brilliant intervals, kaleidescopic flowing corners of them, letting them idle attentively when the space is still again.

Like Truax, Raine-Reusch is a member of the Canadian Music Centre, as well as the Canadian League of Composers. This CD stakes out well, in both its musical and all such professional-associational terms, the culture of the composer in the Western art music community/tradition as it relates to his ambassadorial role between both sides of the Pacific Rim.

Humor me now as I imagine Raine-Reusch coming to the last car on this particular train only to discover it to be uroboric: going through its last leads him back to its first car. As the horror of the situation creeps to dawn, he looks out the window…and sees not the tropical lush life he stepped in from, but only…BLACK, STARRY SPACE!

Before he can get his head around this science fiction, Stuart Dempster suddenly appears, sees his shock, and leads him gently but firmly back to the car they shared. There he opens a door to a stairway Raine-Reusch had not seen before, leading to a second story. Gathered up there are several new (though no strangers) to this disoriented express. Pauline Oliveros has the aura (though not the air) of the group’s central personage, as its most youthful elder; a headphoned David Gamper is fiddling with some electronic devices, and Joe McPhee blows some soft, low long tones through his pocket trumpet while gazing out into the black.

Raine-Reusch looks back to Dempster with all questions in his face; the latter responds by pointing upward. Raine-Reusch tracks the pointing finger to see that the ceiling is a skylight, and the vista beyond it not empty space but the sunlit half of the big blue marble Earth. They are moving toward it.

Pauline moves to one end of the car, Stuart to the other, both to identical levers in the up position. They lock eyes, cock their heads back slightly and in sync, then bring them back in a simultaneous nod accompanied by a pull of their levers. As they do so, everyone in the car looks up, there to see what looks like a gigantic leathery-rubbery ballonet inflating to fill an even bigger metal egg, or what will be one once its two separate halves finish meeting in the middle after their rise from the left and right sides of the car.

When both full ballonet and closed metal egg are in place, blocking all view of the space above the car, Stuart and Pauline return their levers to the upright, again in sync, which causes a loud CLICK and a feeling in the gut like when an elevator starts to rise. All eyes turn to the side windows, as it quickly shows that their car’s upper level is detaching and floating away from its lower. Soon the earth is in the view of one side, still growing larger; receding on the other is what they now can see to be a spinning disk, not unlike the classic UFO…except this one sports the yin-yang symbol on both sides, in opposite schemes of black and white. A ring of windows around its rim reveals the train they’d been on, circling its inner perimeter, apparently held there by the simulated gravity of the disk’s centrifugal spin.

Pauline then beckons to Raine-Reusch to follow her, and leads him to a dual apparatus on the forward end of the car-cum-gondola. Standing inert next to each other, they look like a pair of conventional Segways, only attached to the floor. Pauline steps onto one and it instantly transforms into the…more malleable such device described as the process of free improvisation, above; here, however, it stays connected to the blimp to function as one of its controls. Raine-Reusch steps onto the other one, and the two take control of the airship to pilot it through the atmosphere and safely back to earth.

So flies my fancy to suggest the nature of the musical process of free improvisation so definitively displayed in Gudira taken to a level beyond itself, and into that (omprovisation?) which grabbed Raine-Reusch on his first Asian trip, to study the khaen: trance music.

Driftworks (2000)

Looking Back (1999/2013) (with Pauline Oliveros and the Deep Listening Band [Stuart Dempster, David Gamper], Joe McPhee)

Trance is an elemental psychological state. More to the point, it is also a physiological phenomenon. And certain trance states, for example, shamanic trance, have profound historical and functional connections to the origins of religion worldwide. The language of the body that will unravel myth is the language of trance.

                                                                                    J. Nigro Sansonese³¹

With that in mind, I suggest that there is one frontier left. And it’s based solely on intention. Not the squishy New Age white bread intention of calming, peaceful relaxation, and selfish self-acceptance, but the rough, rocky intention of what the alchemists called transmutation and universal acceptance.

                                                                                    David First

Music in the soul can be heard by the universe.

                                                                                    Lao Tse

That recursion to Raine-Reusch’s first Asian epiphany is mirrored by several larger full-circle reconnects here. My own act of several listenings to these two CDs induced and developed in me a kind of mental trance state of thought and memory (simulated in italic passages woven in with CD reviews, ahead) that serves well the task of wrapping up both this last chapter and the book as a whole.

There are many archaic, historical, and contemporary versions of trance triggered and fueled by music, rhythm, and sheer sound; many contexts, shallow and deep, and much scholarship/reportage about them, also shallow and deep. We’ve touched on some of them in earlier chapters, including the one most pertaining here, on Oliveros’s Deep Listening concept. As Raine-Reusch puts it, “Humans have a propensity for going into trance as can be witnessed at football matches, dance clubs, symphony theaters, or zoned-out kids with earbuds...Music has been a shaman’s tool in cultures around the world, whether through voice, chants, repetitive rhythms, or drones.”

I feel a certain wind at my back and in my sails as I decide which are the choicest bits of my own engagements with and meditations on trance to bring to a discussion of these CDs. The first such choice is to suggest that wind instruments are the closest of such tools in the trance musickosopher’s toolkit to the improvising body. Indeed, if we include among them that body’s voice (shared with all animals, not just humans), they match and fit best not only the concept and practice of a trance music most directly reflective of human corporeality but that of the biosphere of the planet generally--its birds, animals large and small, its air and water. I think of that part of life when I hear these polyphonic free reed organs chording and wheezing, breathing in and out like lungs, loud and quiet, high pitched and low, sliding and scaling the pitch range like wheeling-crying gulls, effecting or suggesting their steadier entrancing drone of bio’s bedrock through it all. Conversely, I don’t think so much of those other kinds of trance inducers Raine-Reusch mentions.³²

Wire strings, percussion, electronics, repetitive rhythm and/or mantras, while they may work best for other kinds of trance (the ecstasy of getting outside rather than inside oneself, collective synchronized thought and/or action, strengths and stamina for physical work or sport) arguably also reflect other aspects of nature (refined/machined minerals in both earth and us, the world of objects beyond our bodies clashing and colluding to make their sounds, the pulsive patterns and cycles of both biology and physics, the central nervous system’s electrical-fieriness) at more remove from ensouled and breathing flesh and blood in full sentient (beyond autonomous) mode, though they do all share common ground when employed to entrance.

I think rather of the instruments that drew me in more often, more seductively, most intimately on my own path as both player and listener--the mouthblown winds. The breath drives and commingles with their sounds, which in turn sympathize with the breathing listener via the ear, like whispers and shouts, human speech, as well as vibrating through the rest of the body as all sound does. They are closer than sounds made with hands on objects, even when they too are handmade (via keyboards or bellows) rather than mouthblown; bowed and buzzing sounds are closer than struck or plucked ones, but still at more remove, less like the sound and feel of the mindful human organism, than the circulating winds.

I want to assert, then, a certain kind of trance through winds that is more about “enstasy” (not my word, more about it ahead) than ecstasy or entrainment, and more reflective and conducive to a trance envisioning the biological organism’s “inscape” (also not my word, also explained ahead) of its specifically biological domain.

Raine-Reusch:

I did a concert with Stu Dempster and Pauline Oliveros for New Music Across America here in Vancouver, where the audience was just literally glowing after the show. Most of our concert was in silence, but the audience just sat there and glowed; people have talked about it for like 15 years now: “that was the most amazing concert I’ve ever gone to.” So there are other forces out there....

I’m pondering my assertion about the winds on every level from the cosmic to the mythical...

• the cosmic: science’s Big Bang--itself imagined as a sound, and its residual background noise first detected audibly in my own lifetime--I imagine more like the first explosive cry and subsequent sounds of an integrated organism than like one thing striking or plucking or bowing another (it’s the universe--the One--there is no other thing for it to strike, pluck, or rub against)
• the mythico/religious: the Judeo-Christian linguistic connection between breath and spirit and word, the Eastern concept of the OM syllable chanted by humans as directly resonant with that universe’s first such birth cry...

Raine-Reusch:

What is exciting...is to make this link with the audience when playing improv, because you can then take them to the moment of creation and keep them there for the whole set.  Sharing that place that musicians yearn for is what audiences yearn for. We then feel the connection with each other, with life and death, with our world. It is a religious experience. I have learned to get to that point on my own regularly through extended listening and playing exercises, some of which Pauline Oliveros teaches.

...from the bio-ontogenetic to the personal...

• the bio-ontogenetic: the voice (breath on flesh) as every organism’s first instrument of sound generation, the one most made least consciously before all others, the one most heard most viscerally from their mothers and fathers and other fellow organisms, the one that seeds and roots all language and music, before any other instruments (and the wind instruments as prosthetically closest to it); the still-living tradition of group and solo singing as older (empirically/theoretically, per Grauer) than the first of our species out of Africa;
• the personal: my own first such vocal events, both transmitted and received; more consciously recalled, the first notes I blew when I learned to whistle, then on the trombone I played regularly and intensively for some four decades, specifically the long tones I started with and continued to practice daily--specifically to relax and focus, shore up and tone up mind embodied, become one with the horn--foundational to all the subsequent new things I learned to play on it.

(Note that all these things, from loftiest mysteries of cosmic creation to those of our species’ stories and ideas about it, from our own origins as a species to the mundane daily routines of one of its members, are simultaneously swallowed up in a mythical, lost past [yes, even one’s personal memories of first sounds and trances] and at the same time ever present in the very stuff and structures around us, in their panoply of ways.).

Raine-Reusch:

The Driftworks tracks were all recorded using Pauline Oliveros' Expanded Instrument System. She played accordion on all four tracks; I played Thai khaen on “A Thousand Quiet Mountains,” Japanese sho on the title track, Vietnamese dan bau on “Silence Echoes,” and khaen again on “Whispers in the Ears of Night.”...What was exciting about Pauline’s system is that it allowed us to bend the notes on our instruments, something otherwise impossible on the khaen, sho, and accordion.

Those Doppler-like sonic warps on that first track return me to my unseen observation from inside the duo’s imagined airship, feeling it swerve away from space and its hover at the top of the exosphere to begin its slow and steady descent through the layers of gases, densities, and pressures to the gravity-welling matter of the spinning surface below. (The whole spinning CD, in fact, does descend from high to low in its pitch range, on average, with some notable spikes and dips here and there.) Raine-Reusch’s is the higher of the two voices, at first; the blend of the prehistoric organic and post-Industrial Age free-reed whispers, bleats, and bellows sets that timeless-timely tone prevailing here in a kind of bagpipey sound suggesting the blur of distance stilling any clear view of the mountains below, while also containing a whole thousand of them in a single glance.) Oscillations in volume and durations of notes from long to busy and pulsive refocus me from that view of the outside to the closer inside life of the airship’s two pilots. Knowing them as I do from all their other music, their slightest gestures and textures (Pauline’s hints of Italian or Polish café accordion, Raine-Reusch’s jazz/rock inflections, nuances here and there) identify them to my ears, as distinct from other people from other times, places, traditions who might play almost the same things on the same instruments.

After the praises of the monophonic wind instruments have been sung, I would take up the song of the first polyphonic ones, of those two or more pipes bound to sound a single chord. More precisely, I would praise it as a new-and-improved drone instrument, a harmonic step beyond its monodic counterparts, as the OM unpacked, the One unpacked into the Many. Finally, I would praise the very concept of it for its sustenance of the One and the Many in accord, rather than in the conflicts--of hierarchy, tension and release, teleological development--imposed upon it over the course of (especially) Western music history.

(A fun fact about two such pipes on the sho: one on each side is kept silent, to let them symbolize the wings of the mythical phoenix, whose call the instrument is supposed by legend to imitate. It is also said to reflect “a remarkable historical relationship between humans, bees, trees and metalsmithing. Its metal reeds, hidden within bamboo reed pipes, are traditionally held into place with a preparation of beeswax and pine resin, and are tuned using a similar substance containing fine lead pellets.”)

I was an Artist in Residence at the Pauline Oliveros Foundation in upstate New York, and Pauline showed me her system the first day. On the second day we went in and recorded this CD. We had recorded everything but “Silence Echoes” before lunch, went out and had a good vegetarian Mexican meal and then came back to record “Silence Echoes.”  The piece was so hypnotic that everyone there, Pauline, myself, Paniotis (who was working the board) and David Gamper, all started to go deep into trance. It was David Gamper who realized what was going on as all our heads were slumped over our instruments and we were slowly stopping. David woke us all up before we melted into the ether!

The two scramble positions in the pitch range as they float down into the thermosphere. Oliveros’s accordion intones both a bottom drone and the highest little cries, indeed ethereally high and shimmery, waving in the EIS winds; the single notes of Raine-Reusch’s dan bau match the shimmer, its single amplified string being played almost entirely in harmonics (overtones rung out by plucking a string with the right hand while at the same time touching a harmonic node of the string with the side of the same hand). His ghostly midrange, sometimes springy tones constitute the warp to Oliveros’s weft in their weave of the echoes and the silence; its vòi dàn (that “ultimate whammy bar,” the buffalo horn stick) alters the tension on the string to rise and fall in pitch with and against Oliveros’s own EIS warps of a different sort, flexes at least a little more within reach of the mouthblown prototypes than the rigidly fixed whine, whinge, and dirges of their modern descendants. The whole effect is eerie, creaky... a ghost(air)shipwreck adrift in and out of clouds above the mountains.

So first our bodies sang, alone and together; then one and more of them picked up a sea shell and blew it like a horn, hollowed out a bird bone and blew it like a flute, stuck in a reed and blew it even louder...: the voice extended, airborne through those tools rather than little larynxes.

Then one and more of them got the bright idea to combine two or more of the pipes so as to sound two or more different pitches with one blow. That archetypal “sacred harp”--of two or more bodies gathered together to sound their collective unities--was now mimicked in a single singer’s voice extended: the one not as emergent epiphany in power of so much as manipulative power over the many.

Then one and more of them noticed Great Chain of Being between the one and its many divisions: the partials of 1:1 (unison), 2:1 (octave), 3:2 (perfect fifth) and so on up through the acoustic ladder of the overtone series that is nature’s pattern of how frequently sound waves rise and fall in time, how their intersections in time affect each other, and effect the new sound thus made. From the vast array of possible combinations of such intersections was derived systems between their tones--the different lengths of strings and pipes, the distances between holes on the tubes, the differently sized and pitched drums--ordered hierarchically.  Drone tone tonic was king, high-born octave was queen, and so on down the family/social metaphor through dominants, subdominants, majors and minors, passing tones defined as flat or sharp...to each its role as weak or strong, consonant or dissonant, definitive or derivative.

Those systems played themselves out like chess games, both happily and not, until all twelve of its units had leveled their own playing fields beyond all blissful ignorance and ignorant bliss, all--much fewer, but as or more creative in their de[con]structions--sonic parricides and regicides, infanticides and fratricides, genocides and suicides. Meanwhile, all along, on the side, the polyphonic One continues apace, droning beside the Many, empatiently biding its time as the latter’s false accords and true discords have their say and day, giving the lie to the old saws that good art requires conflict more than cooperation, that only the unhappy families are the unique and interesting ones...until enough becomes enough.³³

 “Whispers in the Ears of Night” takes the mean of the pitch range from high to lower; the airship descends, intoning the whole CD as its long, slow exhale. Raine-Reusch closes with the khaen he rode in on, both here and in his larger life in the music. The harmonic drone of it is not absolute--it’s much more than its drone tones waving in the winds of volume and shifting pitches--but is flowered and laced with those snatches of melody and rhythm that signal who is Pauline, who Randy. Those unbidden gestures just flow to show how such signs can fly and flag themselves in that drone’s own wind both free of and tethered to it at once. One plus one equals Won.

Raine-Reusch:

To listen without judgment and definition, so that each note is played as a part of the grand structure of life. You reach a place where you experience everything as the same, you are aware of individual things yet they are all interconnected. It is like a grand haze with everything included. Nothing is a bad sound, brake squeals, factory noises, birds sound are all equal. Yet there is a sense that everything has both a sound and a silence, chairs, people, mountains, moon… It’s great when you get there, and many people do, but to consciously get yourself to the place where you can regularly experience it at will takes time and practice. The moment you can place a note within the world around you with full awareness, the world is symphonic, you experience this vast oneness of everything. It is Satori. At that point, nothing that you do, sound, or create is random, everything fits together. The more you place sounds in this space, the more you are pulled into it. It is another dimension that surrounds us, yet is also part of our world if we only stop to experience it. 

When this kind of link is made to the audience, you can then take them anywhere. This of course has its own perils, but that is another discussion.

It is another discussion we should touch on before leaving the subject of trance. Is Raine-Reusch the Buddha we have met in the road and so must kill? Clearly, he is just speaking his truth, freely, generously, joyously...but what might a critical devil’s advocate hear in it? Gurus, or anyone professing certainty, enlightenment, or esoteric gnosis of any stripe, or unverifiable claims of paranormal phenomena, beg to be taken with grains of salt, even--especially--when what they say rings true. (If the salt improves the taste, great; if the opposite, spit it out.)

As some anonymous scribe put it in print for the ages, “they shall teach no more every man his neighbor ...saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know Me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord." Pontificating on the meaning of life can come off like describing one’s dreams in detail, or one’s sex or love life to someone--as if they didn’t know it in their own way already, just as well or better (or much worse, in which case it’s just a cruel tease). Of course, that is, arguably, what scribes like me do when we write about music, or life’s meaning...and it’s not true that I’ve always disliked it. Much of my life as an ominous scribe has been to pass along respectfully, if not reverentially, such info as it was fed to me...but I’m older now, as inclined to challenge as to heed.

But before I do, contrarily, add to the “grand structure of life” my own humble “judgment and definition” of this particular trance music, let’s ask Raine-Reusch what “perils” he had in mind about the musician’s power to entrance an audience.
 

Every experienced performer learns how to move an audience, to make them excited one moment, to bring them to silence the next, to make them laugh, and a second later to bring them to tears. This is the art of performance, and the better you are at it the more control you have over your audience.  Some create a transformative experience for their audience, taking them into new experiences and awarenesses.

However, there are people who are not psychologically ready to make some of the leaps that a performer takes them to the edge of.  I have witnessed audience members in profound emotional crises after a concert. I have also known audience members that have life changing experiences at concerts, sometime not positive ones. It is possible for some in the audience to be taken to a point where they can damage themselves or others as they were in a tentative psychological condition at the outset. I personally have left stage to come to the aid of a person I have taken to the edge, to bring them back to a place of safety and balance.  Others though may have very positive powerful transformative experiences that literally change their life.  I think that happened to me at my first Ravi Shankar concert.

The philosophical import of this discussion for me stems from my own experiences as a musician in trance to entrance; as a listener transformed and enchanted; as a journalist and scholar of music who’s observed and conversed with many other such people about such things to then write it up for my readers and peers; and as a reader/researcher of many other such writings by said peers...all of which bobs up from the depths to the surface of the memory part of my deep listening’s thought-and-memory trance.

Most generally, it is a phenomenon commanding what people call the fear of God, which I’ve always taken to mean a wise and healthy respect for the power of love and life as one that can make or break fragile mortals, according to their measure of said respect. History, including that of my own lifetime, is strewn with entrancers and entranced who led and followed each other, and many innocents not led by their madness, into the flames and doom, at worst. Less dire, siren songs and spells of various pleasant-to-compelling stamps and structures lead fools young and old down garden paths and labyrinths designed to rob from the poor and give to the rich, to opiate the masses and stimulate their masters.

Taking the next step, of naming names and drawing lines in the sands of music’s medium (time), is easy but pointless in hindsight, and a fool’s errand in foresight. We can pick off examples such as Hitler and his musical and oratorical techniques, or those of Jim Jones and countless such cult figures and their chants and hymns and other sound entrancers; we can name, judge, and define any number of great symphonies, court and temple musics, commercial culture-changers/drivers to decry as enablers of corruption, oppression, venality, violence, ignorance and stupidity...but is it not a bit late in the game for that? Does it in fact help us discern our own best from our own worst trances in our own moments here? By definitions set by history, are we not more likely to be voices crying in the wilderness even if history proves us to have judged so rightly?

Of course, each of us assumes we are discerning rightly--much as those we judge and define negatively did and do. Suffice it here to settle for why I trust my own trance of thought and memory--my imagination--and those inducing it.

Raine-Reusch gives me some more things I take to nullify my self-issued license to kill the Buddha in him:

You can start to get there by listening to the soundscape, then by including your personscape...

I’m a Gemini, an air sign: personal mythos, not asserted as scientific, but meaningful to me subjectively as part of the transpersonality I embrace...

...and don’t identify, or judge anything...

as I’ve done by imagining a Buddha I must kill...

just be with it and experience. Then place a sound within it without thought or intent (yup, that is a tricky one). You then increasingly experience lifescape or existence, but it is even more, as it goes so far beyond that human language does not function...

okay...but the thoughtless, intentionless sound I am placing within it is all this I’m writing about these two CDs...my language is functioning beyond itself...

This is where many shamans go, and musicians too...

and writers? and thinkers?...

It is real, but esoteric, it is around us but just beyond reach for most without intent...

but you just said to leave intent out of it, also thought...?

...It is where I live now, where I spend that majority of my time, both musically and experientially. It is the Tao, it is the Ma in Shinto, it is the moment of seeing god, it is enlightenment, it is nothing but another day. It’s snowing here, I must shovel the driveway...

cool, thanks; I’ll take that as my cue to turn away-from/into The Light myself, and shovel some more of what I’m shoveling, in my look at Looking Back

(Speaking of “scapes,” 19^th-century poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called the kinds of imagined inner visions I’m deploying to relay my perceptions of this music “inscapes”...)...and I return to the airship as it makes to alight, finally, after its long, slow exhale of the gases giving way to gravity’s intrigues. Oliveros and Raine-Reusch have found their perfect symbiosis as copilots, both becoming one with the ship’s controls and bulk by navigating alone together at their respective stations. We can judge and define Oliveros as the leader, in the sense that this ship called Deep Listening is her baby--but that daughter of hers is mother to the woman she is, just as much; it is her world, and her partners on these two CDs are just living in it...but then so is she, and so is it as much their world to live in as hers. So goes her part and theirs in the Era of Yin.

Instead of touching down, the others in the gondola, who have been passive observers of the stunning 440-mile descent from space through the two longest layers to the mesosphere, then stratosphere, now troposphere, come to life as fellow players in the world outside around them. At 30,000 feet or so, still miles high, we can see the ground as from an airplane, and see that it’s coming to receive us as we syngk.

Looking Back is so named for being “rediscovered archival tapes from a recording on June 14 & 15, 1999 at the Deep Listening Institute in Kingston, NY,” around the same time as Driftworks. It was released in 2013 in memory of David Gamper, the DL bandmate who played the Max/MSP realtime interactive computer (also keyboards and toys, here), who died in 2011.

Their feet firmly planted in midair (pace AACM), their six shorter tracks on this CD swivel and swerve, sail and signify through the same sonic winds of the harmonic drone powered by the mother ship’s accordion and the man’s Eurasian/Australian/Indonesian khaen, sho, suling, ney, bawu, didjeridu, and voice--all winds--but also fill the music with more of the landscape’s soundscape, as it wafts up to the ship now hovering just feet above its lowland treetops. McPhee’s pocket trumpet, Gamper’s electronics, Dempster’s delayed-echo trombone all flavor and warm the fragrance of the gentler breeze here; toys, voices, garden hose, conch and percussion serve the nervy savor of this last coast home. Flutey-windy, brassy-breathy flights-to-glides of soft moans of indeterminate origin...high chirps--birds, bats, or maybe a pinprick of a leak in the ballonets deflating?--pepper the hush of distant oceans out of sight but not earshot, the melancholy keenings of rootless wraiths, and those soft wolfish moans, none howling, still undetermined. Faintest of all, beneath the bountiful flora and fauna, a little tribe of humans can be heard--imitating and surpassing their bio-kin, in mimicry and mercury for want of said kin’s venerable, noble majesty long lived.

In Sum

You may get better musicians within a specific country, as national treasures, but I haven't seen anyone who has taken this kind of world view to music.

                                                                        --Stuart Dempster

If the child is father to the man, that man best honors that father who best fathers that child. Raine-Reusch writes about the journey his child-father embarked on to find his way from a sad and hard to a more humane and holy life:

Raine-Reusch has spent over thirty years exploring the relationship of music to psychology, philosophy, and spiritual or religious practices... ...his music now contains clear influences from a variety of indigenous cultures and is heavily influenced by Taoism and Zen. In his performances Raine-Reusch strives for a balance of virtuosity, innovation, and a contemplative depth of spirit, while retaining the essence of his instruments.

To me:

I’m an improviser; on a daily basis I react to the world with every breath that I take. My music is a dance that directly reacts to not just the soundscape I’m in, but the whole worldscape that I’m in at that moment, with every influence from every emotion that everybody in that room is creating the world around, and every sound there, every feeling, every sense, every sight—everything is totally involved...

I think anybody that’s really been an improvisationalist understands that there’s a deeply spiritual aspect to it, whether they want to talk about it or not, or whether they’re scared of it, there’s something profoundly deep in it that just sort of touches the essence of what life is. You’re in the moment of constant creation, in that place where life is created, at that moment...you’re tapping into that energy. To do that you have to release everything about who you are.

The point of this is that for me improvisation is a very important part of how I relate to this world that I see...I  can move with the constant shifts in what I see, hear and sense, I can  constantly ride the shifting eddies and currents that I constantly feel  tug at my sense and soul.

I feel that through improvisation I am fully engaging with the world, not just the one that most people live in, but the extended world that I live in and that the books on philosophy constantly allude to.  Improvisation is a spiritual experience that is not intellectualized or mystified, but an immediate experience of the mysteries of life, alive and present in the room for  all to share.

Appendix: J. Nigro Sansonese’s “enstasy”

The inspiration for myth, Sansonese argues, lay in heightened awareness (...proprioception) of certain internal bodily activities important in religiously oriented meditation. The means of heightening proprioception are closely guarded meditative techniques orally communicated from teacher (adept) to student, in particular, techniques associated with respiration.

                                    --J. Nigro Sansonese (Wikipedia, my emphasis)

                                                                       

Author J. Nigro Sansonese’s The Body of Myth: Mythology, Shamanic Trance, and the Sacred Geography of the Body (1994, Inner Traditions) spells out his theory of mythopoesis as one attributing the history of Eurasia’s historic myths to the shamanic trance states cultivated by the Indo-European ancestors of Greeks, Romans, and Hindus living on the steppes of that continent. Aspects of his theory resonate compellingly with the discussion of trance music and breath in this final chapter (led with an epigraphic passage from his book), and with the opening chapter’s focus on the question of how best to write about music, begging inclusion of this appendix as an overarching afterword.

Sansonese provides details of how such apparently abstract linguistic constructs as metaphor and metonym (and their musical counterparts, what I’ve been calling “semusical” gestures) are grounded in a pre-linguistic (and pre-musical) corporeality. He speaks of such constructs as components of myth, and tends to their audial as well as visual aspects.

Sansonese develops the point that the body’s central nervous system (CNS) is always sounding, like the external universe, with the low-level hum of its electromagnetic radiation, and that the body is a resonant chamber. "Proprioception"—the term for perception turned inward, to the sounds generated in the body, or the visual phenomena generated by the eye itself in darkness (not to be confused with imagined, or thought, sights or sounds)—is the way into this inner sensory world, and Sansonese practices and writes about yoga as the discipline (much like the phenomenological approach) of exploring that world. "Stereognosis" is his term for the deep and sensitized awareness of one's own body. Adepts in yoga have an awareness and command of their central nervous systems as dynamic and controllable, not completely autonomous. Their experience of consciousness directly, as an organic state, Sansonese calls "enstasy."

Myths arise from among yogic adepts to communicate their inner reality to children and novitiates whose perception extends only to the outside world. Connections are made between inner phenomena such as, for example, the CNS and a sea monster swimming with just its eyes above water (a viable image for that part of us immersed in our watery bodies, peering out our eyes). These aren't arbitrary images, but metaphors that reflect the nature of the beast, one shared by some aspect of the external world (for example, the 3° Kelvin electromagnetic radiation found throughout the cosmos, and the CNS's physical fit as the optimal antenna to receive it). Sansonese:

Samyama is immersion in the object of trance to the exclusion of all else, and the result of onepointed immersion is realization. In the same way that concentration on ink inscribed upon a page leads to comprehension of meaning in words, intense concentration on the resting voltage of the CNS blossoms into spontaneous realization of the meaning that pervades one's own biology. (p. 35)

Such myths accrete to reflect the shifts of intensely focused proprioception on different aspects of the body. "A myth is an esoteric description of a heightened proprioception…Myth makes use of the special knowledge of our bodies' life processes to tell us about ourselves, about who we are and whence we have come" (p. 36). Myth is intentionally ambiguous—as opposed to magic, for example, or science, both of which deal in cause and effect—because it reflects the ground floor of the human organism's potential, its evolutionary history, not its more fleeting and comprehensible engagements with other phenomena.

Sansonese looks at the CNS as a governor and regulator of the organism, but one with as much primitivity and simplicity as complexity in its hierarchical span from brain to stomach. Biological clocks, for an example relevant to musical time sense, are wondrous not for any signs of higher-order consciousness but for the solid foundation they afford it. (Breath is a somewhat higher function, and one he explores at length.)³⁴

 

Sansonese's picture of the CNS, then, is hierarchical from its simplest level (feeling) through its middle one (perception) to its highest (cognition—a triunity also reflected in the reptile-limbic-neocortical triune brain as an isolated organ). The philosophical school of Phenomenology is one often recruited by music scholars to ground cognition in perception, in keeping with this hierarchy; the even further grounding in subjective feeling, uninformed by perception or cognition, is similarly sound.

Thus, a free improviser’s most visceral voice, the sound made to express the (literally) deepest feelings from within, before being influenced by the world, or by conscious thought, has an authority, for all its primitivity, which his more complex interactive communications with the world around him and his own intellectual flights, fancies, and filigrees must respect and draw upon if they are to live and grow. In evolutionary history and in each organism's recapitulation of it, feeling generates phenomenal experience generates cognition, not the reverse.

Sansonese also spends much time on the acoustics of the inner world. Each part of the CNS, for example, operates at a different sonic configuration; mantras and chants are examples of devices conceived to generate awareness of one rather than another of these configurations (Sansonese doesn't use the word "chakra," for locus of energy along the length of the CNS, but it's the same idea). He has attributed certain sonic characteristics to each of the three levels discussed above (he calls them first, second, and third worlds). These characteristics determine the sounds of the names of the mythical characters representing the different aspects of the organism (e.g., Sisyphus for breath, that phenomenon that rolls its "stone" uphill with each inhale and back down with each exhale). They also contribute to music conceived to speak to one or the other aspects:

We have tentatively arranged the mantras occurring in myth in table 3. Very roughly, they describe the following phons [unit of loudness--MH]: first world (feeling)—a dull roar; second world (perception)—a clicking; third world (cognition)—a whine. (p. 128)

So it is that sonic reality determines and grounds metaphorical meaning. A circle is described: the organism's self-contained inarticulate feeling (first world, primitive—music's land of the drone tone One) reaches out beyond itself to the world (second world, of perception, phenomena—music's land of the 10,000 things, the Many: metered rhythm, pitched sound, patterns thereof, system, one-step melody, the womb of consciousness) for names to match its internal reality, then returns (third world, cognition—the cry of the tumbling strain, the high voice a man must attain, that given to a child and a woman) to again internalize such connections (as its knowledge, its sense of "I" and "Thou").

Sansonese lists axioms throughout his book to define myth, as he goes through his steps in doing so. In summary, he says

No axiom is concerned with philosophical, ethical, or religious questions. Myths did not arise from a need to supply answers to such questions. Their origins are so remote from us in time that we must put aside customary and compulsive intellectualizing if we are to understand them, and we must especially avoid glibly equating mythology to symbology. The theory of myth as a description of heightened proprioception follows from an ability—admittedly hypothetical—of our earliest ancestors to pass with relative ease into trance. The apparent loss of that ability is related to the evolution of the human nervous system, one that has led to an increasing reliance on the cortex—the seat of intellect—for a filtered experience of the world.

Yoga is a form of Know Nothingness: "know no thing-ness." It seeks to throw awareness, as though it would build a bridge, between any object and the abiding subject, which is the atman, the atman that is the sole attachment of the heart; and all of that would be philosophizing par excellence were it not for the ability of yoga's technical wisdom to reify intellect, bring it to life, and supply an experience for every idea—unto God itself. (pp. 140-41)

---

---

1 ^{1. My coinage of “musickosophy” to stand for the process of improvising or composing one’s “wisest”--most creative/original, as opposed to derivative/traditional/formulized--music is based on Christopher Small’s signature neologism “musicking.” His own broader definition of that is “to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing. We might at times even extend its meaning to what the person is doing who takes the tickets at the door or the hefty men who shift the piano and the drums or the roadies who set up the instruments and carry out the sound checks or the cleaners who clean up after everyone else has gone. They, too, are all contributing to the nature of the event that is a musical performance” (Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (in English). [1998. p. 8]. Hanover: University Press of New England.}

^↩
2 ^{2. In Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s “Over Our Dead Bodies” in Dissent: A Quarterly of Politics and Culture (Winter 2014).}

^↩
3 ^{3. Rosemary Mahoney, “Why Do We Fear the Blind?” (New York Times, 1/24/14).}

^↩
4 ^{4. James Webb’s Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America (Broadway Books, 2005) gives an overview of the Celtic, distinct from the Germanic (including English, via Anglo-Saxon), strain of the British Isles, from deep to modern history.↩}
5 ^{5. Lawrence Sutin’s All is Change: The two-thousand-year journey of Buddhism to the West (2006, New York/Boston/London: Little, Brown and Company) shows the story in its title to be one of deeper and longer historical pervasion than commonly thought. Its chapter “Beat Zen and Crazy Wisdom,” through looks at people such as Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and others captures with erudite panache the dramatic essence of it in our time and place. See also Crazy Wisdom: The Life and Times of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche (DVD, 2011).↩}
6^{6. My survey of the literature on this subject that drew me in, and my own contributions to it, began with my Ph.D. dissertation (Northern Sun, Southern Moon: Identity, Improvisation, and Idiom in Freie Musik Produktion [2000, Wesleyan University, pp. 29-44; and pp. 1206-1446]); ran through the later book developed from that (Northern Sun, Southern Moon: Europe’s Reinvention of Jazz, Yale University Press, 2005, pp. 269-99); and has continued since then to the time of this writing (2014) in my perusals of other work discovered since that spoke in some way to that holistic concept of the improvising body (see footnote 11). ↩}
7 ^{7. Heffley (2000), p. 8. ↩}
8 ^{8. Ibid., p. 10↩}
9 ^{9. Ibid., pp. 1438-46.↩}
10 ^{10. Ibid., pp.1367-1413.↩}
11  Ibid., pp. 1287-1363. After doing all that work in the ‘90s, I’ve followed with interest similar work by others as it’s crossed my path: W.A. Mathieu, who wrote that “the rules of music were not formed in our brains but in the resonance chambers of our bodies” (Harmonic Experience, Inner Traditions, 1997), words on that book’s back cover that stand next to an unlikely trio of testimonies from Terry Riley, Pete Seeger, and (from 1962) John Coltrane; Adam Rudolph, for his articulations about creative music in writings and interviews; Rudolph’s longtime mentor and musical collaborator Yusef Lateef, for his concept of “autophysiopsychic” music; and Bob Gluck, for his blog’s “observations about defining the spiritual in music – An ongoing consideration: 1998 – 2013.” All of these sources I discovered after my own published work on the subject reflect the integration of body, mind, and spirit in the music at the heart of that and this work by virtue of being serious players of the kind of creative and “cosmically aligned” music they write and talk about--what I’m calling “musickosophers.”^↩
12 ^{12. See David Gelernter (“The Closing of the Scientific Mind,” March 2014, Commentary). Also worth citing at length here:↩}
13 ^{13. See Rupert Sheldrake (The Science Delusion [Coronet, 2012]) & Thomas Nagel (Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False [Oxford University Press, 2012]).↩}
14 ^{14. Claire Sykes, “Randy Raine-Reusch” (MUSICWORKS Magazine). ↩}
15 Ibid. ^↩
16 ^{16. Ibid.↩}
17 ^{17. Ibid.↩}
18 ^{18. Ibid.↩}
19 ^{19. Ibid.↩}
20 ^{20. From the Urban Dictionary (1995): Asza def.: She's beauty and she's grace, she's elegant and taste. A girl bearing the name Asza (pronounced Asha) has got it all. Not only beauty, but also brains. The name can also be used as a verb describing things that go exactly as planned. ↩}
21 ^{21. The khaen is well represented in the CD accompanying The Garland Handbook of Southeast Asian Music (Terry E. Miller and Sean Williams, eds.; Routledge, 2008, tracks 5 & 6). Track 5 is a Thai lam sing (repartee genre, one featuring back-and-forth lyrics, often improvised, between a man and a woman) song; track 6 is a Laotian version (lam salvane) of the same genre. Both immediately recalled to my mind the sound and feel of Cajun and Zydeco accordion-cum-vocal music.↩}
22 ^{22. Recall this from my look at Grauer’s book, in Chapter Two: “Chapter 17 retells the ancient Chinese myth of the Yellow Bell, foundational to both Chinese music and culture, for its possible resonance with an actual history of tuned pipes (originally bird bones) as a technology instrumental in developing both music and language.”↩}
23 ^{23. Claire Sykes, “Randy Raine-Reusch” (MUSICWORKS Magazine).↩}
24 ^{24. Curt Sachs, The Wellsprings of Music (McGraw-Hill, 1961, p. 59).↩}
25 ^{25. The extra string is tuned to C below the usually lowest E string. Müller is a veteran of the European scene I covered in Northern Sun, Southern Moon, most notably for a 10-year stint with Wolfgang Fuchs’ King Übü Örchestrü. ↩}
26 ^{26. “The Story of the Ch’in” (T.C. Lain and Robert Mok, in Jade Flute: The Story of Chinese Music, New York: Shocken Books, 1981/1985, pp. 81-118) is well worth reading for its erudite and readable presentation of history, lore, artwork, poetry, and ethno/musicology pertaining to this instrument. A pithy taste: “The zither, so claimed the ancient Chinese, was an instrument that ‘inhibits wanton thoughts and puts the mind of the people right.’ That the Ch’in survives the turmoils and vicissitudes of Chinese history for more than two thousand years perhaps owes much to this statement, since it stands for ‘purity’ in Chinese music as opposed to the ‘impurities’ of alien musical influences. Moreover, it is said that Confucius himself played the Ch’in and the folk songs he collected in Shih Ching (Book of Songs) were actually zither tunes...For the Chinese gentry, the Ch’in was a ‘virtuous’ instrument, the playing of which was to be cultivated as a literary pastime and for spiritual elevation, and not to be compared to the playing of other folk instruments relegated to the lowly entertainer” (pp. 81-2).}

Also worth referencing here, the more professional-scholarly “Music of Qin: From the Scholar’s Study to the Concert Stage” (Bell Yung, in Reading Chinese Music and Beyond, Chinese Civilisation Centre, City University of Hong Kong, 2010, pp. 9-28)--especially for this passage about the cultural context of the instrument and its musical tradition, specifically its relationship to the language arts: “...an appreciation of the music depends very much upon the listener’s understanding of the literary content of the compositions. This extra-musical content, as mentioned earlier, is related closely to the history, philosophy, cosmology, and religion of China” (p. 16).

^↩
27 ^{27. See more about this, with videos of performances, at http://www.asza.com/zenone.shtml; and in my complete interview with Raine-Reusch.↩}
28 ^{28. In real time, most tracks were recorded in the early ‘90s, not released until 2004.↩}
29 ^{29. Some of the scores are performed by Raine-Reusch and others on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBBCEE04167AE5B36↩}
30 ^{30. Reading that reminded me of my own experience performing Christian Wolff’s Burdocks for the composer, with musicians more in his circle who were wary of my own more jazz sound and approach. Fortunately, Wolff took my side, and enjoyed the change.↩}
31 ^{31. Sansonese, p. 8.↩}
32 ^{32. Ted Gioia illuminates the discussion of the distinctions between stringed, wind, and percussion instruments in shamanic practices (Healing Songs, Duke University Press, 2006, especially pp. 62-4, 72-5, 99-101).↩}
33 ^{33. See Heffley (2005, pp. 35-8) for my more measured if less poetic gloss of the history of harmony in the West.↩}
34 ^{34. From Berendt (1983: 33), the Indian Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan writes of the breath words that speak to the entire development of it as music-maker, from the voice to its world of extensions of same beyond the body: "When we study the science of breath the first thing we notice is that breath is audible; it is a word in itself, for what we call a word is only a more pronounced utterance of breath fashioned by the mouth and tongue. In the capacity of the mouth breath becomes voice, and therefore the original condition of a word is breath. If we said, 'First was the breath,' it would be the same as saying, 'In the beginning was the word.'"↩}