The Great Animal Orchestra

by Krause, Bernie

  John Muir—a hero among many—embodies a paradox that has become a hallmark of how we think about nature: that the wild should be preserved, yet improved upon. Before the turn of the last century, Muir strongly advocated expelling the Ahwahneechee Paiutes and the Southern Sierra Miwoks from their ancient home. His target: Native American groups that had lived in and around the Yosemite Valley for centuries in a relatively successful strategic balance with the natural world. While the tribes had had some impact on the land with controlled burns, limited agriculture, and hunting, nothing compared with the impact of their Muir-sponsored removal: the ecological balance of the previously intact site was altered forever. Muir felt that sharing space with what he called the “diggers” inhibited his enjoyment of the landscape and interfered with his shepherding tasks. He considered the Miwoks to be “dirty” and “fallen” and therefore not worthy of the stewardship they and the Paiutes—who had a hostile relationship with the Miwoks—had learned. By eliminating these “unsightly” Native residents, the well-heeled, educated members of Muir’s newly formed Sierra Club could supposedly improve upon Yosemite’s management. Meanwhile, Muir wrote lovely paeans to the sound of wind blowing through the High Sierra conifers, signaling a sense of place he thought only he could understand. As time passed he came to reconsider his judgment. But by then it was too late.

  Musical invention reflects modern views of ourselves and our increasing dissociation from the wild. Paralleling trends in science and the visual arts, composers, too, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, began to echo the deconstructive inclinations that had become common in the rational philosophic and scientific communities. Tied only to a vague idealized notion of wildness, many composers drew on the voices of celebrity or signature animals, or on geological and weather events, to animate their music. Claiming “nature” as an inspiration, they, too, deconstructed the environmental whole and then reconstituted a selection of acoustic elements into a culturally resonant expression, assigning special meaning to a few particular organisms or events.

  For example, Mozart wrote music lionizing his pet starling. The Sixth Symphony (the Pastoral) by Beethoven incorporates the voices of a cuckoo and quail, while Cantus Arcticus by the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara features recordings of common cranes. Heitor Villa-Lobos, from Brazil, wrote a piece called Uirapurú, highlighting the musician wren mentioned in the previous chapter. Vivaldi voiced the seasons. Debussy romanticized the sea. Olivier Messiaen’s music echoed the songs of birds he noted as “musical” while hiking in the French countryside with his wife, Yvonne. Messiaen didn’t limit his work with birds to just one or two compositions. He considered himself equally an ornithologist—aside from his many stunning pieces that assumed a range of different forms, he also took the songs and calls of ospreys, flycatchers, warblers, thrushes, and skylarks and transformed them into a number of musical strophes, highlighted in works such as Chronochromie, Des Canyons aux étoiles …, Réveil des oiseaux, and Oiseaux exotiques. Americans such as George Crumb and Alan Hovhaness wrote celebrations of whales, and Paul Winter jammed along with timber wolves in Common Ground, dedicating much of his musical repertoire and performing life to tributes of the natural world.

  Although I enjoy a great acoustic venue enlivened with a world-class orchestra and a talented conductor, I find that, however respectful, brilliant, and conscientious the performance pieces may have been, in reality few of the musical works that claim nature as an inspiration speak to the essence of any natural environment I know. By featuring signature creatures selected from outside their rightful acoustic settings—animals whose voices just happen to fit the musical paradigms that composers are comfortable with—our compositions demonstrate a creative myopia: they present “nature” in terms of what the artist thinks it ought to sound like. We assess that which is deemed “musical” in our world and reject that which is not. We critically filter out “extraneous” sounds in favor of a preferred musical palette.

  Marcel Proust understood the problem when he wrote in Swann’s Way: “Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them.” For me, our attempts at nature-related music evoke an intense longing for the more layered and richly textured voices that emanate directly from the wild. Either way, these music-from-“nature” performances forcefully express the cultural limits of our nexus to the natural world. Luc Ferry, the French ecophilosopher, put it more succinctly when he observed in The New Ecological Order: “Nature is beautiful when it imitates art.”

  When I was an undergraduate in college, I took a music survey course from the eminent musicologist H. Wiley Hitchcock. As part of his program, he introduced the class to the work of a British ethnomusicologist, Colin Turnbull, who in the 1950s had gone to the Congo to record the music of the Mbuti pygmies of Zaire. Hitchcock played a few recordings of the tribe’s music—waves upon waves of hypnotic repetition, intricate rhythm patterns, melodies and polyphonies colliding and separating from one another effortlessly, subtle dynamics adding excitement to the performances. At the end of the three scratchy field recordings, the professor let a moment of silence go by as the class absorbed what it had just heard. The discomfort of many students in the room was palpable. They were eager to move on to the American folk music promised in the next round of subjects. (Folk music in the late 1950s was becoming a popular idiom.)

  Still, Hitchcock held us there in the past, as if unsure where to take his point, anxiously shifting his weight from foot to foot as he considered what to say next. Then, using the descriptive vernacular of the moment to put the pygmy music in perspective, he began to assess what we had just heard first as “primitive,” and second as not terribly relevant given how advanced music of the West had become. He had made his point—one that resounded throughout much of the academic and popular music world of the time. There was a general pattern here: what had been de rigueur for these hunter-gatherers over the course of thousands of years took Westerners only a brief instant to dismiss.

  Despite Hitchcock’s hesitation, the recorded samples he played were so unusual and rich that I never forgot that winter afternoon in the lecture hall. As it turns out, the “primitives” my university professors spoke of had a lexicon of musical expression far more intricate, dramatic, and dynamic than anything I had heard materializing from our most advanced institutions. For one thing, the musical examples came from groups that were clearly more aural than visual. And for another, their music was evocative of creatures they heard all their lives but may have never seen, such as tiny insects, frogs, birds high in the canopy, or nighttime creatures. I might add that the music of the Mbuti pygmies is filled with expressions much closer to our heart and soul—a celebration of life—than most of what I had heard coming from schools of sound-art production using the most innovative technologies and literary rationale.

  After his lectures on folk music, Hitchcock introduced the class to Charles Ives, a composer he would study and write about for the rest of his life. The professor, however, failed to make an important association that was so central to Ives’s compositions.

  Almost a century ago, Charles Ives, a Connecticut insurance salesman who decided to quit talking and begin listening, wrote his Fourth Symphony. Finished shortly before the end of World War I, this transcendent twentieth-century work did not get its first full performance until 1965. Still, as a reflection of music’s wild origins, it is arguably one of the major contributions to American (and possibly Western) musical literature of the last hundred years. Ives, one of the few deep listeners of his time, managed to synthesize familiar landscape acoustics and weave them into a tapestry that embodies competition, cooperation, tension, polyphony, polyrhythms, release, consonance, dissonance, microtones, instrumental and human voices, and themes spatially converging and separating—just as sonic events occur within the borders of the wild. (The third movement of Ives’s Fourth Symphon
y is one of my all-time favorite pieces of twentieth-century music.) More remarkable, the work intensely reflects spontaneous aspects of the interior human psyche as contrasted with the natural world—expressions of great energy and softness, deep emotion, surprise, uncertain resolution, and an immediate temporal presence.

  Composing in the late period of the industrial revolution, Ives was still able to capture the beauty and depth of human wildness—the elements that reside deep within all of us. My guess is that when musicians and conductors first read the score, they were mystified by the power that this extraordinary work unleashed and the ideas that it expressed. The double-sharp and -flat notes on the page were so far removed from the common Eurocentric musical literature of the time that at first read-through by the orchestra members, the music could not be clearly interpreted, particularly the strings. Leopold Stokowski’s 1965 recording of the piece’s premier performance (by the American Symphony Orchestra and Schola Cantorum chorus of New York) shows how constrained and unfamiliar the performers were with these concepts and how uncomfortable the conductor was with the content. The reading is stiff and laborious. A later rendition by Michael Tilson Thomas with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and chorus is less cautious. Unexpectedly, the best performance of all was the Oakland Symphony Orchestra’s 1967 version conducted by the late Gerhard Samuel, which portrayed a fresh, youthful innocence and captured the vital textures and dynamics that Ives likely intended in his masterpiece. It is a recording held in archive version only, never released to the public. While not a “perfect” reading, it evokes the passion and wildness of a youthful America we can only hope to hear again.

  In addition to Ives, a number of Western composers are revisiting the soundscape as a valued resource for the creation of music. Aribert Reimann’s orchestral score for his opera Lear is one example. Its 1981 American premiere in San Francisco was received with mixed reviews, but I consider it one of the few compelling late-century Western orchestrations I’ve experienced. It suggested the urban soundscape textures not yet so prevalent in the European academy, and through the lush acoustic tone clustering of his string orchestrations in act 1, Reimann exposed a tension between the electronic studio music of the era and sounds from the populated metropolitan worlds in which he lived.

  Numerous orchestrations by the late Benjamin Britten, such as Billy Budd and Death in Venice, are strongly influenced by the urban and natural soundscapes that surrounded him during his many travels abroad and at his home in East Anglia.

  And there are others, including works by a few students at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford—where composers and innovators such as John Chowning study the intersection of music and information technology using advanced synthesizers as creative media tools through which they express what they have discovered. Some of the students have begun to reexamine the potential of natural soundscapes and early instruments as important sources of compositional stimulus.

  R. Murray Schafer’s Patria series, an elaborate cycle of operas written over the past three decades, features several performances that take place in remote and natural settings—far removed from ceremonial halls of culture. The Princess of the Stars has been performed on a lake, usually in Northern Ontario. Instrumentalists from the Toronto Symphony are scattered out of sight of the audience throughout the forest surrounding the lakeshore, while the singers, on illuminated boats, begin their musical narratives along with the changing sky just before daybreak—emerging a little after four a.m. on late summer mornings from small alcoves that encircle the lake. While the audience stands or sits on the shore, the performers are induced into action by the natural soundscape, led by the dawn chorus of birdsong. Schafer has also written an a capella choral piece about wind, arguably one of the most difficult aspects of the soundscape to convey through musical art. His piece Once on a Windy Night demonstrates how we can be inspired through critical listening, as Schafer gracefully captures the essence of this invisible phenomenon with stunning impact.

  The Italian composer David Monacchi defines his work as being based on an “eco-acoustic paradigm,” a flexible compositional model used for many of his pieces. As part of the creative process, Monacchi likely spends as much time in the field collecting material and listening as he does composing. The natural biomes that he analyzes for their biophonic partitioning directly affect nearly all of his compositions—his musical muse is derived from intensive listening and the sonic details he discovers in the related spectrograms. Monacchi’s arrangements are meant to express the ecological principles hidden in the biophonies of entire wild habitats. In his own words: “The segregation of sounds into temporal, frequency, and specific niches—observable in the sonic expression of many undisturbed ecosystems—is an example of the important narrative structure that I try to convey to audiences through my sound-art and music.” In his masterly revelations of nature’s composition—both seen and heard—audiences are immediately made aware of our atavistic links to biophonies. Eyes flashing with excitement, David told me: “My most important role as an eco-acoustic composer is to understand and reveal nature’s intricate acoustic formulas and, at the same time, to be able to interact with biophonies without disturbing the equilibrium of their delicate set of patterns.”

  For his concerts, Monacchi surrounds his audiences in a multispeaker envelope of highly calibrated sound sources—a system referred to in the industry as AmbiSonic—and performs segments of the material that capture the dynamic and dramatic lyricism inherent in the original tracks. Sometimes he manipulates—that is, pitch-shifts—the ultra- and infrasound components so that his audiences can better hear the interplay of low-frequency elephant sounds at one end of the spectrum and high-frequency bat and insect noises at the other.

  In his composition Nightingale— this is the remarkable part—he streams the spectrograms across a large screen in the center of the stage. Within the niches that define the biophony, Monacchi improvises in real time on a transverse wooden flute. “At those moments, I am transported,” he says, a fact confirmed by his body language and countenance during his collaborative concerts. In another, more recent composition called Integrated Ecosystem, he explores the interaction of a digitally synthesized performance with a primary equatorial rain forest’s sonic habitat. The spectrograms, projected again in real time during the performance, show how he aims to create a sound sculpture that is strictly within the available temporal and frequency niches of the complex bioacoustic ensemble. Performing a real-time synthesis through several sensors that detect the movements of his hands and connect to custom generative software, Monacchi adds his electronic signature to unfilled narrow bandwidths and available time windows, building a powerful metaphor of one species—the human—that comes full circle and plays within a composite animal orchestra, finding synergy and a balanced, harmonic relationship.

  The natural world holds many secrets that can inform our music, yet as composers, many of us have ignored them. After hearing my presentations, musicians and composers often ask how they can learn more about the field of bioacoustics, which is otherwise so remote from their thoughts and experiences in the classroom, practice room, stage, and studio. I give the same advice to everyone: Turn down Ronnie James Dio, Orange Sky, Panic Bomber, Arvo Pärt, and Philip Glass for a moment. Try to put them out of your mind. Listen to the aural contexts in which the creature world vocalizes. As you would with any musical composition, engage with all of the sounds that make up the animal orchestra. Notice how the individual sources mix together. “Listen to the bass, it’s the one on the bottom / Where the bullfrog croaks and the hippopotamus / Moans and groans.” Be mindful of the subtle differences in the ambient flow of streams, creeks, and waterfalls; the cells of thunder and rain passing by (be sure to take your headphones off when in the presence of electrical storms); the wind in the aspens, pines, or maples; and the wave action at the shore. Try to pick out the structure of the creature symphonies conveyed by whole habitats. N
otice the seasonal dynamics—rich and intricate in spring, delicate and sporadic in winter. Which high-pitched birds and insects do you hear? When do you hear them (what times of day, year)? Where do the amphibians fit in the spectrum? Who fills the mid- and low-range acoustic turf? What creatures set up rhythm patterns? Which ones rely on timing to be heard in relation to others? These are the same questions that composers address when faced with orchestrating their musical lines with the instrumentation at hand. How would you set about composing a piece of music from this palette?

  In order to harness nature as a source of musical inspiration, we must be willing to make the time and find ways to hike back to wild places. For me, the process is singularly edifying. Once I’ve located a noise-free location, a goal in itself, I listen—sometimes with eyes closed—to the ways in which the blend of creature voices define space. Because each habitat—even those within the same biome—will express itself with an assemblage of sound signatures that form a unique collective voice, I can rarely anticipate what the sound of the landscape as defined by the biophony will be. They’re always different—often in not-so-subtle ways.

  The disparity between landscapes and their inhabitants is one reason why the music of Béla Bartók, the early-twentieth-century Hungarian composer, sounds so unlike the wide-open optimistic feeling of Aaron Copland’s compositions, which depict an idealized American West as he imagined it in the last midcentury.

  Each of us has at least one sound-mark in our head, a signature soundscape that defines a sense of place in our aural experience. For composers, that sound-mark is the font from which they draw the fragments that they plait into music. In the wild natural world, that mark can be very rich—it just takes time and a quiet frame of mind to unravel and understand.