May 02 | Wind through the strings (Fire in the Wineglass #3)

Omid-jan’s third lesson in the course focused on the first eighteen lines of the Masnavi, specifically the Song of the Reed passage which I’ve referenced in other pieces on this blog.

It’s funny what extra wisdom you can receive when someone is sharing in the learning with you, particularly the most obvious things! Omid-jan showed us a beautiful ney (reed flute) he had received as a gift from a well-known Sufi musician, and was explaining how these instruments are crafted. Pointing the end at the camera, he said, “You can see of course that this is hollow. Before being prepared for a musician naturally there would be no hole here. It would be filled. The reed must be hollowed out in order to make a sound. Then a white-hot piece of metal is applied over and over until it makes the holes for your fingers.”

The reed, says the song, makes a crying sound, a lament, because it is taken from its home, the reed bed. It is then subjected to pain, in a sense – the emptying out and the branding. But all of this is what is needed to make the most haunting, gorgeous sound, and of course most of the Sufi services that I’ve been to begin with this sound, alone, to remind us.

There really is nothing quite like it. My best memory was of waking up during the 24 hour sema I attended in Seattle around 3 or 4am, just to the sound of the ney. It really made me feel like I was in a whole other universe, one where, as Omid-jan said later in the lesson, “There is no you or I.”

The harp, of course, although not a reed instrument, does have a hollow place: the sound board. This is where the strings are anchored, and where the sound is concentrated. There are several ways to play the folk harp (smaller ones can be put up on tables), but the standard way is to be seated and to lean the instrument back against one’s right shoulder. When you do this, you can feel all of the vibration right against your heart. It’s a beautiful feeling.

It’s always interested me as well that the process of electronically amplifying the harp is counter-intuitive. I can’t tell you how many people have tried to stick a microphone right inside the soundboard (and you can imagine that when those people are men they rarely listen to me telling them this won’t work). There is almost no real enhancement of the sound when this occurs, and what does come out is muddy and dark. I’m sure there’s a more detailed explanation for why this happens, but my very uneducated guess is that the vibrations are simply too strong and thick. Each string to a human ear may only contain one note that’s perceptible, but really the tone itself is made up of multiple overtones that all sing in harmony together. Within the soundboard itself, which is somewhat enclosed, I imagine it’s much more difficult for a microphone to unify these tones. Instead of one pure note, you get a multitude, a choir even. One might as well try to mic heaven!

But something even more beautiful occurs with the addition to wind to my lovely harp-jan. When I carry her to wherever we need to go, if it’s windy, the wind will blow through the strings and make an incredible celestial sound. I’ve yet to record this sound but one day I’d like to very much so you can hear it. It’s hard to describe: “shimmery” is perhaps the closest one might get. She has her own voice, her own soul, in a sense, totally divorced from mine, and yet when I do sit down with her, we do become one being, one soul. I cannot replicate that wind-song on my own, and she cannot make my own songs on her own. We need each other, and yet we are not fully separate. Knowing this keeps me humble.

As Omid-jan would say, “It’s all God!”