WORDS AND SILENCES (2022)

WORDS AND SILENCES is a sonic portrait of the Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton (1915-68). It brings together archival recordings Merton made alone in his Kentucky hermitage, along with newly composed music. In the spring of 1967, Merton acquired a reel-to-reel tape recorder to use in his hermitage. The recordings he made are intimate, ranging from thoughts on Samuel Beckett, to Sufi mystics, to the 1967 Louisville racial protests, to Michel Foucault. He also managed to immediately use the tape recorder both as a contemplative tool and a medium for self-discovery.

The album often feels like a one-person play, with an exchange between Merton and the ensemble. There are subtle references to the music he loved throughout his life, including sacred, folk, John Coltrane, and Kansas City jazz. Merton’s words still feel relevant today, both in terms of the solitude and reflection experienced during the pandemic, and of the demand for racial justice happening across the country. His work shows how the movement and tension between contemplation and action are not opposed; they complement one another. Words and Silences is available now in the Winesap Store, at Bandcamp, and all streaming platforms.

Recorded in Knoxville, Utah, Ohio, Boston, New York City, Vermont, and Berlin, WORDS AND SILENCES brings together Harnetty’s ensemble of musicians to pull Merton’s voice out of the archives and into the world. As with his other projects, Harnetty undertook a long process of research. Harnetty began reading Merton’s books in his childhood, and starting in 2017 he began researching the hermitage audio tapes at the Thomas Merton Archives housed at Bellarmine University in Louisville.

Throughout the album there are moments of deep concentration and quiet, and always a sense of serene celebration: a fever-chill of joy. There are also subtle references to the music Merton loved throughout his life, including Louis Armstrong, Joan Baez, John Coltrane, Buck Owens, and Jimmy Smith. Brass and wind instruments evoke the attentive breathing of meditation, and the piano shares distant echoes of Merton’s love for early Kansas City Jazz pianist Mary Lou Williams. 

During the early weeks and months of the pandemic, Harnetty found himself—like so many others—in a strange, anxious, forced solitude. Grateful to be working on WORDS AND SILENCES, he built each track in parallel to the dates of the Merton recordings fifty-three years before. When Merton was noting the vernal sounds of cardinals, meadowlarks, and flycatchers, Harnetty was observing his own spring unfold—wind, new leaves, his son playing in the yard, laughter—all made unusually audible against the pandemic-induced quiet of empty streets and skies. When Merton was listening to the evening and far off sounds of Fort Knox, Harnetty was also attuned to the night, feeling the chill and quiet of darkness. And when thunder and rain interrupted Merton’s words on May 14, Harnetty was finishing the last sections of the project, weighing each movement against the whole, searching for the correct balance of clarinet and saxophone and trumpet against Merton’s confident yet questioning voice. Merton was sitting in his hermitage, and Harnetty in his garage: two people listening to their greening springs, ever separated yet folding and bleeding into one another. 

Sometimes the music closely follows the auditory cues laid out in the tapes, as in “Breath, Water, Silence,” where Merton comments on passages of the Sufi mystic, Ibn al-‘Arabî. Here, Merton is preoccupied with breath and breathing, and this permeates each aspect of the piece. Harnetty begins with a transcribed fragment from “Boogie Woogie Prayer,” a blisteringly fast piano duo by Meade “Lux” Lewis and Albert Ammons. Merton’s commentary, however, seems to stretch time, so Harnetty dramatically slows the fragment down and spreads it out across several octaves. Now, greatly simplified, it expansively resonates, and helps create a pocket of space for the words to inhabit. Trombone and clarinet play long tones, the length of a breath. Along with the trumpet, the instruments color these notes with tremolos, bended notes, and buzzing sounds. When Merton speaks, the texture of the music thins, as if accompanying a singer. Sometimes the musical phrases nestle between words, and sometimes the rhythms of words and music match or mimic or are in counterpoint with each other. And then, there are times when the music seems to reflect or comment on what Merton is saying, as when Harnetty pulls a triplet figure from “Boogie Woogie Prayer” and spins it out to correspond with the archival sounds of water dripping in a bucket and the wrens outside the hermitage. As the piece unfolds, these two elements—breath and water—wax and wane and then join together with the saxophone, which plays a melancholic, wavering three-note melody to the end.

In another piece—“A Feast of Liberation”—Merton talks of racial unrest and protests taking place that very night in Louisville, 1967. There is a striking parallel between the suffering then, and the suffering taking place now, too: the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and so many others are still raw and ringing in our ears, and once again breath has been made palpable. Harnetty adds a repeating, solitary, sparse line to Merton’s voice, built on three notes evoking John Coltrane’s Ascension (another favorite of Merton’s). It gives enough space to provide a lilting counterpoint with Merton’s voice, and it swells and spins into a cloud of dense piano lines. The music suddenly stops, and Merton’s voice returns, the words now calm and oddly quiet, yet powerful. It is as if he is tired and emotionally spent from the evening’s experiment, but also now in a new place: the audible remnants of reflection and repose.

In all of this music, we hear Merton’s curiosity, questioning, and bewildered perplexity. We also hear the tape recorder itself, acting as both a mirror and counterpart to Merton’s voice. We hear the exposed, vulnerable, uncertain self of Merton sitting alone in his hermitage. And, we hear all kinds of contradictions—between past and present, inward and outward, living and dead, time and space, everything and nothing—and we can move between them, hold them together, and listen as they melt into each other.

WATCH: A SOLO LIVE PERFORMANCE AT THOMAS MERTON’S HERMITAGE

Tracks:

PART 1:
01. Sound of an Unperplexed Wren
02. A Feast of Liberation
03. Who Is This I?
04. Well, Cats, Now We Change Our Tune
05. Strange Things You Sometimes Find

PART 2:
06. Thinking Out Loud in a Hermitage
07. Breath, Water, Silence
08. A Hawk Flew Fast Away
09. Let There Be a Moving Mosaic of This Rich Material
10. New Year’s Eve Party of One
11. One Plus One Equals One

(Note: there is a bonus disk of instrumentals available on the CD version of the album, as well as on Bandcamp.)

Performers:

Jeremy Woodruff: Flute/Alto Sax/Bari Sax
Katie Porter Maxwell: Clarinet/B. Clarinet
Phil Rodriguez: Trumpet
William Lang: Trombone
Brian Harnetty: Piano

Credits:

Mastering: Cauliflower Audio
Audio editing: Keith Hanlon
Design: Colorquarry
Videography and video editor: Kevin Davison
Video director and editor: Brian Harnetty

Thanks to: Marina Peterson, David Belcastro, Brother Paul Quenon, Paul Pearson, Nat Segnit, Seth Bokley, Dao Strom, Dick Sisto, Gabriel Kahane, Roger Lipsey, David Grubbs, Rachel Grimes, Will Oldham, Owsley Brown, Stuart Hyatt, Nate Wooley, Bellarmine University and the Thomas Merton Center, Keith Hanlon/Secret Studio, Joe Duddell, Chris Forbes, Kevin Davison, and the Merton Legacy Trust.

Words and Silences was co-commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts and Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, and was supported through a MAP Fund Grant, and artist residencies at Marble House Project (Vermont) and Loghaven (Tennessee).

All sampled recordings by Thomas Merton, from New Directions Publishing Corporation, acting as agent. Copyright ©2022 by the Trustees of the Merton Legacy Trust. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp, and Now You Know Media.