The Sound of Explosions

- A sonic retelling of the Beirut Explosion -
This piece of writing relates to my composition of the same name, which can be watched here.

Feldman [...] has changed the responsibility of the composer from making to accepting.
– John Cage

In his ‘Lecture on Something’, published in 1959 in It Is, John Cage praises his friend Morton Feldman on redefining the role of the composer, notably in the context of his pieces titled Intersection. Cage criticises the composer that lays out everything for their musicians, comparing the process to that of manufacture. He relates Music to Life, and states ‘the mythological and Oriental view of the hero is the one who accepts Life’, suggesting that the composer should accept their piece for what it is, rather than plan out every aspect of it.

Like Feldman, I accept my piece.

The instrumentation was for 4 electronic instruments, saxophone, and live effects. The musicians were told to improvise to the film that played, and to listen to each other. The film was a retelling of my experience of the Beirut Explosion, emphasising the sounds I heard on that dreadful day. The film followed typical sonata form with an exposition section, news footage of the event and the opening sentence: “What is the sound of explosions?”, a development section, my perspective and the aftermath, and a recapitulation section with the psychedelic sequence and the closing sentence: “This is the sound of the Beirut Explosion”.

I accept the living, ever-changing nature of my piece.

Were we to play the piece again, it would sound different. Different melodies, harmonies and timbres would arise. The arc of the piece would likely shift, and different emotions would be felt. The music would be different, the musicians could be different, the instrumentation may be different, and the video could be redone, for this piece is an idea, a concept, a story. My experience and emotions towards that day change, fluctuate and evolve over time. They are alive. This piece is alive. To listen to a recording would be against the point, as the piece exists in the moment.

This piece was first played on the 31st of March 2023. As the piece started, the sounds were all over the place as the musicians didn’t know what to expect. We were still trying to figure out what we sounded like. The video opened with a disclaimer that set the tone for the piece. The question ‘What is the sound of explosions?’ was posed, and the musicians replied with loud and textural sounds that were processed to sound harsh and distorted. As the next few questions appeared on screen, it became clear the musicians had found their place. Their responses to the questions were unique yet united. As the piece progressed, Music emerged from the noise, like a phoenix rising out of the ashes, a comparison often made about the city of Beirut.

Before performing the piece, I wondered who would be in control. Would anyone be in control? Would it be me? Was it meant to be me?

As the piece started, I most definitely was not in control. Nobody was. The musicians were very closely following the video, attempting to recreate the sounds referenced on screen. There were points where I expected the musicians to make noise and didn’t, and points where the opposite was true. After the security cam footage section, as melodies and harmonies emerged, I gained control. I was conducting the musicians by manipulating their sound and creating rhythms with it. In that moment, I accepted the sounds the musicians were making and suddenly found myself in the composer’s seat. I draw a parallel here between my grasp over control in the early section of the piece and that of the early moments after the actual blast. This was not intentional, and may not happen at another performance, but is beautifully poetic, a testament to the living nature of the piece.

To this day, there isn’t an acceptable explanation to what happened that day. What we do know is that a literal boatload of ammonium nitrate, a dangerously explosive fertiliser, was stored in the port at the heart of the city. It had been sitting there for six years, in a locked hangar. Accounts of several letters addressed by experts to the president and the government about the dangerous nature of the ticking time-bomb exist and were dismissed for reasons one can only explain as incompetence. Theories, flagged as conspiracy by said incompetent government, are that a certain Iranian-backed political party, mafia and terrorists are in complete control of the port, and used the explosives for nefarious reasons. The truth is that every attempt by a foreign, unbiased investigation group to examine the port was denied, while all evidence was being burnt up. We may never know the truth. The instrumentation setup is a reference to this. I can tell you my story, but not anyone else’s. I can tell you what happened to the people that day, but I can’t tell you why. Every report by foreign agencies is missing something, is distorted, and manipulated by inconclusion due to lack of access to evidence, much like the electronic instruments passing by my computer get manipulated and distorted. The only truth you will hear is that of my story, the people’s story, that of the saxophone, which you hear directly from the room, uncensored, unaltered, complete.

No closure will be found elsewhere than by accepting.

The audience may also accept my piece. Does that make the audience a composer? Marcel Duchamp said that “a work of art is not completed by the artist but is completed by the observer”. I agree with Duchamp, the piece would have no meaning without an audience. The performers may also accept my piece. For me to claim to be the composer of this piece, must I accept it more than anyone else? What does that entail? I wonder what it means to be the composer anyway. Do composers own their pieces? The piece is not a physical entity, it simply exists in the moment, one can own it as much as one can own a concept. Besides, everyone in the room is experiencing the same piece, so what difference does owning it make?

I accept my disownment of the piece.

Building on Cage’s argument, I agree that the responsibility of the composer is to accept, but not that anyone who accepts the piece is the composer. I suggest that to be the composer, you need to be in control. In my piece, the musicians were bound to what was on screen, and their output was in my hands. Seeing as I was in control of what was displayed on screen and in control of the sonic character, I am, or was, the composer. When playing a piece composed by Beethoven, the musicians are bound by what is written on the score. The tighter the instruction, the clearer it is who composed it.

In the context of improvisation, I believe that a performer who goes out of the bounds set by the composer is not dissimilar to the performer playing a wrong note in a work by Bach. Performers are a big part of music; they are typically responsible for the sounds heard, and inevitably bring a certain character and feel to any piece they play. There are many nuanced definitions of what interpretation is. The way I see it, it is the inevitable duty of the performer to challenge the bounds not directly set by the composer.

I accept the performances of the performers.

I challenged the nature of sound in this piece. The term ‘sound’ doesn’t have a widely accepted definition. Cage’s lecture Composition as a Process, section 3: Communication is a series of questions and quotations from multiple sources. In it, he poses many questions regarding the nature of sounds, without really answering them. Among them are: “Is music just sounds? [...] People aren’t sounds, are they? [...] How many sounds are there altogether?” Among the quotes, we get a hint of an answer: “A sound is high or low, soft or loud, of a certain timbre, lasts a certain length of time, and has an envelope”. In his Lecture on Something, Cage recalls Feldman’s definition: “he said that the sounds were not sounds but shadows. They are obviously sounds; that’s why they are shadows. Every something is an echo of nothing”. Vague.

I suggest that a sound is an idea of a sound. If you can think of a sound, then it is a sound. A sound can thus be high, low, both, or neither. Playing the average note on the piano, one hears the hammer, the key press and release, three vibrating strings, and in most cases, many reflections of sound waves in the form of reverberation. While each one of these sounds is a sound in itself, the bundle of them all is also a sound. A chord can be a sound, and silence can be a sound.

When I wrote The Sound of Explosions, I saw the sound of the explosion as one entity, one shadow. My story is not mine alone. While every Lebanese lived through that experience differently, I like to think we all tell a similar story in a choral manner, as one. Improvisation was at the heart of the piece. It’s what allowed my story to become our story. Ultimately it matters not who composed the piece. I’d like to think that through me, it composed itself.

We accept our piece.