The Harmonic Choir

When I was growing up in the northern woods of Michigan, I never saw a movie that took place anywhere near where I was living. Not surprising, really, but it did give me the sense that what I saw on the movie or television screen was entirely unrelated to what I saw in my real life. That changed when I moved to NYC, and continued once I had made the cross-country trek to LA (it took awhile after arriving in sunny Southern California before I stopped looking for the M*A*S*H* helicopters to come floating up over Mulholland Drive). The first time I really had a real life/reel life schism was watching Splash in a big movie theatre in Times Square. I had gotten used to recognizing NYC locations, but in Splash, Tom takes Darryl into a movie theatre in Manhattan, which just happened to be the very theatre I was sitting in (is it my imagination, or do the current glut of little girls named Madison owe their names to Darryl Hannah’s character in this movie? If so, that is so pathetic). I got the weird feeling that I could wander out into the lobby and see the scene unfolding right there.

The longer I lived in NYC, the more these kinds of things happened to me. The Delancy that they were Crossing was but a couple of blocks from my apartment, and I managed to see Do the Right Thing on the hottest day of the summer in Brooklyn, and it was just like a continuation of what was going on outside the theatre. Another Spike Lee film – er, joint – Clockers, took place largely in a housing project but a mere block from one of my Brooklyn apartments, a project I was mugged next to twice.

But the creepiest bit of film/life overlay was when I saw Jacob’s Ladder, one of those Occurrence at Owl Creek-spawned life-in-a-moment films that were briefly fashionable and had great music (see also Siesta). In it, Tim Robbins’ character is haunted by hallucinations or nightmares (or are they?), and one of the first manifestations takes place in an eerie subway station in the bowels of NYC, where not-quite-human creatures skulk and scurry around the inky blackness, terrifying him and the audience. And that station was none other than my very own, the one I tunelessly whistled through after I got off work late at night on my way to getting mugged by clockers.

The effectively creepy score for Jacob’s Ladder, written by Jean-Michel Jarre’s dad Maurice, also features a wonderfully evocative and otherworldly track from the Harmonic Choir although, in a long-standing but irritating tradition, it is not included on the soundtrack album (like the amazing PTP track in Robocop or anything from The Shining).

I did later run across that track (this one, in fact) as part of a glorious three-CD collection of vocal traditions from around the world called Voices. Although it is deeply difficult to find, I highly recommend this entire set for its incredible diversity of sources (from Gospel to Zen monks to the Balinese Monkey Chant) and the way it reveals what a wide world still exists within the highly touted Global Village.

The Harmonic Choir was formed in 1975 by David Hykes, who was inspired by the overtone singing of Mongolia called Hoomi (literally, “throat singing”). The Hoomi singers produce a deep bass or baritone fundamental drone and then, through careful manipulation of both the breathing process and the vocal apparatus (tongue, jaws, lips, and cheeks in addition to the larynx), they create and manipulate a series of overtones, emphasizing one or more of the harmonics of the fundamental drone. Using these techniques as a starting point, he developed the distinctive style of the Harmonic Choir.

The music works best if performed in an echoic space (this track was recorded in a 12th Century Cisterian monastery in Provence), as it helps blend the singers voices into one tone that seems to emanate from everywhere. I used to like doing this in the tiled bathrooms at Hampshire, finding the tone that resonated the room and humming it, listening to it multiply against itself. Once the choir (there are only five singers (!)) has warmed up and settled on the fundamental drone, they begin the careful process of manipulating overtones.

Hykes divides harmonic singing into five types of roughly increasing difficulty. The first is singing a steady fundamental and a steady harmonic, as used in Tibetan sacred chants. The second is moving the fundamental and harmonic together in parallel, as used in some Bulgarian sacred chants. The third is to hold a steady fundamental and create melodies with the harmonics, as used in Hoomi singing. The fourth is to hold the harmonic steady while varying the fundamental and the fifth is to vary both independently. All five types can be heard on the Hearing Solar Winds album from which this track was taken, but this track in particular demonstrates the fifth type, in which the fundamentals slide slowly downward while flute-like harmonics pop in and out. It is truly remarkable and unlike anything else I’ve ever heard. My wife hates this music, claiming that it sounds like ghosts moaning melodramatically, but I love the intense vibrations and carefully controlled harmonic interplay. It has, as David Hykes claims, the “ring” of truth.