(Original posted on July 1, 2006)
The other day, I bought an “assembly kit” for a kalimba, an African musical instrument. It had been a while since I last experienced some simple crafting. I struggled a bit with the task of slipping the metal support rod under the temporarily fixed metal tines, but I managed to complete it sooner than expected.
Now, for the crucial and enjoyable part: “tuning.” The great thing about the kalimba is that it doesn’t necessarily have to be fixed to a single temperament; you can change it variously for each performance.
From the conventional world of 12-tone equal temperament, I tried major scales, pentatonic and hexatonic scales, Spanish-like scales, and Lydian modes. I also experimented with a pseudo 7-tone equal temperament to get a Gamelan-like resonance, and even assigned different temperaments to the right and left hands.
It’s interesting how, depending on the temperament, the body of the instrument as a resonance box produces unique beats or drones. With major scales, for example, a “powaahn” (a soft, lingering) reverberation clung to the sound throughout. This was probably not just resonance, but an added textured drone, almost like a pleasant form of muddiness.
It’s a strangely comforting muddiness, even evoking a sense of musical richness. This might be similar, in essence, to the state of a piano when the damper pedal is pressed while striking the keys.
As I played around with the kalimba, my psychological state began to shift from the ephemeral pleasure of improvisation to a desire to construct musical time (and its memory) born from that improvisation.
An improvisational compositional process, a form of composing, began to take shape, driven by thoughts like, “I feel a sense of a ‘block’ in the performance so far, so let me try to improvise a contrasting ‘block’ to pair with it.”
The moment I feel the most thrill and catharsis in this act is, of course, when ending the piece. Will I bring the musical peak to the final moment, or will I cool it down and try to stop time? I search for the ending by sensing the musical time elapsed so far and the present moment.
I noticed that during the earlier tuning process, the further I set the scale from my own musical vocabulary—that is, the more it became a mere “sound-mass” devoid of scalar meaning for me—the more the balance of my improvisational composing senses shifted from being output-oriented to input-oriented.
Instead of an output-oriented consciousness of “How about this?”, an input-oriented consciousness of “What is that sound?” seems to come to the forefront. For example, after playing something percussively, I might discern a melody in the sounds I produced. Surprised and bewildered by this fact, I would then try to improvise a phrase, and then listen attentively to that as well. This is how the improvisational composition continued.
In solo instrument performance, not an ensemble, making elements like rhythm, melody, and harmony ambiguous or limited—I feel this simple kalimba assembly kit reminded me of the fact that by immersing myself in such an environment through improvisation, I can reconfirm, rediscover, and nurture my own musical sense.
