The music of voices

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Thursday, October 23rd.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: a conversation with the creator of the new album, XX: Twenty Years of Silence.

In 2004, William A. Thompson IV was an Army National Guardsman in Iraq, charged with gathering intelligence. He was also a jazz pianist with an experimental bent. His debut album, Baghdad Music Journal, was released by the High Mayhem label while he was still overseas. Now, 20 years later, Thompson has released a kind of sequel. WORLD’s Music Reviewer Arsenio Orteza talked to him about it.

ARSENIO ORTEZA: If you condense the name “William A. Thompson IV” into initials and add the Roman numeral for “four,” you get the word “WATIV.” That’s one of the names under which William A. Thompson IV has been releasing music for the last 20 years. He first used it on Baghdad Music Journal. The album was exactly what its title said—an aural document of an Iraq-war soldier’s experience. While its experimental, electronic nature might have normally made it “niche,” the uniqueness of its origin and purpose got it some rather high-profile attention.

HOWARD MANDEL: “Kind of freaky” is the way many people might describe Thompson’s music.

That’s National Public Radio’s Howard Mandel describing Baghdad Music Journal on a 2005 episode of NPR’s All Things Considered.

MANDEL: He uses static as a rhythm instrument and incorporates eerie ambiences like the whirring of an air conditioner, overheard conversation, or random bits of short-wave radio that he records on his iPod. He says he adapted quickly to this new technology. But Thompson is less about the medium than about the moods he tries to capture…

Mandel’s description was accurate.

William Thompson’s latest release, XX: Twenty Years of Silence, has no air conditioners or short-wave radio, but it does incorporate eerie ambiences and human speech. Consider, for instance, the opening cut, “Speaking in Tongues.” It’s based on the melodic suggestions of a recording of a preacher discussing threats facing the family.

MUSIC: [Speaking in Tongues]

It’s one of several speech-to-music experiments on the album. Thompson earned a Ph.D. in experimental music in 2022. So I asked him what sparked his interest in what he calls the “musicality of speech.”

THOMPSON: It’s really interesting, I think, because the way people speak is pretty musical and—to the point that you can look at populations regionally and—and their dialects and then compare it to their folk musics, and it’s very similar. You know, like the first track on this record, “Speaking in Tongues,” it’s some Southern gospel preacher, and it’s very blues sounding to me, and it sounds like church music of that caliber. I like the idea of composing from something that just—sounds that aren’t necessarily music, because I don’t really necessarily distinguish between music and noise the way that I think a lot of people do.

One of the other speech-to-music pieces on Twenty Years of Silence leans into Thompson’s wartime experiences. It’s called “Dirge for Two Veterans,” and it’s based directly on the last two stanzas of Walt Whitman’s nine-stanza poem of the same name.

MUSIC: [Dirge for Two Veterans]

As with “Speaking in Tongues,” a recitation establishes the melody, which Thompson then develops on piano. He then reintroduces the recitation in increasingly degraded forms, transforming it into a kind of decaying memory. Another piece, “Not to Keep,” takes its title from a poem by Robert Frost and also utilizes recitation. In this case, however, the speaking is all but buried by a piano, a bass, and a drum kit that seem to be in a slow but gradually intensifying struggle. The poem’s last line emerges clearly only at the end. Thompson said that the poem itself was “a little too on the nose about war and veterans” and that he didn’t want the piece to feel “corny.”

Not being too on the nose isn’t something that Thompson is likely to be accused of any time soon. Thompson includes detailed track-by-track explanations of his process with each selection, but even listeners who read the notes for Twenty Years of Silence may find that the pieces reveal themselves only after multiple listens.

One group of listeners who might have an edge are fans of classical music. The genre tags on Twenty Years of Silence’s Bandcamp page are “experimental,” “sound collage,” “electronic,” “jazz,” “war music,” and “New Orleans.” But I detected a classical echo at the beginning of the song called “Computer Riot.”

MUSIC: [Computer Riot]

Thompson, who in addition to jazz, is also conversant with the high-culture canon, confirmed my suspicions.

THOMPSON: I like that you’re saying that because I’ve—I’ve always really liked classical music, especially modern classical music. And I think my writing is definitely informed by that, and my improvisation. I mean, because I minored in composition, so I was writing—just writing music for—modern music for composition lessons, yeah, the entire time. So that also influenced it. But even, you know, with Baghdad Music Journal, I was listening to a lot of, like, Bach. I think I can hear Bach, you know, like a fake, like, kind of jazz version of Bach happening.

None of which is to overshadow Thompson’s real jazz. On this album, the loveliest real example is “122-60,” a song based on the first time that Thompson met his wife.

MUSIC: [122-60]

To quote the album’s liner notes, “122-60” “expresses the joy that [his wife] brought into [Thompson’s] life.” What the liner notes leave out is that the song can bring joy into the lives of Thompson’s listeners as well.

I’m Arsenio Orteza.

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