http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRqfYQyU2lQ
Around 1977 I wrote the music that became the soundtrack of the Shanidar video. I finally gave the song a name, "Shanidar," in 2009. In 1991 I had been thinking about the Shanidar IV burial site of a Neanderthal (dated at 60 to 80,000 years ago) when I wrote a poem (printed below), "The Flowers of Shanidar." This song seemed to claim that name (Shanidar).
In late 2012 I was experimenting with classical composition and MIDI instrumentation and scored Shanidar for cello, violin, and English horn, loosely targeting classical chamber music or string quartet organization. I subsequently recorded this multi-instrument version using a digital audio workstation and writing the notes of my composition into a MIDI note editor (i.e., without the use of a MIDI keyboard or other instrument). I then developed and recorded a bridge departure using MIDI bass, piano, and drum set and played an electric guitar part (on a J. Turser Strat). Following that break, I returned the classical set, but added a dual electric guitar harmony part paralleling the cello melody for the final measures of the song. I then began to think about images that might help tell the tale of the Shanidar poem, selected those and assembled them into a YouTube video production with the Shanidar sound track.
Everyone is free to make their own interpretation of poetry (and art in general), but I would note that, briefly, the following is what I intended in the poem and subsequent video: During 1957--1961, Ralph Solecki and a Columbia University team excavated a cave in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, located in the valley of the Great Zab. They found the first adult Neanderthal skeletons in Iraq, dating between 60--80,000 years before present time. One of the skeletons, Shanidar IV, was buried in a fetal position on his side and soil analysis revealed clumps of pollen from flowers near the body. Solecki believed that the flowers were placed there as part of a burial ceremony some 60,000 years ago (some disagree, believing small mammals may have stored the flowers in coincident burrows). I wrote my poem, Shanidar, after reading about this. The poem is written describing the flowers ("Threescore millennia ago you praised a colder sun; Dancing colorfully attired and perfumed in the sharp, clean breezes of the resurrected tundra") that were placed in the grave. The sun was "colder" because this was during the last glaciation, the Middle Pleistocene era. It was a world not yet defiled by the foolishness and blind greed of later mankind, poisoning the earth in order to accumulate material things in excess of any possibility of use. When I write of their inflorescence, the structure of the flowers, I am using a metaphor for my own view of existence, i.e., as in chaos science (hence the fractal images in the video), I view reality as predetermined but unpredictable, just as the flowers or other shapes in nature emerge following predetermined paths, but their ultimate shape, their ultimate destiny, only emerges by observation (the Hegelian unfolding of reality if you will), not prediction. I then wrote of the ancient humans placing these flowers in the grave with their deceased companion (the skeleton discovered at Shanidar), taking their (the flowers') last bright day with them into the darkness. I propose that these ancient humans knew that the same consciousness which they experienced in their dreams would not stop at death, but would naturally continue---into the next world, and possibly new incarnations.
Around 1977 I wrote the music that became the soundtrack of the Shanidar video. I finally gave the song a name, "Shanidar," in 2009. In 1991 I had been thinking about the Shanidar IV burial site of a Neanderthal (dated at 60 to 80,000 years ago) when I wrote a poem (printed below), "The Flowers of Shanidar." This song seemed to claim that name (Shanidar).
In late 2012 I was experimenting with classical composition and MIDI instrumentation and scored Shanidar for cello, violin, and English horn, loosely targeting classical chamber music or string quartet organization. I subsequently recorded this multi-instrument version using a digital audio workstation and writing the notes of my composition into a MIDI note editor (i.e., without the use of a MIDI keyboard or other instrument). I then developed and recorded a bridge departure using MIDI bass, piano, and drum set and played an electric guitar part (on a J. Turser Strat). Following that break, I returned the classical set, but added a dual electric guitar harmony part paralleling the cello melody for the final measures of the song. I then began to think about images that might help tell the tale of the Shanidar poem, selected those and assembled them into a YouTube video production with the Shanidar sound track.
Everyone is free to make their own interpretation of poetry (and art in general), but I would note that, briefly, the following is what I intended in the poem and subsequent video: During 1957--1961, Ralph Solecki and a Columbia University team excavated a cave in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, located in the valley of the Great Zab. They found the first adult Neanderthal skeletons in Iraq, dating between 60--80,000 years before present time. One of the skeletons, Shanidar IV, was buried in a fetal position on his side and soil analysis revealed clumps of pollen from flowers near the body. Solecki believed that the flowers were placed there as part of a burial ceremony some 60,000 years ago (some disagree, believing small mammals may have stored the flowers in coincident burrows). I wrote my poem, Shanidar, after reading about this. The poem is written describing the flowers ("Threescore millennia ago you praised a colder sun; Dancing colorfully attired and perfumed in the sharp, clean breezes of the resurrected tundra") that were placed in the grave. The sun was "colder" because this was during the last glaciation, the Middle Pleistocene era. It was a world not yet defiled by the foolishness and blind greed of later mankind, poisoning the earth in order to accumulate material things in excess of any possibility of use. When I write of their inflorescence, the structure of the flowers, I am using a metaphor for my own view of existence, i.e., as in chaos science (hence the fractal images in the video), I view reality as predetermined but unpredictable, just as the flowers or other shapes in nature emerge following predetermined paths, but their ultimate shape, their ultimate destiny, only emerges by observation (the Hegelian unfolding of reality if you will), not prediction. I then wrote of the ancient humans placing these flowers in the grave with their deceased companion (the skeleton discovered at Shanidar), taking their (the flowers') last bright day with them into the darkness. I propose that these ancient humans knew that the same consciousness which they experienced in their dreams would not stop at death, but would naturally continue---into the next world, and possibly new incarnations.
Shanidar
by Dalton Bentley (copyright 1991-2012)
Threescore millennia ago you praised a colder sun
Dancing colorfully attired and perfumed in the sharp, clean breezes
of the resurrected tundra
With an inflorescence predestined
but fulfilled only in each unfolding moment
you arose in a world not yet defiled
Dexterous beings of the morning chose you for a companion’s last bed
(Did you carry with you the brightness of that final day into the darkness?)
They knew that which was always awake in their brother’s sleep
was awake still---
Yours was not, then, a sacrifice devoid of meaning
Threescore millennia ago you praised a colder sun
Dancing colorfully attired and perfumed in the sharp, clean breezes
of the resurrected tundra
With an inflorescence predestined
but fulfilled only in each unfolding moment
you arose in a world not yet defiled
Dexterous beings of the morning chose you for a companion’s last bed
(Did you carry with you the brightness of that final day into the darkness?)
They knew that which was always awake in their brother’s sleep
was awake still---
Yours was not, then, a sacrifice devoid of meaning
