Brian Harnetty - Words and Silences (2022)

Composer and interdisciplinary sound artist Brain Harnetty employs field recordings, carefully sculpted textural and ambient electronics, musical instruments, and archives of spoken oral history and stories to reflect the communities connected to them. Words and Silences is a multivalent chamber work for quintet to accompany 1967 reel-to-reel tape recordings made by monk, mystic, and author Thomas Merton. Harnetty visited the Thomas Merton Center in Louisville in 2017. An archivist pointed to reel-to-reel recordings made alone in his hermitage at Kentucky's Abbey of Gethsemani. In them, Harnetty discovered an unfiltered, private Merton, experimenting, meditating, and digressing on birds, moonlight, God, music, violence, politics, doubt, Samuel Beckett, Michel Foucault, Sufi mystic Ibn al-Arabi, and more. He comments repeatedly on the tape recorder's form and function as his aid as Harnetty's intuitive, exquisite chamber music accompanies on disc one. The second disc contains only the instrumentals. An accompanying 48-page chapbook contains a lengthy essay by Harnetty and transcriptions of the taped material.

On "Sound of an Unperplexed Wren," Merton begins at the beginning: "Ok, now I hope we can go on recording like this, I think it will stay down. Let's go." His voice speaks the title, and he follows with "no comment necessary" before listing bird species. Harnetty weds repetitive piano with clarinet and flute as subtle brass, percussion, and winds frame Merton's words. "A Feast of Liberation" is an experimental meditation. Recorded at night against a background of jazz, he moves between the subjective and the objective on the race riots occurring across the country. That the night is quiet and that people are being killed elsewhere. A lone piano playing a four-note pattern is joined by a clarinet, then expands the theme. Merton's voice returns, commenting on the night's atmosphere, and shooting sounds from nearby Fort Knox. Throughout, Merton references the tension and uncertainty existing between his humanity and his vocation, his solitary monastic life and the desire to interact with the world, before extrapolating them into expansive metaphysical questions. In "Breath Water Silence," the morning sound of monastery bells during lauds frames his comments about Ibn al-Arabi's conception of God, underscored by a drastically slowed piano transcription of Meade Lux Lewis and Albert Ammons' "Boogie Woogie Prayer," before ruminative, gospelized horns flow in and out with Merton's narration. In "New Year's Eve Party of One," he references pianist Mary Lou Williams amid tape hiss and sounds of a December night as Harnetty quotes from her Zodiac Suite. (Elsewhere, Merton references Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane, and Buck Owens Harnetty offers impressions of them all.)

Words and Silences embraces the mystic's many contradictions in reflecting his embrace of "authentic perplexity." Merton relentlessly sought a unifying discovery to resolve contradictions in human life, spirituality, love, nature, violence, and the cosmos (inner and outer) that was just out of his reach. Harnetty reveals Merton's acceptance of frustration, confusion, gratitude, and revelation as part of his journey and hints it is also part of ours. Words and Silences is musically adept and emotionally and spiritually resonant. Brilliant.