Seconds

I have an on-again/off-again relationship with Scottish
small pipes -- quieter little sisters of the war pipes
you hear on St. Paddy's day. They offer a very restricted
musical palette (8 notes in a
mixylodian scale, plus the flat seventh 1 octave down),
and it's a great challenge to see what kind of music you
can make within these limits. Playing pipes is like sumi
painting: because the elements are so few, you can't
cheat with a lot of dumb notes that sound impressive
but don't add up to anything. Pipes force you to play honest.

But there's another reason I like the pipes. Because
of the drones, they often produce the interval
of the second. This is the most discordant of all the
intervals, so it's avoided in most musical traditions.
I only know of three in which it plays an important role.
One's Gaelic piping. Another is Balkan singing.
The third is Tibetan church music. The monks do seriously
heavy throat music, and the seconds come out strongly
because of the way the overtones mix it up.

These musics take some getting used to, and I
think it's because of the seconds. The second is a
seriously HARD sound, and it's REALLY THERE. You can't
ignore it, or pretend it's something else, or make it
into something merely pretty. It's interesting to think
that the cultures that use these intervals are no
strangers to hard times.

Once you get your head around this interval, you
begin to see it out in the world. A few years ago
I saw a film clip of a man in the Middle East.
His house had just been destroyed by a bomb --
utterly destroyed, reduced to rubble -- with his
wife and children inside. It was interesting to
see what this man did. First he fell to the ground.
Then his friends lifted him up and he shouted
over and over again: God is great.

That's the interval of the second.

But this makes seconds sound like something terrible.
It isn't always that way. Do you know
Van Gogh's painting "Starry Night"? Pinwheel
constellations, vortices of light against the dark,
constellations you can't see from anywhere on this
earth but MORE REAL than the ones you can. If you
haven't yet seen these constellations -- crazy,
magnificent Vincent's constellations -- you will see them,
somewhere, sometime. Because that's also the interval
of the second.