300 YEARS OF TONAL GRAVITY

written and illustrated by Alexi Lima

The sublimeness of his semblance made his presence somewhat contagious, something to remember . as his descending aura oscillated its airing resonance along the palpitant harmonies of the organ hymn.

As the final chord of the Hymn of Remembrance was sounded, the voice of a young man spoke to the visitor:

Welcome back to Germany Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach! My name is Keith Daniel Jarrett. I will be your host during the 1:23’:31” mission which you came here for. Oh... by the way Mr. Bach, happy anniversary!

It was 1985. The historic meaning of the year was marked by the 300 years celebration of his birth, an event shared and recognized by many music admirers around the world. This long gone music composer and eternal inspiration to our civilization, was returning to the earth on a 1:23’:31” mission.

In one day of March, in a flash of light, he arrived, accompanied by the sounds of a Hymn of Remembrance.

The spherical hall where the two men were encountering, provided a sonic acoustical dimension generated by its multi-phonic system recently developed in the last quarter of the century.

The accidental exposure of the human ears to certain sounds containing RPMs (reverse propagating modes), would result in the collapse of the hearing mechanism. A phenomenon known as black sound collapse, corresponding to a space-time black hole singularity, a well known condition in cosmology. At the singularity of the hearing collapse, no sounds would escape the human ear once detected in the brain.  A complete state of abnormal noisiness... opposed to deafness.

The two men took two seats on the front row facing a huge screen wall. The peculiarity and uniqueness of the screen, seemed to do with its three-dimensionality at first, but the closer one looked at it, the more one realized its lack of opaqueness, its magical texture resembling somewhat the transparency of a colorless compound. On a microscopic scale, the screen was a complex geometric array of millions and millions of fibers built in tiny octahedrons. It synchronized music and images in motion by converting sound waves into light waves through hydrogen gas compressed into the fibers. The images were revealed in the hydrogen field.

The lights of the spherical hall were turned off leaving the fiber screen even more fascinating, when all of a sudden, a dim blue dot blurred the entire screen in a lapse of a thought. Then, the blue substance started diluting and saturating into composite shapes of written words, as they shifted to the tone of gray.

And the metamorphic words read:

SPHERES

IMPROVISED WORKS FOR THE ORGAN

PERFORMED BY KEITH JARRETT

ON THE KARL JOSEPH RIEPP BAROQUE ORGAN

OTTOBEUREN ABBEY, GERMANY

1976