MUSIC, SOUND, SILENCE
VOLUME 5 NUMBER 2
Summer 1980

The notion of music, seen from the concept of sound as the life force, becomes huge; but somehow we assent to it. It "strikes a chord," and the very expression witnesses its truth; as P. L. Travers would say, it is in our bloodstream. Our questions are too small, it seems, to be answered; music is indefinable because it is a movement toward something larger than our vision--creation itself, a structure of universal order whose top vanishes in the clouds. Steve Reich, the searching composer whom we have interviewed in this issue, has written elsewhere that "listening to an extremely gradual musical process opens my ears to it, and it always extends farther than I can hear." What the laws of music and vibration reveal is precisely this structure in which we can find our roots and our reason for being, all the more convincingly because the vision is reflected in all other aspects of existence as in an infinite series of mirrors. The vibrant sound which is the life force is also movement and heat and color. The law of the octave echoes through the light spectrum and through the cycles of every human life. --from the editorial Focus

ARTICLES
MUSIC, THE WAY OF RETURN Herbert Whone
Sound and Music as the root of our existence.

SCHUBERTIANA Tomas Tranströmer
A poem.

DREAMING NOTHING David L. Lavery
Sounds in the Night.

FIGURES OF THE MUSICIAN Peyton Houston
A poem.

THE TEMPLE OF MUSIC Tom Moore
Resonating images in the work of Robert Fludd.

COYOTE'S SONG David P. McAllester
Animal cries in Navajo song and ceremony.

ON MUSIC Rainer Maria Rilke
A poem.

VARIATIONS: A Conversation with Steve Reich
An American composer in touch with tradition.

THE CELESTIAL ORCHESTRA Howard Schwartz
A short story.

THE RESOUNDING COSMOS AND THE MYTH OF DESIRE Robert Lawlor
Myths at the heart of cosmic movement.

FRESH WINDS FROM THE ANDES Susan Bergholz
Tahuantinsuyo takes its music home.

EPICYCLES: Traditional Stories from around the World
ORPHEUS Greek
Retold by David Espinosa

CEREMONY Aztec

TALIESEN Welsh
Retold by Anne Himler and Paul Jordan-Smith

THE OAK OF THE TWO BLOSSOMS Irish
Retold by Thomas White

THE SILK DRUM Japanese
Retold by P. L. Travers