The Ceaseless Song

I made music before I could speak. I drummed and hummed along with tunes it seemed only I could hear. When I could stand, I hauled myself to the piano and pressed the keys blindly above my head. I wrote my first song before I could reach the pedals. When I was strong enough to hold a flute, I puffed and spluttered into it. But not for long. Unlike my friends, who could only manage to hold a note, my playing floated away as a rich sigh, full of depth and feeling. My family found me a violin. The screeching and scraping soon smoothed into long, sinuous melodies. Next, they found a teacher, but I struggled to read the little dots and lines he laid out in front of me. I could not match those markings with my feeling for the sound.

Frustrated that I would never be a great musician, the teacher gave up and handed me off to a colleague, someone with, he explained, “less skill, but more patience.” This new teacher did not care about theory or whether I understood how the music should be played. He did not make me stare at the sheets of lines and dots anymore. Instead, he would put a record on the stereo and ask me to play along.

I would begin by copying the melody, then sometimes, compelled by my senses, I would switch to one of the harmony parts. I would pick up different instruments: a flute, a horn, my violin (now far too small for me), and see how the different parts sounded. He would join me, changing instruments to complement mine. We roamed the spectrum of genres, from folk tunes that conjured other worlds and other times to angular contemporary music that thrashed and halted—music that throbbed in my chest and buzzed at the base of my skull.

Sometimes it felt like a test, as if he was trying to find my limit, the point at which my intuition would fail. At times I thought it might. When we disagreed about which part of a song was the melody and which the harmony, he would stop me and ask me why. I felt foolish not being able to explain, but he never tried to convince me I was wrong, just that we heard it differently. It was when my “hearing it differently” veered into improvisation that my method finally made sense. I was no longer just hearing the music, nor simply feeling it. When I played without limits, unbounded by what had been set down, I was in the music, and it was in me. Something about the shape of the tones begged me for more—an extra dimension, which I could help grow from within. I could use the resonance of a horn to fill a gap, or the versatility of a clarinet to mold something jagged into something round, or vice versa. From then on, I didn’t just play music, I played with it.

My teacher let me tinker and fool around, though he rarely strayed from original form himself. One day, he arrived visibly excited. He had found someone willing to lend him a very special recording, a section of “The Ceaseless Song,” the most extraordinary piece of improvisation ever heard. Excited as I was, I had never heard of it. He apologized, admitting it should have been part of my education from the beginning. As he set up the sound system to give us the best possible experience, he told me the story of how the song was created.

Years ago, three young men had been killed in an accident up in the mountains. The whole community gathered in the large cave where they were buried to pay tribute to them. Just as they were laid to rest, one of their mothers, a leader in the community, began to sing. It was a slow, harrowing song of sorrow that poured from her as her body resonated with grief—a low humming that grew to a clawing cry. It was not a song anyone had heard before, but it struck her fellow mourners as a fitting way to honor their sons, so they joined her. They sang and cried with her, following her tune. Some added lower tones in support, and others added highlights filled with torment. A thousand people singing a song, though none of them knew where it was going—a song that came and went in waves but never died.

The mother who had started it all sat at the center of the crowd. Her wailing turned to a primal growl of mourning. Her unrelenting noise guided the song until another voice swayed to a different tune. Sometimes the song dipped to a murmuring, punctuated by cries and moans of loss. Sometimes it grew into a cacophony of battling melodies and rhythms. At one point, an old song of mourning emerged from the chaos and was taken up by almost everyone. Later, a song favored by the three boys who died rose from the maelstrom, a brawling tune about fighting a bear. To some, it seemed incongruous, but still the music swallowed the raucous ballad and turned it into an elegy. There was no leader, no plan, no consensus except in their one central certainty: they must keep going.

After several hours, many voices had run to rasping. Those who could began to clap and click and slap their bodies, their rhythm giving strength and structure to those depleted or overwhelmed by tumult. Others returned home to fetch instruments. Others still brought back food and drink so that those who stayed to sing and drum could continue through the night. In the morning, when they remembered there was work to be done, many took their leave. In the evening, they returned and took up their vigil once more. After ten days, perhaps thirty people remained in the cave where the boys had been laid to rest. They were mostly the boys’ mothers and kin, but others continued to join them and, on a rotation, took the place of those needing to ablute or rest. The players changed but the music never stopped.

News of “The Ceaseless Song” soon reached communities all around. Drawn by curiosity and empathy, travelers came to see and to hear. They arrived quietly and took their places at the periphery. Before long, however, the music ushered them to join in. These people from far afield brought new rhythms and melodies. As more people heard about the song, tourists began to arrive. They listened but did not contribute. Then anthropologists came, seeking to understand the cultural context of the song. They studied the cave for specific acoustic affordances and asked the various participants about their music education. Some notated what they heard and analyzed it for specific cultural influences. Entrepreneurial types recorded sections of the song and sold the albums to people far and wide. Eventually, the song’s popularity became so widespread that it attracted the attention of the most famous musicians of the time. On posters and pamphlets, they announced that they would all join the song on a particular date. The region filled with fans wanting to witness their contribution. The cave was packed. The famous musicians arrived. They listened and sang and clapped and passed knowing looks of appreciation and mutual congratulations between each other. It was a masterpiece, an expression of their talent at its height. Only a few copies of the recording of that day have survived.

As my teacher turned on the stereo, I heard music that I had never conceived of before. I listened, transfixed, to lilting melodies and crunching harmonies that wove and unified, that whispered and blazed in my mind. It was haunting, this music born of death, but it filled me with joy even so. It embraced everything that could and was bound to be. I could not help but be drawn into it. At first, I sang, and then my fingers found the piano. Eyes closed, I pushed and yielded to the music, drifting and skipping across the echoing voices. I wondered how I would have sounded in that cave, and how those singers might have reacted if I had been there. I wondered what my teacher would do, how he would choose to meld and pierce the sound, but then I realized he wasn’t playing.

So, I did.

I found the cave in the hills above a tired-looking town. Faded signs and closed shop fronts told me that this place had once bustled with excitement. Everywhere, “Home of the One and Only Ceaseless Song” was painted across walls, windows, and the meager offerings of the only shop still selling musical instruments. A scratchy recording of the song hissed from the doorway as the owner directed me toward the cave but told me not to bother finding it. I would only be disappointed.

Wind whistled up where a fissure in the rock had formed the entrance to the cave, but inside there was an eerie silence. Only a slow, even tapping echoed across the vast, dome-like space lit by a single shaft of daylight from high above. I could see little in the gloom, but my ears drew me to the center. There, I found two women—a mother and daughter, by the looks of them. The mother sat huddled in on herself while the daughter thumbed a wooden drum. Between them lay three flat stones like coffin lids. I stood for a while, unwilling to interrupt their vigil. The cavern was a tomb, but what grief was there had transformed into quiet reflection. The cool emptiness of it beckoned me.

I used my body as my drum and let myself ride and turn the wave of sound. The music was mine and ours.

The daughter caught my gaze and, with her eyes, invited me to sit opposite her. At first, she appeared to pay me no more heed, but as I sat, I heard the rhythm of her drumming change. The soft rapping of her hand on wood disappeared into the empty quiet, but then returned as a thousand tiny raptures. The cave nurtured the sound. It held me in a tight embrace, vibrating into each of my cells until it buoyed me up and caught me in its drifts and tides. Without thinking, my hands began to beat. I used my body as my drum and let myself ride and turn the wave of sound. The music was mine and ours.

The daughter had not stopped, but she was listening. I felt us settle with each other, shifting the momentum back and forth between us. With a flick of a wrist, I could catch her rhythm as it spiraled outward and fling it back to her or leave it hanging in space for her to reach out and take. And then the mother began to sing. At first, it was a low hum. A guttural drone, deep in her chest, and then suddenly it burst from her throat and claimed the highest reaches of the craggy dome. We listened and drummed and hummed, and eventually all three of us were singing in the whirling sea of sound. At its peak, I could barely look at my companions, but as we climbed down from those lofty rafters, I saw smiles breach their furrowed features.

From that day, I have been one of those who keeps “The Ceaseless Song” aloft. Others have come and gone, but the word—or rather the music—is spreading. It cannot be captured or set. It lives in its playing. Anyone may join us, but those who do are often those who must. If you must, join us.