What follows is a script that arose from one of my experimental electronic music pieces. The story itself grew from the music that I had composed over a week or two. I titled the atmospheric music “The Invitation of Birds” as its opening makes use of recordings of bird sounds I had collected around our home in Black Mountain, North Carolina. Program music in reverse? Waking nature, the entrance of the Master and the Seeker–united in the love for their instrument.
This tale was written before the writing of The Pearl Trilogy. It is interesting to see some of the patterns and threads that look forward to events in the trilogy; for example, events in the second book on The Night of Vigil. Flute, flight, lute, and starlight. I add it here as in my recent re-discovery of it and its corresponding germinal origin in the music, might also be of interest to close readers of my works. What is striking is that it pre-dates, by some four months, the dream that led to the making of The Memory Tapes of John I. Pearl. There may even be some connections between this little wonder-dot and collection of tales, Sun Wind Silversea.
Perhaps the music, once it is finished, will take part in the eventual soundtrack for the trilogy with each chapter in the series being given at least one musical setting for the events presented in the chapter. Stay tuned, Pearlandiers.
The Invitation of Birds
(A Script for an Animated Short Film with Music)
Pre-dawn light.
Swirling white and bluegrey mountain clouds, slowly drifting and climbing through mountainous forests.
An aerial view focuses on two adjacent mountain tops cradled in white mist. The cloudview plunges into a deep valley where all the flora and fauna stir behind the foggy ephemera rising through the tiered niches of mountain life. Large rock formations protrude near the summits of each mountaintop—nature’s rough-hewn shrines.
Through the thinning, brightening mists, two figures walk slowly, east to west and west to east. They stand and face one another on rocky ledges stretching out from mountain’s edge.
An elder teacher and his younger student have come to their meeting place. They see one another, and three times bow in customary gesture. Master and Seeker. Each one produces a wooden flute from beneath their garments. A red-ribboned flute for the Master; a green-ribboned flute for the young Seeker.
The old man sits on one of the rocks, collects himself, and with a slight, familiar gesture invites the young Seeker to do the same. Silence. They listen to the awakening life and the youth waits for the Elder and the lesson to begin.
With a slow, long breath, the Elder begins to play his flute. The boy, opposite, listens and joins in.
Birds descend and begin to collect in the watching trees as Teacher and pupil play in a call-and-response.
The boy’s playing takes on a wilder pace and a slightly more shrill tone as he displays his proud flourishes.
The teacher, with the sounding of the first note ever taught to his student, reminds him of the primacy of slow, controlled breath, and quality of tone. The sounding of that note contains the remembering of an ever-present invitation to listen to the birds in the surrounding forest.
To ask:
what is given to us
in the breaths of trees?
Return that.
The boy feels the invitation, the question.
He feels his body and spirit relax, deeper and deeper as with each breath he rejoins his Master’s sustaining, circulating tone.
As their combined music moves through the air, the Elder looks up and nods to a pair of vigilant, hovering eyes in the shadows of the forest. He directs a note upward, and with that slight gesture, the boy, caught up in a rush of beating wings, leaves his body and finds himself aloft in the clouds above his village.
He wonders: has he become a hawk or an eagle?
Perhaps he is now a thrush—his long-loved harbinger of dawn and dusk . . . ?
Whatever his new form, he’s never soared so high . . . but his elation gives way to a creeping nervous fear as he enters an ever-darkening cloud—thick with the acrid dusts of metals, burnt fuel and chemical vapor. As he passes through the blighted air, a rumble of engines burst through the sky . . .
He is not alone.
The skies have grown crowded with planes. Below him, ribbons of river life are swallowed up by the bric-a-brac crosswork of streets and highways. Teeming industrial machinery exhales fumes and noise; choking lakes and ponds dot a wasteland of congested dwellings and charred forests.
The boy wants to turn away. His spirit yearns for home, but he hears the sound of his Master’s flute rising above him–a comforting, returning presence that bids him to remain awake . . . to witness all that he now envisions . . . to endure the twisted chaotic sprawl of mechanical life, so alien to our true nature. To devote himself ever to its renewal as long as he draws breath.
His flight over cities, farm, and pasture-land lasts until dusk, and the boy’s spirit grows ever weary. A looming hemlock beckons him to find rest. There he lands and finds a perch among the interlaced branches of the grand evergreen.
He watches through the tree as the moon climbs into the sky. For a time, he finds the peace that comes with rest.
Waking to the sound of a plucked instrument, he knows them to be a familiar melody. Again he soars into the air, following the mournful strains of the lute and sees once again his common terrain; he is circling back from whence he came. He surveys the opening heavens—a full moon impearls the wider necklacings of stars.
A yellow light enshrouds his head, and he realizes that he is passing through a shaft of moonbeam. The light illuminates a thatched roof below him and he passes through it as if he were made of water. He is set down on a straw cot in a lone hut and gradually begins to feel his full presence returning in his human form once more. Near the fire sits his smiling teacher, gently plucking out those cherished sweet sorrows from the strings of his lute.
Without speaking, they gaze at one another and into the fire. Then, drawn by the movement of a striding shadow beyond the door, they look outside the hut toward where Mother Crow passes to see the boy whom she had led on his spirit journey.
Her piercing eyes and strong beak shine back at them in the falling twilight . . . her black wings shudder with life and moonlit color as she lifts to join her waiting flock. Their caws sound departure. Again they lift their wings into the starlit, wayfaring heavens above.
*******
As there is a way to go on the completion of the electronic piece which currently clocks in at close to nine minutes in length, here is some of the finest Chinese folk music that might well serve for some mood music for your reading of this script. One of my fave recordings of Chinese Folk Music is the CBS Masterworks album Phases of the Moon. Superb from start to finish.
****
jf
July 27
(2018)
