The Perspective of Being Seen

On October 15, five singers and an instrumental ensemble led by composer Fred Hersch performed Rooms of Light, a song cycle on the life of photographs with music by Hersch and lyrics by the poet Mary Jo Salter. Over the course of the performance, the audience was challenged to consider photography’s many roles in life through a set of 19 songs.

Softly chiming cymbals introduced Outer Space, Deep Blue Sea the fourth song in the show. As Canadian baritone Jonathan Estabrooks and accompanying bassist Matt Aronoff performed the song, the two met to complement the simple rhythm of drummer Ross Pederson’s percussion and the gliding hands of pianist Fred Hersch. With each line, Estabrooks’ low baritone compared space and sea as if through the eye of a camera lens—compiling snapshots of the discrete characteristics of elements found in both.

Space and sea are commonly paired lyrical themes. Salter’s lyrics make reference to classic uses of these figures in music. But while most songs employ these themes to describe change, “Outer Space, Deep Blue Sea” captures these phenomena as a camera would, framing only fragments of much larger concepts.

The universe: we build our lives around morning and night and the changing seasons—two cycles that display just how space and time meet to evoke change. Yet, even though it seems that we grasp these patterns because they are both anticipated and consistent, we actually have a rudimentary understanding of space and time—just as a camera can only capture a single moment.

We understand the deep blue sea’s vastness in a limited way. We know it exists and we know it is deep, but we don’t understand much more about it. Even as science continues to catalogue the components of marine ecosystems, the ocean in its totality remains ungraspable. A photograph of a sunset over the ocean is a reminder of this. Outer Space, Deep Blue Sea unites the contradictory elements of movement and stillness in any picture of light, but the lyrics also play on a universal feeling that is commonly invoked by music–love.

These themes are oftenbrought together in art and can be seen throughout classic songs stemming from different genres. Consider, Otis Redding’s posthumously released song Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay–space, sea and the yearning for a lost love are linked to one another. As the narrator sits on the dock and “[watches] the tide roll away,” he can’t help but consider the morning sun and conclude that” nothing’s gonna change/everything still remains the same.” The song’s composers, Redding and songwriter Steve Copper wove this idea of consistent change throughout this number.

Other songs that use the figures of space and the sea typically allude to change. In Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide, love is depicted as a matter of change that is symbolized by “ocean tides” and “changing seasons.” The changing seasons alludes to the idea of space—the universal vastness which surrounds us, but manages to keep its own rhythm.

The song’s singer and composer, Stevie Nicks, correlates her feelings to space, sea and the environment that sits above and beneath both. “Oh mirror in the sky, what is love?/ can the child within my heart rise above?/can I sail through the changing ocean tides?/can I handle the seasons of my life?”

During Estabrooks’ performance, lyrics such as “a perspective of being seen,” “seeing the invisible” and “you and I into the deep blue sea/ too far down for anyone to call blue” speak to the instability and unnamable nature of love. Deep down in the sea, there are “undiscovered species” that go unnamed even though we know they exist. Love and love lost are emotions with similar characteristics. Artists attempt to depict it but, like space, these representations are always, and only, an approximation.

Like the undiscovered species, this feeling of love is often too deep to be fully captured. The “perspective of being seen” identifies elements and feelings that surely do exist but cannot be represented in their entirety. Photographs are still moments in time–they remain constant even if they depict change. This theme was masterfully conveyed by the instrumental arrangement that accompanied the poems.

I realized this toward the end of the song, as I heard the faint sound of piano strings and nearly unnoticeable violins, the instrumental ensemble led by Fred Hersch continually added subtle sounds behind the lyrics. It was this complex of dynamic sound behind the relatively simple images presented in the lyrics that conveyed a deeper meaning to the song.

One of the last lines of the song was “the camera believes in the fish and the stars.” The camera captures a moment in time or a finite space, and while we may recognize the moments found in photographs, the camera cannot completely present these themes to the world. While we may capture a scene, we could never truly capture sea, space or love.

November 11th, 2015 | by Lovanda Allisha Brown Published in Beyond Category, Performance, Sound, Visual Columbia University's Arts & Culture Beat