This episode is a summation of the first chapter of my thesis, in which I provide a historical context towards the treatment of nature in music. I've pared it down quite considerably in an attempt to make it a little more enjoyable and not get too deep in the weeds.
Episode Transcript:
Alaska. “America’s Last Frontier.”
A place teeming with wildlife and unspoiled natural beauty.
A place rich with indigenous culture and lore.
A place so big it could fit all of Texas, California, and Montana inside its borders, and still have room to spare.
A place whose location is so far reaching, that the International Date Line is warped in order to accommodate it.
This place has been admired, studied, and traversed for decades. Its distance from the continental United States has given it a harsh, near mythic, image. It has been the subject of poetry, literature, film and music, all of which praise its natural splendor and still manage to not do it enough justice. As I mentioned in the trailer, the main reason for spending so much time talking about Alaska is because John Luther Adams and Matthew Burtner have spent much of their lives living there, and as a result, their music frequently evokes aspects of the state and its landscape. I’m going to dedicate separate pods on each composer, but before I do, I want to spend some time covering the history of how composers have used music to emulate the environment.
Much of this is repurposed from my thesis, so if you’d rather read that, you can find it on my website @ luke helker . com.
~
I feel it is important to stress in the beginning that while much of the music I talk about entrenched in the Western musical canon, connections between sound and nature have been explored by humans since the age of ancient civilizations. Much of this has been documented by anthropologists and ethnomusicologists alike. Frankly require an entirely separate podcast series in order to adequately cover the scope of such cultures and music. So for now, we’ll keep our attention focused on the West.
Musical depictions of nature in the western canon begin to emerge around 1528 with French renaissance composer Clement Janequin. His programmatic chanson Le Chant des oiseaux uses the voice to recreate bird songs. Janequin is one of the first composers to write what we call programmatic music, or music that is designed to engender a non-musical narrative, but with music. It should be noted that in his treatise Poetics, Aristotle writes how poetry, and by extension music is mimetic, or imita tive in that it can represent objects or events in the world. Similar to Le Chant des oiseaux, Janequin used music to reflect the sounds of the hunt and even recreate battle sequences.
The proliferation of music intended to evoke nature, or a particular environment continues throughout history including works like Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony (1808) Debussy’s La Mer (1905) and Messiaen’s Reveil des Oiseaux (1953). All of this is taking place as Western compositional techniques and aesthetics become codified. I think it’s important to remember this because as we head into the twentieth century, new ideas begin to emerge that reconsider what sounds were worthy of such appreciation or in other words what sounds are worthy of being immortalized in music.
For instance, I believe these challenges of the status quo begin in earnest when Arnold Schoenberg asserts that all twelve tones should be treated equally, rather than grouping them into separate tonal centers. His “emancipation of dissonance” began to afford composers a new degree of flexibility when it came to the craft of composition. However, this idea of pantonality quickly merged with his twelve-tone system and created a more mathematical and emotionless approach to composition.
Next we have Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo who expanded on Schoenberg’s ideas of embracing dissonant sonorities. To him, birdsongs were not the only naturally occurring sounds worthy of musical inclusion. In his manifesto, The Art of Noises Russolo argues that the sounds associated with urbanization and industrialization should also be recognized as sounds worthy of embracement in the Western symphony orchestra.
By the early 1910s and ’20s, the world had witnessed the dramatic effects of modernization as a result of the Industrial Revolution, in which factories sprouted up like weeds. The Industrial Revolution had a profound effect on the First World War, which endorsed more sophisticated weaponry and horrific fighting conditions. For Russolo, Italy’s new sonic palette could be manipulated for his own purposes. As a result, he cataloged all of the different sounds he heard and invented a few of his own noise machines (or intonarumori) for his own compositions. He divided the noises into six categories, based on the specific production of sound: explosions and roars, hisses and whistles, whispers and bustling, screeches and friction, percussive impacts, and the voices of humans and animals.
Now here’s where I need to shamelessly allow my background and biases as a percussionist enter the discussion because around this same time, perspectives on percussion instruments also began to shift. Percussion had long been used in symphonic music to reinforce time, harmonic cadences, and occasionally provide sound effects, particularly with non-pitched percussion instruments. However, now composers shift towards treating percussion instruments on an equal plane with the other orchestral instruments and soon enough people began to compose music specifically for percussion, the most famous of which was Edgard Varès’s Ionisation. Varèse continued to cement his legacy as one of the most forward-thinking composers of the twentieth century with pieces like Amériques and Déserts, which embrace new sounds into the orchestra including sirens and electronics.
Varèse had a keen understanding of music’s ability to convey place in both geographical and spiritual terms. Reflecting on Amériques, he noted that it is not “purely geographic but as symbolic of discoveries—new worlds on earth, in the sky, or in the minds of men.” Varèse had similar sentiments regarding his piece Deserts, in which he uses the image of a desert to conjure feelings of solitude and detachment. He suggests that doesn’t have to be made entirely of sand. It could be a desert of sea, snow, outer space, even a deserted city street could be a desert. He even likens a desert to “the remote inner space of the mind no telescope can reach, a world of mystery and essential loneliness.” And on some level, we all inhabit a desert at some point in our lives, even if it’s not in the most literal definition.
Now, we’re going to move on to John Cage, who taught us that all sounds could be treated equally, including silence. He remains notorious for the one piece in which the performer doesn’t play a single note. In 4’33”, the performer approaches a piano and prepares the perform on it, but for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, they do not play a single note. While the piano may not produce any sound, the performance is filled with the ambient sounds of the audience or of the hall. The conceit for such a radical piece was inspired by his experience in an anechoic chamber, a room designed to produce absolute silence by not having any resonating chambers. However, when Cage was in one of these rooms, he realized that true silence did not exist, because he could still hear the circulation of his blood and the electrical currents running through his nervous system. 4’33’’ is a very controversial piece, and often regarded as a prank. But I do believe that Cage tapped into something rather profound, by forcing us to confront the nuances of both sound and silence as factors when experiencing music.
While Cage may have retuned our ears to the world at large, perhaps the most significant contribution to the idea that an environment can serve an artistic purpose came when R. Murray Schafer wrote The New Soundscape (1968), in which he compared the world to a symphony, equating aircraft, guitars, and machinery as possible leitmotifs. That idea may not appear as radical as 4’33”, but where Cage remained rooted in compositional and philosophical ideas about sound and space, Schafer turned ambience and environmental sounds into an academic study. In addition to The New Soundscape, Schafer also published The Book of Noise (not to be confused with Russolo’s Art of Noises), both of which acknowledge that noise was as natural a sound as any other, but ultimately wanted to raise awareness towards careless noise pollution, calling the modern a city a “sonic battleground” in which “man is losing.”
Schafer’s research would form the basis for “acoustic ecology,” a discipline that investigates how soundscapes can be used to articulate relationships between humans and their surroundings. He soon established the World Soundscape Project (WSP), and began working with Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp to expand on their mission to study habitats through sound in an effort to learn more about how humans can interact with their environment. This involved embarking on cross-country “recording tours” of both Canada and Europe, yielding several publications The Vancouver Soundscape (1973), European Sound Diary (1978), and Five Village Soundscapes (1978) as well as a bevy of accompanying recordings, many of which were published on CDs. The recordings are kaleidoscopic collages of sounds from churches, harbors, trains, and wildlife all of which are familiar, yet distinctly belonging to their particular regions. Their collective research culminated in Schafer’s book, The Tuning of the World (1977) and Truax’s Handbook for Acoustic Ecology (1978), both of which are still used as reference works for students today.
Over the past century, Russolo, Varèse, and Cage have prompted various debates on the merits of noise, silence, and their respective representation in the Western canon. Shafer and the members of the WSP succeeded in not only combining aspects of each discussion into a study from which other niche disciplines exist (archeoacoustics, bioacoustics, ecoacoustics, etc.), but have in turn laid the framework for how artists, scientists, and musicians can see, hear, and record the world the around them. Many of the processes used by the WSP are still in practice today and include field recording, sonification, and site-specific methods, all of which have become art forms in their own right and will be covered in greater detail in later podcasts.
This more or less brings us up to date, and I’ll continue to fill in the gaps in later episodes, but I want to briefly talk about the philosophy of place itself. The literature and philosophy that has guided my research has been conducted and theorized throughout the twentieth century. Much of it stems from differing interpretations of how one defines “place” and considers its physical, mental, and emotional impact. For example, Daniel Grimley and Denise Von Glahn examine the concept of space by focusing on the spiritual and emotional aspects of physical spaces. In his book Delius and the Sound of Place, Grimley notes that:
“Place refers not only to a specific geographical site or set of coordinates, but also to matters of identity, presence, and behavior. To “know one’s place” for example, implies hierarchical notions of social class and distinction, and to “call a place home” is to evoke ideas of ownership and belonging.”
Von Glahn echoes this sentiment of place shaping one’s identity and her book The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape. In her book, she examines the reciprocal nature in which place can inspire art and art in turn can evoke place. She achieves this by focusing on American composers including (but not limited to) Ives, Copland, and Ellington.
The aforementioned composers use their music to evoke a particular surrounding. The naturally occurring birdsongs and weather patterns that inspired the music of Messiaen and Beethoven are unique to their particular time and place but could also occur in some form or fashion anywhere in the world at any given point in time. As Russolo, Varèse, and the WSP push the boundaries of what is sonically acceptable, we can also hear distinct sounds meant to evoke what they heard in Italy, America, and Canada respectively, which corresponds with Grimley’s definition of place.
Grimley’s definition of place as a sense of belonging or ownership is evident in both Adams and Burtner and their relationship to Alaska. Both have called Alaska home for a number of years and both have since composed a wealth of music inspired by and evoking aspects of Alaska. It is also consistent with the reciprocal relationship outlined by Von Glahn. In the introduction of her book, Von Glahn includes several questions that she uses as a framework for understanding how place affects composers and how why such pieces are noteworthy. These include questions like: What was the purpose of the memorialization of this place?; How did the composer relate to the place?; What compositional techniques did the composer employ to capture the place?; and What vision of the place and hence of the United States do each of these pieces convey? Such questions are applied to the music of Adams and Burtner throughout my thesis, and will continue to be applied to all of the composers that I interview or examine.
My thesis was intended to understand what Adams and Burtner were trying to evoke with their music. In the thesis, I analyze selected works s from each of the composer’s catalog, spanning several decades of their careers. These are pieces that demonstrate how the composer attempts to recreate an element of Alaska’s landscape or, more generally, aspects of nature.
Fortunately for us, this podcast allows me to add much more to the discussion. To learn more, stay tuned for next week’s podcasts. Til then, keep your ears to the earth.