Michael Robinson
Tibetan
Tears (Nagamani)
1.
Tibetan Tears
(1998) 60:29
Meruvina:
kawala, balafon, hyoshigi and tanpuras
| Tibetan Tears |
I
had been planning the music for Tibetan Tears for at least six months, putting
it aside while I composed the four compositions found on Lunar Mansions and
Luminous Realms. The challenge I was readying myself for was to compose a one-hour alap (no jor or jhala) with sustained musical interest. When I was finally
ready to begin, the actual composing and programming took about three weeks.
It turns out that the swaras (tones) I used are identical to an obscure South
Indian raga, Nagamani, which translates to mean jeweled snake or cobra. But
that was after the fact. My actual musical inspiration came from Hariprasad
Chaurasia, the bansuri master, who has raised the art of flute playing to previously
unimaginable levels.
Realizing that some degree of contrast would be necessary for such an extended piece, I decided to set-off the main voice, a Near Eastern kawala timbre, with the gentle struck-wood sound of an African balafon, slightly punctuated with a Japanese hyoshigi, a wooden percussion instrument. Together they swim within the prominent expanse of male (low) and female (high) Indian tanpuras.
Most
often, my compositions are named after they are completed. I gravitate towards
poetic titles that somehow reflect the nature of the music. The situation in
Tibet was not specifically in my thoughts while composing Tibetan Tears. However,
the rightness of this title leaped out at me soon after the music was finished,
as did the poem, Oil and Blood, by Yeats, printed below. The title came to me
after I had a vision while listening to the music that the kawala was a Tibetan
mother mourning the loss of her child, and the balafon was the spirit of the
departed child.
In
tombs of gold and lapis lazuli
Bodies of holy men and woman exude
Miraculous oil, odour of violet.
But under heavy loads of trampeled clay
Lie bodies of the vampires full of blood;
Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet.
-
Michael Robinson, July 1998, Beverly Hills
©
1998 Michael Robinson All rights reserved
Out
of a ground of a tanpura drone periodically rises a bansri melodic line. This
gesture is often slow, but animated at times, and it eventually always returns
to the drone. Periodically, a balafon line responds, rising and falling, returning
to the tanpura. Maybe this is a metaphor for life, rising out of formlessness,
eventually returning to it. This hour-long work is expressive and quite moving.
- CDeMUSIC
The following is a letter written to Helen Vendler in July 2011 enquiring about the Yeats poem, and her response:
Dear Ms. Vendler,
I am very curious to know what inspired 'Oil and Blood' from The Winding Stair and Other Poems by Yeats. It appears to me that he may have been contrasting specific persons in public or private life, or maybe the poem developed out of his fascination with 'exotic' ceremonies and superstitions.
If you would be so kind to render an opinion, or direct me to someone else who may know about this poem, it would be greatly appreciated. I am an American composer, and the late David Lewin, who taught music theory and composition at Harvard, was an important teacher in my life.
Cordially,
Michael Robinson
Los Angeles
Dear Mr. Robinson,
Here is the basic info from Jeffares 1968 Commentary on the Collected Poems of Yeats (now out of print). I've never seen anything relating it to people contemporary with Yeats.
“This poem was probably written in 1927 and worked over in 28 and 29. Yeats read several books on St. Teresa" (four are cited). Notes on lines 3 and 5 follow: line 3: odour of violet: from Lady Lovat, The Life of St. Teresa, p. 606: "The wood of the coffin was found to be split and decayed and the coffin was filled with earth and water but the body of the Saint was intact, her flesh white and soft, as flexible as when she was buried, and still emitted the same delicious and penetrating smell. Mpreover the limbs exuded a miraculous oil which bore a similar perfume and embalmed the air and everything with which it came in contact."
Yeats wrote to T. Sturge Moore from Cannes on 2 February 1928 about 'that very British brother of yours' [G.E. Moore, the philosopher: "By the bye, please don't quote him again till you have asked him this question: 'How do you account for the fact that when the Tomb of St [sic] Teresa was opened her body exuded miraculous oil and smelt of violets?' If he cannot account for such primary facts he knows nothing." (Letters of Yeats and T. Sturge Moore, pp 121-2) line 5: the vampires: Yeats had read Bram Stoker's Dracula and Sheridan Le Fanu's vampire story (dramatised by Lord Longford under the title Carmilla).
And that's all that Jeffares has to say. In the 1959 A Reader's Guide to William Butler Yeats, John Unterecker (pp 207-08) says merely that "Vampires 'full of blood,' lie in bloody shrouds under that emblem of power, earth itself, 'heavy loads of trampled clay.' Holy men, on the other hand, who have presumably climbed the tower toward moon's wisdom, lie preserved in golden tombs and tombs of lapis lazuli."
In my own view, Yeats is drawing, in these six lines, the arc of what people have "experienced" from the realm of the supernatural, from the benign "exudations" of the saints (whom people honor with noble tombs) to the violent murders by vampires, who are thrust under the earth in their bloody shrouds and their blood-wet lips. Although the ostensible burden of the poem is a thematic contrast, the fact that the end words of the saints rhyme with the end-words of the vampires mean that both belong to the same overarching order of the "exotic" (as you say): the tomb material ("lazuli") of the saints rhymes with the tomb material ("clay" ) of the vampires; the benign fluid that the saints "exude" rhymes with the vicious "blood"; and the sweet "violet" rhymes with the repellent "wet." "Two things equal to the same thing are equal to each other" is the message of all rhyme, and such discordant rhymes cause the unease felt by those facing the two sides of the supernatural, "good" and "bad." Take one, you have to take the other. The sixain form (abcabc) of "Oil and Blood" is familiar in English verse as the close of a Petrarchan sonnet; (the other English sixain form, ababcc, used by Shxpr in Venus and Adonis and therefore referred to as "the V. & A. stanza" has two parts, whereas the sixain abcabc is one single arc, confirming the oneness of the apparently contrastive images.
The poem was inspired in part (as Unterecker remarks) by the very complex preceding 4-part poem (a much better one) called "Blood and the Moon" (about which I've written in my book on Yeats, Our Secret Discipline). It contrasts the two poles of human existence: unattainable idealism, represented by the moon, and the struggle for power, represented by blood. Again, Yeats insists on the interdependence of the two impulses, and the impossibility of escaping either.
This is I'm sure more than you wanted to know.
Best of luck in your work in that holde kunst.
Yours,
Helen Vendler
A. Kingsley Porter University Professor
Department of English
Harvard University