Stillness: Let the noise settle. - Page 24

Editor’s note

The quiet room

Stillness is treated here as a form of attention, not withdrawal. These cards move through sleep, perspective, emotional steadiness and the small practices that make a crowded day more inhabitable.

Q1915

StillnessMusic

Across Korea and its diaspora, Arirang survives through a simple refrain and thousands of local variations whose new lyrics can hold separation, labour, love or homecoming.

Arirang is recognisable enough to gather strangers and open enough to belong to a village, a region or a person far from home. Its short structure invites singers to alter the verses around a returning refrain, so memory is carried by variation rather than fixed text. The song has crossed borders, political division and migration without becoming a museum specimen. Continuity, here, means keeping a door in the music through which another life may enter.

ArirangRead card

Q1917

StillnessMusic

In qawwali, lead singing, answering voices, handclaps, percussion and repeated poetic lines gather momentum until devotion becomes a shared physical experience.

Qawwali is rooted in South Asian Sufi gatherings, including performances at shrines and devotional assemblies. A lead singer may unfold a line of Urdu, Persian or Punjabi poetry; the chorus returns it, claps mark the pulse, and harmonium and drums tighten the frame. Repetition does not leave the words where it found them: emphasis, improvisation and audience response alter their emotional weight. The ensemble turns listening from private reception into collective participation.

QawwaliRead card

Q1918

StillnessMusic

The end-blown shakuhachi can bend pitch through tiny changes of breath and head angle, making air noise, unstable tone and silence part of its expressive vocabulary.

The shakuhachi is a vertical bamboo flute whose open blowing edge exposes every adjustment of the player's breath. During the Edo period, komusō practitioners of the Fuke tradition used solo pieces as a discipline of attention; later, the flute entered chamber, stage and contemporary music. Its sound is compelling partly because it refuses polish as the only measure of beauty. A gust, a cracked edge and the pause after a note can all remain inside the composition.

ShakuhachiRead card

Q1920

WonderMusic

Azerbaijani mugham gives performers a modal framework rather than a fixed script, asking the singer and instrumentalists to shape an unfolding architecture through improvisation.

In a classical mugham trio, a singer commonly performs with tar and kamancha, while holding a frame drum. Modes, melodic routes and inherited poems provide the grammar, but no notation can prescribe the weight of every pause or ascent. Each interpretation therefore carries disciplined memory and present-tense judgement at once. The tradition has absorbed centuries of exchange across Persian, Turkic and Caucasian worlds without losing its demand that a musician find the road anew.

MughamRead card

Q1921

StillnessMusic

Cabo Verdean morna joins poetry, voice and string instruments to hold departure, distance and longing—experiences shaped by island life and generations of migration.

Morna is sung in Cabo Verdean Creole, commonly with guitars, violin, cavaquinho and other strings giving the voice a gently turning ground. Its poems often return to sodade: not a decorative sadness, but the ache of people, islands and futures separated by the sea. The form has travelled wherever Cabo Verdeans have made homes abroad. A small archipelago turned distance into a shared musical grammar without pretending that distance hurts everyone in the same way.

MornaRead card

Q1923

DriveBiography

After South Africa cancelled her passport in 1960, Miriam Makeba spent three decades in exile, using performance and United Nations testimony to confront apartheid abroad.

Makeba's records carried South African languages, rhythms and everyday stories to listeners who often knew the country only through headlines. When she tried to return for her mother's funeral, the state refused her entry; in 1963 she addressed the United Nations about apartheid, and her music was banned at home. Exile gave her reach, but at the price of ordinary belonging. Her career refuses the comforting idea that an international platform cancels the wound of being denied one's own door.

Miriam MakebaRead card

Q1924

StillnessBiography

Neşet Ertaş inherited the Abdal and bozlak tradition from his father Muharrem Ertaş, then renewed it through an extensive body of his own songs and performances.

Ertaş grew up inside a working musical lineage, accompanying his father and learning not only melodies but the social world that gave them weight. His singing let the bozlak's high, unguarded cry hold separation, poverty, love, pride and the road; his bağlama answered without ornament for ornament's sake. He became nationally known without sanding away the Abdal tradition that formed him. The achievement was not escape from inheritance, but a voice distinct enough to keep inheritance alive.

Neşet ErtaşRead card

Q1926

StillnessBiography

Queen Liliʻuokalani composed more than ceremonial music: songs such as Kuʻu Pua i Paoakalani turned intimate melody into memory during political dispossession and confinement.

Liliʻuokalani was Hawaiʻi's last reigning monarch and a prolific composer whose songs joined poetic language to a keen sense of place. After the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, she was confined in ʻIolani Palace; music written around that period carried loyalty, loss and attention to those outside the room. Aloha ʻOe became globally familiar, but familiarity can blur the political life behind the melody. Her songbook is also an archive of a sovereign mind refusing to be reduced to defeat.

LiliʻuokalaniRead card

Q1929

DriveLanguage

Modern Neo-Tifinagh adapts historic Amazigh letterforms into standardised alphabets used for teaching, public signage and digital communication across North Africa.

Tifinagh is not one frozen alphabet but a family of related forms with deep roots in North Africa, including the writing maintained among Tuareg communities. Modern institutions and language activists developed Neo-Tifinagh orthographies to serve contemporary Amazigh varieties in schools, books and civic space. Standardisation made fonts and keyboards possible, while also requiring choices among regional practices. Revival is rarely a return to an untouched past; it is the careful design of a future in which inherited signs can do new work.

TifinaghRead card

Q1930

WonderLanguage

Roughly two dozen wooden objects bearing rongorongo glyphs survive from Rapa Nui, but no proposed decipherment has won scholarly acceptance and the texts remain unread.

The surviving lines carry compact figures—human, animal, plantlike and geometric—often arranged in a reverse direction when the tablet is turned. Their makers left no bilingual key, and the knowledge needed to read them did not survive the violence, disease and social rupture that transformed Rapa Nui in the nineteenth century. Claims of a solution arrive regularly; evidence has not yet made one persuasive. The silence belongs not to the objects, but to the historical conditions that severed text from reader.

RongorongoRead card

Q1931

StillnessLanguage

Vedic recitation preserves words, pitch accents and pronunciation, using patterned sequences that recombine words and word-pairs to detect and resist errors in oral transmission.

A written transcript can record a sentence while losing how each syllable rises, falls or joins the next. Vedic teachers preserve those dimensions through exact imitation and recitation patterns that reorder words into controlled combinations, making a mistake easier to expose. The discipline demands years because the archive is distributed across trained bodies rather than stored in one object. Its precision shows oral memory not as the absence of technology, but as a technology refined around breath, repetition and mutual correction.

Vedic chantRead card

Q1932

WonderLanguage

Across South and Southeast Asia, scribes prepared palm leaves as pages, writing or incising texts before stringing the narrow folios between protective boards.

Palm-leaf manuscripts carried literature, ritual, law, astronomy and medicine in many languages and scripts across a vast region. Their long, narrow format reflects the material itself; holes and cord kept separate leaves in sequence, while boards guarded the bundle. Heat, insects and humidity made periodic recopying part of preservation, so survival depended on active readership rather than passive storage. Today's digitisation protects access, but the page still bears the shape of a plant and the labour of a hand.

Palm-leaf manuscriptRead card

Q1933

DriveLanguage

Beginning with Hawaiian-medium preschools in 1984 and public immersion schooling in 1987, community-led education rebuilt a path for ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi from early childhood to university.

By the late twentieth century, generations of English-dominant schooling had pushed Hawaiian out of many homes and classrooms. Families and educators answered by building Pūnana Leo preschools, then fighting for public immersion pathways that could continue through secondary and higher education. Children were not asked merely to study the language; they learned mathematics, science and daily life through it. Revitalisation became durable when Hawaiian was allowed to carry a whole future, not just describe a treasured past.

Hawaiian languageRead card

Q1934

StillnessLanguage

Ainu is critically endangered, yet community classes, instructor training, family programmes and museum-based teaching are creating new settings in which it can be spoken and heard.

Assimilation policies and discrimination interrupted the everyday transmission of Ainu across generations in Japan. Revitalisation now takes several forms at once: beginner and advanced courses, new teaching materials, training for instructors, parent-child learning and public programmes led by Ainu knowledge holders. A museum can preserve recordings and objects, but a language needs situations in which one person addresses another. The decisive unit of survival is not the word in a catalogue; it is the relationship that gives someone reason to say it.

Ainu languageRead card

Q1936

WonderFood

Injera batter is fermented—traditionally with a starter carried from an earlier batch—then cooked on one side until bubbles open into the soft, absorbent surface known as eyes.

Teff often gives injera its structure, although households also work with other grains and blends. During fermentation, microbes sour the batter and fill it with gas; on the hot griddle those bubbles set into a porous sheet strong enough to carry stews and tender enough to tear by hand. The same surface serves as food, utensil and shared table. A saved starter links today's meal to the last one, making continuity something tasted rather than announced.

InjeraRead card

Q1939

StillnessFood

Across Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia, cooks roll moistened semolina into grains and steam them, preserving distinct local methods inside a widely shared meal.

Couscous begins before the pot: semolina is moistened, rolled by hand, separated into grains and prepared for steaming, a tactile judgement learned through observation and practice. Broths, vegetables, meats, seasonings and occasions vary across regions and families. Its UNESCO recognition came through a joint nomination by four countries, an unusual act of cultural diplomacy. The dish offers a mature model of belonging—shared deeply, made differently, owned completely by no single border.

CouscousRead card

Q1940

WonderFood

During tempeh fermentation, Rhizopus fungi grow a white network of mycelium through cooked soybeans, binding separate beans into a firm cake while transforming flavour and texture.

Tempeh is often described as fermented soy, but its structure is as important as its flavour. The fungus grows between the beans, its fine filaments making thousands of biological joins while enzymes reshape compounds in the soy. In Java and across Indonesia, makers learned to manage heat, moisture, airflow and inoculum long before the organism had a laboratory name. Fermentation here is neither decay nor mystery; it is a cultivated partnership whose success can be lifted from its wrapper in one piece.

TempehRead card

Q1941

WonderFood

Garum and related Roman sauces were made by salting fish and allowing enzymes and microbes to break the flesh into a savoury liquid traded throughout the empire.

Garum was not one standard recipe but a family of fish sauces and pastes sold in different grades, from everyday seasoning to branded luxury. Salt controlled the fermentation while enzymes in the fish liquefied tissue, concentrating savoury compounds long before anyone named umami. Jars from Pompeii carry painted labels identifying contents and makers; the producer Aulus Umbricius Scaurus even displayed sauce containers in a floor mosaic. The condiment reveals an ancient market already fluent in processing, reputation and packaging.

GarumRead card

Q1943

StillnessFood

Indigenous peoples of the Eastern Woodlands harvested spring maple sap and concentrated it into sugar long before Europeans arrived, developing the knowledge newcomers later adopted.

Maple sap runs during a narrow swing of freezing nights and milder days, turning weather knowledge into a harvest calendar. Indigenous makers cut or tapped trees, gathered sap in bark containers and concentrated it with heated stones or boiling, producing transportable sugar as well as syrup. European settlers learned from these practices and later introduced metal tools and large-scale equipment. The familiar bottle therefore begins with older expertise: how to read a forest precisely at the moment it changes season.

Maple syrupRead card

Q1944

StillnessFood

In southwestern Morocco, argan oil production moves through harvesting, drying, pulping, cracking, grinding and mixing—skills traditionally transmitted among rural women.

The hardest-looking moment is cracking the nut between stones, but argan knowledge lives in the entire chain: when to gather fruit, how long to dry it, which kernels to roast for culinary oil and how to judge paste and water by touch. The oil enters cooking, body care, remedies, hospitality and wedding exchange. Its value is inseparable from the argan woodlands and from the people who maintain the practice. A marketable product sits at the end; ecological and social judgement begin much earlier.

Argan oilRead card

Q1945

DriveFood

Indigenous makers pounded dried bison meat and mixed it with rendered fat, sometimes adding berries, to produce energy-dense pemmican that kept well on long journeys.

Removing water from lean meat slowed spoilage; enclosing the powder in warm fat added energy and protection, creating provisions suited to winter, travel and uncertain supply. Plains peoples developed this food long before commercial fur companies depended on it. Métis producers later organised large bison hunts and supplied brigades moving through the interior, making pemmican part of a colonial economy with immense appetite. Its efficiency should be admired alongside the harder history of extraction that grew around it.

PemmicanRead card

Q1946

WonderArt

Indonesian batik makers apply hot wax in lines and dots to resist dye, then repeat waxing, colouring and removal to build patterned cloth through controlled acts of concealment.

Wax does not colour the cloth; it preserves selected ground while dye changes everything exposed. Removing the wax, adding new barriers and dyeing again lets a maker layer decisions that may be almost invisible until the final boil. In Indonesia, motifs and uses accompany life from infant slings to weddings, work, performance and burial, while designs also register centuries of exchange. Batik's surface is therefore both image and process map: every colour records where the cloth was open, and where it was deliberately kept safe.

BatikRead card

Q1950

WonderArt

Artisanal Talavera in Puebla and Tlaxcala depends on a linked process of clay preparation, shaping, glazing, pigment work and kiln control transmitted through specialist workshops.

Talavera is often recognised by its luminous surface, but the visible decoration is only one stage in a demanding chain. Clay bodies, wheel or mould, enamel, mineral pigments and firing must behave together; some makers oversee the whole sequence while others inherit one specialism. The Mexican tradition grew through Indigenous knowledge, Spanish ceramic forms and wider trade, a history of contact shaped by unequal power as well as invention. Each workshop keeps a distinct hand inside a shared process.

Artisanal Talavera of Puebla and TlaxcalaRead card

Q1951

WonderArt

Chinese paper-cut artists use scissors, knives or chisels to turn a single sheet into connected motifs for windows, interiors, festivals, weddings and other social occasions.

Every opening must leave enough paper to hold the rest together, so composition is also an exercise in structure. Regional practices range from fine, delicate scenes to bold forms; makers adapt motifs to birthdays, marriage, seasonal festivals, prayer and the architecture of a particular room. The art has often been passed among women from childhood, while contemporary artists also use machines and new media. Its vitality lies in that elasticity: one inexpensive sheet can still carry a highly local world.

Chinese paper cuttingRead card

Move into another roomWonderThe world is stranger up close.