Ball of Wax Audio Quarterly

[Disclaimer: this review contains homework.] Peter Colclasure’s “Synth 3” is the story of modern America encapsulated in a five-minute tonal work centered in A minor, its primary i-VII-III-v (V? I can’t tell because Colclasure maddeningly/wisely avoids establishing that third interval and the chord’s functional relationship to the tonic . . . and this is exactly why music like this moves me to want to write about it) progression moving gently along as a slightly buried voice joins the arrangement. It isn’t a lyric per se, but it’s every bit as important to this song as any lyric could be for what it represents by its presence and its words: a reading in Spanish of a poem that has—or was supposed to—come to represent what the United States stands/stood for, the very concept symbolized by the Statue of Liberty. You know the one: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” (Homework: dig into the poetry of Emma Lazarus, one of America’s earliest female activists and advocate for indigent Jewish immigrants.)

It should be noted that having this famous work read in Spanish is a move as bold as it is ironic—but then, Lazarus didn’t write the poem so that only English speakers would hear the call to come to the Land of the Free; in fact, her own ancestors immigrated from Portugal, fleeing the tyranny of the Inquisition. Her family brought their language and beliefs, as did every immigrant to some degree—as did those who bring the Latin American language and customs that so vibrantly color the American Southwest. But that’s part of the greatness of other cultures, isn’t it? Their rituals and beliefs, their dress, their concepts, their words and dialects—it’s all strange and wonderful and should be held in awe for its complexities, its differences from our own, and for spices it adds to our American Melting Pot (homework: look up Israel Zangwill).

Or maybe there are too few who feel that way? Maybe all of these things aren’t meant to be miscegenated in this particular area of the planet? “Synth 3” seems to indicate as much at its halfway point, where slightly disorienting effects join the arrangement, followed soon by an otherworldly hum, all warbly notes and ever-deeper flange, building a low wall of sound suggesting that, rather than promote a mixing together or a “cultural harmonization,” every foreign element (as represented by the Spanish speaker, now completely inaudible in the mix—effectively silenced) should be eliminated in favor of a more uniform population distribution, though that uniformity is its own discord. And this is the saddest part of the whole exercise, summed up in the final warped sounds of the track: without the beauty of heterogeneity, of other colors, of other sounds—other ideas, even—there is only instability and, inevitably, decay.