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13. Ear-Dreaming: A Study in Listeners
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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317 Chapter 13 Ear-Dreaming: A Study in Listeners eleanor v. stubley E ar-Dreaming—the title came to me as I watched Larry Weinstein’s cinematic rendering of John Weinzweig’s“Hockey Night in Canada”(1986). Sprawled on a well-worn couch, Weinzweig was watching television, seemingly transfixed by the fast-paced action of a hockey game as first one team and then the other strove to gain control of the puck. A choir announced in a punctuated staccato rhythm, “stick, check, body check, stick, check, body check,” such that the slap of the consonants filling the silence between the words reverberated with the sharp crack of sticks and skates on ice. As the choir continued,“nine seconds, seconds to go, nine seconds, seconds, seconds to go,”the camera panned from the choir to a close-up of Weinzweig’s glasses filled with the refracted images of the hockey players flying across the screen. It was as if I was seeing through the lenses into the composer’s creative mind and witnessing, through the sonority of his being, what Gaston Bachelard describes as the “unseen ear that knows how to dream.”1 “Stick, check, body check,” the abrupt cadence of a puck contacting a goalie’s glove mid-air, the anticipatory silence of “six seconds … two seconds, seconds to go,”inspiration and realization coalesced so that I could hear Weinzweig “hearing [himself] listen.”2 But it was not simply the thought of Weinzweig as an ear-dreamer that sparked my imagination.As I continued to watch the play of music and image evolve with the ebb and flow of the unfolding hockey game, I began to envision the task of writing a reception history of Weinzweig’s music, as a form of ear-dreaming. Part of it was a sense that my efforts to conjure a “period ear” would need to be tuned to Weinzweig’s own dreaming, since he had described 318 the legacy his compositional process as a never-ending “quest to identify the tempo of the times.”3 More important, though, was Weinstein’s cinematic achievement. He had not only used the charged, kinetic energy of the hockey game to create the impression of a sonorous world that, although fashioned from a limited number of repeated motives, was constantly changing and evolving; he had used the resulting play of sound and sight to create a vocal polyphony which allowed me to always remain in touch with the action that was happening off-camera. Weinzweig’s compositional career had spanned a period of over sixty years: some heard him as a Canadian composer, others as a JewishCanadian composer, still others as a new-music or a performers’ composer. And, depending upon when, where, and how one listened, his music was understood, by virtue of the changing tempo of the times, in a number of different ways. In view of this, I needed to conjure not a single“period ear”in the manner of Naomi André,4 but the polyphony of multiple ears sounding the same themes in different ways across time. In order not to lose the total picture as I focused first on one listener and then on another, I would also have to achieve in words what Weinstein had achieved cinematically through the play of sound and sight. I begin near the beginning. 3 January 1943 The clock approaches the top of the hour, six seconds, five seconds … two seconds,one second to go,as radio listeners coast to coast await the familiar signature theme heralding the CBC’s weekly instalment of Our Canada. Joe, a soon-to-be air-force cadet, answers its orchestral flourish with a whistled rendition of his own. Seconds later the authoritative voice of the series’narrator,Lorne Greene,announces:“Joe,our poets,our painters,and our composers are important, for in their work our country can see its soul take shape. In words, in paint, in sound, the spirit of Canada begins to spear across this land as the arts grow up.”5 While a“land tamed,”Greene continues,“we are a nation, Joe, not yet fully imagined,”and when the work of our artists is complete we will discover that we have long been “strangers to ourselves.” Listening to these words today for the first time, I hear behind them, as if an echo from the future, Gaston Bachelard’s explanation of the ultra-hearing characteristic of the ear-dreamer, that creative inspiration that in fashioning something new...