Lost Steps by David Rothenberg

In Alejo Carpentier’s epic novel The Lost Steps, a composer journeys into the Amazon, and only there finds the inspiration to write the great symphony of his dreams. Carpentier excels at describing just what the Amazon sounds like:

“And in the vast jungle filling with night terrors, there arose the Word. A word that was more than word. A word that imitated the voice of the speaker, and of that attributed to the spirit in possession of the corpse. One came from the throat of the shaman; the other from his belly. One was deep and confused like the bubbling of underground lava; the other, medium in pitch, was harsh and wrathful. They alternated. They answered each other. The one upbraided when the other groaned; the belly voice turned sarcastic when the throat voice seemed to plead. Sounds like guttural portamenti were heard, ending in howls; syllables repeated over and over, coming to create a kind of rhythm; there were trills suddenly interrupted by four notes that were the embryo of a melody. But then came the vibration of the tongue between the lips, the indrawn snoring, the panting contrapuntal to the rattle of the maraca. This was something far beyond language, and yet still far from song. Something that had not yet discovered vocalization, but was more than word…. Before the stubbornness of Death, which refused to release its prey, the Word suddenly grew faint and disheartened. In the mouth of the shaman, the spell-working orifice, the Threne—for that was what this was—gasped and died away convulsively, blinding me with the realization that I had just witnessed the Birth of Music.”

Ever since I read that book in college decades ago I always wanted to travel to the Amazon to hear such sounds for myself. This year, invited by Diego and Marlene Samper of Calanoa Amazonas and the Wild Symphony Project, I finally got to realize my dream.

Here are some of the sounds I heard, mostly of the forest and river, and some with the gentle intrusions of humanity’s musical thoughts.

Yet how gentle can we ever be, really?

“I had seen the word travel the road of song without reaching it; I had seen how the repetition of a single syllable gave rise to a certain rhythm; I had seen how the alternation of the real voice and the feigned voice forced the witch-doctor to employ two pitches, how a musical theme could originate in an extramusical practice. I thought of all the nonsense uttered by those who take the position that prehistoric man discovered music in his desire to imitate the beauty of bird-warblings—as though the song of a bird had any musical-aesthetic value for those who hear it constantly amidst a concert of snorts, screeches, splashing, running, things falling, waters rushing, which for the hunter is a kind of sonorous code, the understanding of which is a part of his craft.”
—Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps

music often made in close collaboration with the natural world.

www.terranovamusic.net