Our origins as a specie are in water. Each of us is born from our mother's watery wombs. It is no surprise that thoughts and images of water are abundant in our consciousness. This is only heightened in cultures where the presence - or absence - of sufficient drinking water is an ever present concern in life.

Many cultures root the beginning of all things in water. In the Hebrew Bible, the cosmos prior to creation is described as a watery chaos:

"When God began to create the heaven and the earth - the earth being unformed and void, with darkness sweeping over the water ... God said, 'Let there be an expanse in the midst of the water that it mjay separate water from water ... God called the expanse sky ... Let the water below the sky be gathered into an area, that the dry land may appear.' And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the gathering of waters he called Sea.'" (Genesis 1: 1, 2, 6 - 10; New Jewish Version).

The act of biblical creation is the division of the 'waters' of the skies, the earth's atmosphere from the waters on earth. The imagery continues throughout this text: The liberation from ancient slavery is imaged as the passage through the Sea of Reeds. The former slaves emerge from the momentarily dry sea bed as free people, readying to embark on new lives. Job describes his suffering with reference to mythical sea monsters lurking in the primeval waters. Many sacred texts tell of an ancient flood that eradicated most life on the planet, pointing to the massive power of water over our lives and imaginations: "All the fountains of the great deep burst apart, And the flood-gates of the sky broke open." (Genesis 7: 11).

Water is powerful. Drinking water gives life. Watery storm surges bring death. Thundering waves hint at the power of the natural world. The waters within our own bodies make life itself possible.

I have long been captivated by the biblical Jonah story. It is a story about a person who hears a call to responsibility, to help a nation in a time of plight. He bears a message that might - and, in time does - save their lives. But Jonah is an unwilling messenger, and instead of embarking on his mission, he flees and boards a sea-going ship. Once aboard, the seas grow stormy, and everyone on the ship grows anxious. Believing that there must be a reason for this danger, the sailors ask who is responsible. Jonah confesses, and jumps into the sea.

The story picks up with Jonah sitting in the belly of a giant fish. He prays for his rescue: "You cast me into the depths, Into the heart of the sea, thefloods engulfed me, all your breakers and billows swept over me ..." (Jonah 2: 4)

Jonah hears his call once again, seeks to begin anew finding himself back on dry land, ready, this time, to follow through to fulfill his task.

I have always been captivated by this story. But I've been equally troubled by a gap in the narrative, between Jonah's jump and his arrival inside of the whale. What happened in between? What did he experience? What, if anything, did he learn? Did he assume that his death was imminent, and if so, did his whole life flash before his eyes? Did he find the water terrifying? Or was it comforting, causing him to reflect on his situation, and maybe even on larger issues of life and death? I've always wanted to know.

There is a Jewish tradition of telling stories about stories. It is called 'midrash.' Since biblical texts tend to offer limited details and few hints about what motivates its personalities, the midrashist fills in gaps, elaborates where the text is spare, suggests what the characters might have been thinking ... 'Jonah Under the Sea' may be viewed as a sonic midrash, in this tradition of commentary and elaboration. Instead of words, I work with sound.

'Jonah Under the Sea' is an attempt, through the medium of electroacoustic composition, to 'listen in' during Jonah's journey. My assumption is that this descent into the waters happened in a flash. But this was an instant where time became telescopically extended, and the events seemed to last much longer. In Jonah's mind's eye, while freely descending into the sea, he perceives an endless array of images and sounds, particularly those relating to his watery environment. He remembers earlier moments in his life near a port of call, especially the call of fog horns. Jonah notices how similar these sounds are to those of the whales that surround him now. The sounds also call to mind the ancient call of the shofar, the ram's horn. The resonant qualities of sounds underwater also remind him of sounds of voices he has known, as they echoed in reverberant buildings and caves.

I wrote in the original notes for this work, Jonah "... is bombarded by many sensations--the rushing tides, confusion, sounds of ram horns and passing whales, harbor memories, and echos of a human voice."

This is less a programmatic work than one that presents a panoply of sense impressions, allusions, and free associations. These are experienced by Jonah in the midst of the sensory onslaught brought on by the massive power of the sea. My musical influences include the classical electroacoustical tradition, and soundscapes.

The goal of the predominantly Canadian movement of soundscape composition is to represent a sense of place. R. Murray Schaefer, known as the parent of acoustic ecology, from which soundscapes sprung, once wrote:

"I call the acoustic environment the soundscape, by which I mean the total field of sounds wherever we are. It is a word derived from landscape, though, unlike it, not strictly limited to the outdoors." (Schaefer, 1977, 1994)

Composer and Schaefer associate, Barry Truax adds:

"a parallel stream of compositional activity also emerged that created, what I have called, the genre of the 'soundscape composition'… characterized most definitively by the presence of recognizable environmental sounds and contexts, the purpose being to invoke the listener's associations, memories, and imagination related to the soundscape." (Truax, 1995)

Soundscape composer Claude Schryer adds that "It is a technique that treats the acoustic environment as both the subject and the content of a composition, teetering ambiguously on the border between representation and abstraction." (Schryer, 1998)

'Jonah Under the Sea' is but a cousin of soundscape composition, since the geographical place depicted is an imagined pastiche, not a real place that I have known. What elements of representation are present relate to the sounds of places that I have visited. My interest is less in the actual environment of the sea than it is in Jonah's internal experience.

In a sense, this work is a continuation of the first electronic composition that I ever created, 'Cape Cod Imaginary Landscape' (1974). This ten minute musique concrete work, composed when I was an undergraduate music student, drew entirely from processed recorded sounds, none of them actually sounds of water. In that work, I reflected upon memories of summers sitting by a dock at Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The result was as much about 'me' as it was about the shoreline. Similarly, 'Jonah Under the Sea' is more about Jonah, or Jonah as I imagine him to be, than it is about the ocean and the aquatic environment.

My first aesthetic influence within the field of electronic music was musique concrete. This is an inherently abstract musical genre. The associational and referential quality of sounds are kept to a minimum. Pierre Schaeffer, who conceived of the term, described his compositional process as deriving from the unique sonic qualities of the sounds:

"At each moment of the work of expression, as recording unfolds, sound reacts, proposes its own solutions, incites, elicits ideas, helps the formation of the piece ... When I admit a sound at the output, when I let a sound come out, I must immediately treat it, not as an element whatever, a piece of wood, a fragment of puzzle, but as a pawn or a figure, a person with three dimensions, etc. ... and I cannot play with it exactly as I please." (Palombini, 1993b)

In 'Jonah Under the Sea', I found myself responding simultaneously to the influence of soundscapes and musique concrete. My compositional process was intuitive, starting with no formal structure. At times, qualities of the sounds themselves drew me forward. At other times, I felt moved by their referential qualities. While some would hold that these two approaches are irreconcilable, I often find myself living simultaneously in both worlds. My thoughts are well articulated by composer Darren Copeland:

"… it is time that the sonic artist comes to terms with the fact that s/he is in touch with an artistic medium which can engage a new heightened realm of listening sensitivity, a mode of listening that can facilitate intellectual engagement with the meanings and messages embedded in the sounds of daily life." (Copeland, 1995)

Most of the sound materials in 'Jonah Under the Sea' derive from recordings of sea sounds: ocean waves, dolphins, whales, fog horns, plus sounds of voices and rams horns. At times these are highly digitally processed.

It was also my intention to create moments of sharp disjuncture in the sound texture. To achieve this, I interwove short passages of music that I composed for a small string orchestra. Since my goal was disruption of the sonic surface, and by suggestion, of Jonah's experience, I chose to create these sections using Midi sequencing software and sampled string sounds. It was my conscious desire that these sounds appear artificial, in contrast to the recorded environmental sounds. The goal was to suggest the otherwordliness of Jonah's experience, as he sunk free-fall into the sea depths. Some have suggested that I re-record these sections of the piece using a string quartet. I could imagine doing so only if it my original intentions weren't compromised. I find intriguing the idea of creating a live performance version of this work, where a string quartet, whose sounds are processed, is a component.

In closing, I find myself in concord with philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard, who writes:

"The function of art and politics is to make people dream, to fulfill their desires (but not to allow their realization), to transform the world, to change life, to offer a stage on which desire (the director) plays out its fantasmatical theatrics. The operations common to the dream (or to the symptom), to this art, and to this politics must, therefore, be recovered and made manifest. " (Lyotard, 1993)

It was my hope, in this work, to draw upon a variety of associations - both musical and representational - to bring to life a moment from a distant mythical past. Is not the goal of music to strengthen our imaginations, and deepen our sense of what it means to be human?

'Jonah Under the Sea' has been recorded on the CD, 'Stories Heard and Retold' (1998, EMF 008).

Darren Copeland, 'Cruising For A Fixing In This 'Art of Fixed Sounds',' Musicworks 61, Spring 1995.

Jean-Francois Lyotard, 'A Few Words to Sing', 'The Psychoanalytic Approach to Expression', Toward the Post Modern, 1993, 1995, 2-3, 41).

Pierre Schaeffer, 'Vers une musique experimentale', quoted in Carlos Palombini, "Pierre Schaeffer, 1953: Towards An Experimental Music", Music & Letters 74(4), 542.

R. Murray Schaefer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and The Tuning of the World, 1977, 1994.

Claude Schryer, "Searching for the Sharawadji Effect: Electroacoustics and Ecology", Musicworks 70, Spring 1998.

Barry Truax, 'Sound in Context: Soundscape Research and Composition at Simon Fraser University', ICMC Proceedings 1995, 1-4

Download 'Jonah Under the Sea' (MP3, 12 Mo)