Sounds Wild and Broken, page 25
Acoustic flexibility of space turns what was fixed—the sound of a venue—into another part of the instrumentation that composers use to sculpt sound. This is an extension of stereo, quadraphonic, or “5.1” sound—systems that use two, four, or six speakers to build immersive listening experiences—into realms where sound has a fine-grained spatial structure, its positions and movements controllable on-the-fly from an electronic tablet. The flight that I heard in Elena Pinderhughes’s flute music was one example. She played her flute from the stage, but the music drifted and swooped through the performance space in service of narrative and emotion.
Composer and electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani, interviewed after using a Meyer system at Moogfest, put these possibilities into context. She said that the first uses of quadraphonics in the 1970s “didn’t have the content, there was no real viable reason to do it.” But today “we have a new generation of kids who are playing electronic music that just wants to fly all over the room and be sculpted and moved.” She emphasized the emotional heft of spatial design in music: “Powerful . . . until you feel it, you don’t really know what it is.”
Spatial audio technology has a natural affinity with dance, which, by its nature, moves through all three dimensions of space. Wherever the dance is participatory, rather than watched by a seated audience, these new audio systems will allow music to move along with human bodies. From ballrooms to clubs, composers and performers can now make music dance, literally. Combined with strap-on haptic devices that pump low-frequency sounds into our skin and body tissues, the line between body motion and music is blurred. This builds on the link established hundreds of millions of years ago when our fish ancestors first evolved inner ears that detect both motion and sound, a design that we and all other vertebrates have now inherited.
The application of these methods to electronic dance music (EDM) is clear. Movement by listeners is part of the EDM experience, and new technologies are readily embraced by performers and participants alike. But spatialized sound technologies also offer an opportunity to understand traditional instruments in new ways. When we hear a violin, guitar, or oboe, we receive an integrated sound that flows from the instrument’s entire surface and volume. This is the intent: to animate the air with a coherent tone and texture. But when your ear is close to the instrument, you realize that its sound has a topography. Might we now, as part of the narrative of an instrumental piece, travel across the varied terrains of a violin’s belly, the bore of a flute, or the surfaces of a piano? Instruments would then be experienced as three-dimensional objects full of tensions and harmonies, just as a musical score is. Form of instrument and form of music can now converse not only through time, a single dimension, but within the three dimensions of space.
Our ears could also be given what live musicians have, a position on the stage. Sit with the violas. Fly to the brass at just the right moment. Pause a moment between the bass and the banjo in a bluegrass concert, then, as the music demands it, sweep to the fiddle, then pan out to the whole.
Such compositions would bring to the concertgoing experience some of the same spatial dynamics of walking in a forest or through a sound installation in an art gallery. Moving through an ecological community is an experience in which sound has form and texture within space. The same is true when sound is used as a sculptural form in gallery spaces or outdoors. In the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, for example, the electronic sounds of David Tudor’s Rainforest V come from everyday objects—a wooden box, an oil drum, plumbing parts—suspended in a large room. As we move within the space, sound takes on different rhythms and colors. Unlike the living species in a rain forest, though, Tudor’s objects lack long evolutionary histories of sonic coevolutionary haggling and dealmaking among themselves. Instead, the physical forms of manufactured objects in the installation are animated by electricity, an effect augmented by the objects’ responses when sensors within them detect and reply to sounds made by visitors. Spatially nuanced work such as this can now, with the help of electronics, enter the concert hall.
Most human music is experienced as a temporal flow from one point within a field of sound. We take a seat in a concert hall or slide headphones over our ears. Even when we are walking with earbuds, the sound does not track our movement, but instead arrives in a way previously unknown to any living being: a seemingly stationary sound source reaching a body in motion. Composers can now bring more spatial dynamics into their creations, integrating sound and motion. This work is an extension of more traditional forms of composition and performance. Processionary and marching music creates spatial narratives, as do instruments and voices ranged around halls and worship spaces.
Music is relationship. It connects people, but it also engages us in the physicality of the spaces that we occupy. Every instrument and form of music is thus made partly from its acoustic context. In this, human music does not differ from the communicative sounds of other species. Each species has, through evolution and animal learning, found its sonic place in the world.
Humans, though, actively shape our acoustic spaces in ways impossible for almost all other species. Singing birds cannot modify the reverberations of the forest. Snapping shrimp do not turn a knob to brighten their crackling choruses. A katydid in a rain forest is incapable of adjusting the amplitude or frequencies of the dozen other insects singing around it. Even the mole cricket does not rework its burrow to fit its song. But human music making allows creative reciprocity among our compositions, instruments, and the acoustics of space. Electronics in our ears and concert venues have now opened new possibilities for these fruitful relationships, the continuation of a process that began in the sonorous caves of the Paleolithic.
Music, Forest, Body
The plaza at Lincoln Center in New York City has been stripped of all signs of nonhuman life. Contrasting black-and-tan paving slabs mark out a geometric design centered around a 317-jet, illuminated fountain. The architectural narrative aims to honor and elevate high art but also to exclude, forcefully declaring that human power and ingenuity are entirely in control here. The rest of life’s community has been erased, save for thirty London plane trees, planted away from the main plaza, arrayed in soldierly rows in a gravel-topped concrete rectangle. Memory of the thriving human community whose neighborhood was leveled in the 1950s to build this place—seven thousand Black and Latino families who received no assistance for relocation—is also obliterated. This is a place seemingly for those who believe themselves to be maestros, or “masters,” from the Latin magister, “he who is greater.” Much beauty, artistry, and meaningful connection happen here, but this is also a place of fracture and erasure.
We walk into the concert hall, home of the New York Philharmonic, the oldest symphony orchestra in the United States. Here, too, the space conveys the message of dominance by a single human architectural plan, as do almost all places where humans gather to be fed by the fruits of culture: performance venues, lecture halls, museums, cinemas, and places of worship. Upholstery. Metal railings. Wood panels so smooth and glossy they seem made of plastic. The doors to the concert hall close, sealing out sounds from the rest of the world. On stage, the musicians’ bodies are veiled by uniformly black shirts, trousers, and dresses. The aesthetic is formal and signals wealth.
Every part of the journey to this concert impresses on the listener that they are engaged in a shedding of the messiness and particularity of the city, the community of life, and even of human flesh. The audience sits apart from musicians in a darkened space, muscles and nerves resisting any urge to become entrained in or contribute to the music. The experience of sound here will, it seems, transcend this time and place, focusing our attention on a sonic experience of creativity, artistry, and beauty unshackled from Earth. This release promises an experience of God, in sacred music, or into the realms of human ideas and emotions.
But this escape is an illusion. We can pave over the living soil, displace human and nonhuman life, occlude views of the human body, and close the doors in a sound-proofed vault, only to arrive back in human flesh and the diversity of the living world. The concert hall delivers a powerful experience of embodied life, a union of the human and more-than-human world almost unmatched in its bodily intimacy and richness of ecological relationship. There are few other places in our culture where the boundary between “human” and “nonhuman” is so thoroughly erased, even if we do not usually celebrate this merger in our external representations. Perhaps the sensual power of interbeing experienced here is why we must use pavement, sealed-in chambers, and shrouded bodies? These trappings of concertgoing mediate the entry of music’s earthly power into our bodies and psyches, easing a union that might otherwise be discomforting in its raw openness, vulnerability, and animality.
Lights dim. Paper programs rustle, like a strong breeze over dry oak leaves. Conversations hush as heads and torsos orient to the stage. Tonight’s concertmaster, Sheryl Staples, steps onto the stage with an eighteenth-century Guarneri violin in her hand. From a position below the conductor’s podium, she signals to Sherry Sylar, principal oboist for this concert, who lifts her cocobolo wood instrument and sounds an A. The note sails out into the hall from the oboe’s bell, drawing in its wake a flotilla of notes from other instruments. Then silence: the evening’s moment of maximum expectation and concentration, 2,700 people collectively holding their breaths. The moment breaks into applause as the conductor, Jaap van Zweden, strides out, sweeps his arm over the audience and orchestra, then takes his perch. Another moment of expectant silence and the baton falls. A shiver and crescendo from the percussion swells into brass and strings, and Steven Stucky’s “Elegy” commences.
From the moment the oboe sounds, forests and wetlands come alive on stage. In this place of high human culture, we are lifted into joy and beauty partly by the sounds of other beings, our senses immersed in the physicality of plants and animals.
The oboe’s sound is rooted in plants from the coastal wetlands of Spain and France. The reeds that impart vibrations to the musicians’ breath are parings of a giant cane indigenous to the brackish, sandy shores of the western Mediterranean. Growing more than six meters tall, the hollow stems of this grass grow only two to three centimeters wide. This seemingly preposterous architecture—plants taller than houses, on stems narrower than my thumb—endows the reeds with their sonic properties. Tough fibers made from interconnected plant cell walls run lengthwise through the canes. This dense, uniform array of microscopic filaments stiffens the canes, allowing just a little flex in strong winds. It takes tools as sharp as surgeons’ knives to excise thin slivers to make reeds for wind instruments. Only after blades have shaved the reed to translucent thinness can human hands or lips feel any springiness. In the sound of the woodwinds—oboes, clarinets, bassoons, saxophones, and others—we therefore hear one of the more extreme plant architectures, a skinny giant that yields material uncommonly lightweight yet very hard and stiff. Reed instruments in India, Southeast Asia, and China use plants with similar qualities, either giant canes, palm fronds, or bamboo. Reeds made from more diminutive grasses or from shaved tree wood produce soft or coarse sounds with inconsistent tone. The northern European whithorn and bramevac, for example, use willow bark reeds to evoke squeals from conical wooden horns, sounds that lack the fine control and predictability of cane- and bamboo-reeded instruments. Oboists play with the finest reeds of all. When I spoke with Sherry Sylar about her work, she told me that the oboist’s relationship with reeds is like woodworking, a precise craft of manipulating plant material. The oboist is both luthier of cane and musician.
The oboe’s bore and its finger holes sculpt the pressure waves within the instrument, pulsations that then push sound into the hall. It is the bore’s smoothness and taper, the bell’s flare, and the dimensions and sharpness of the finger holes’ many openings and edges that combine with the resonant properties of wood to give the instruments’ bodies their acoustic signature. Any warps, pits, cracks, uneven surfaces, or irregularities in proportions degrade the sound. Oboes and other wind instruments, then, need to hold their shape, surface gloss, edges, and proportions, even when bathed in the warm moisture of human breath. This calls for dense, smooth-grained wood. The predecessors of modern oboes and clarinets, shawms and hautboys, were made of boxwood, fruitwoods such as apple and pear, or tight-grained maple. These trees grow slowly, layering wood into themselves in thin yearly accretions. Similarly dense and smooth apricot wood is favored for the surnāy of western and central Asia and bamboo for Japan’s hichiriki.
Before the nineteenth century, the music of reed instruments flowed from the woods of their homelands. Now we often hear materials that have been transported from other continents. Most oboes and clarinets used by professional musicians, for example, are made from mpingo, also known as East African blackwood or grenadilla, or other tropical woods such as cocobolo or rosewood. These materials became available to European instrument makers after colonial occupations of Africa, South America, and Asia. The superior stability, density, and smoothness of these woods were ideal for instruments that are repeatedly bathed in human breath then dried, a process that cracks or warps other woods. Along with nineteenth-century innovations in metal sound-hole keys and levers, forest products shipped to Europe from tropical forests produced many of the instrument-making traditions that prevail today.
The Musical Instruments Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a short walk across Central Park from Lincoln Center, reveals the tangled relationships among local ecologies, colonial trade, and the craft of instrument making. At first, the galleries seem like mausoleums for sound. Silent instruments sit illuminated behind sheets of plateglass, reliquaries for the remains of music whose spirits have flown. The glass, polished wooden floors, and long, narrow dimensions of the galleries give the sound of footfalls and voices a lively, clattery feel, unlike the expansive warmth of concert halls, reinforcing the sense of isolation from musical sound. This initial impression evaporates, though, when I let go of the idea that this is a space for direct experience of sound. Instead, we can marvel here at stories of materiality, human ingenuity, and the relationships among cultures.
Like the Paleolithic mammoth-ivory flutes whose construction relied on the most sophisticated craft of their era, the instruments on display at the Met show how, across cultures and time, people have drawn on their highest forms of technology to create music. Trumpets and whistling jars from the precolonial South American Moche civilization reveal mastery of ceramics. Pipe organs were, for centuries, among the most complex machines in Western Europe. An Algerian rebab bowed lute and Ugandan ennanga harp show precise engineering of wood, skin, and string. The technologies of silk production, wood carving, lacquer, and ornamented inlay converge in a Chinese guqin, a long stringed instrument played on a tabletop or lap. In the twentieth century, industrial innovations appear, from electric guitars to plastic vuvuzela horns.
Precolonial instruments often used indigenous materials. Walking through the galleries is an education in the many ways that humans have sonified matter from their surroundings. Clay, shaped then fired, turns human breath and lip vibrations into amplified tones. Rocks turned to bells and strings reveal metallurgical connections to land. Plant matter is given voice in carved wood, stretched palm frond, and spun fiber. A bestiary of animals sings through taut skins and reshaped teeth and tusks. Each instrument is rooted in local ecological context. Condor feathers in South American pipes. Kapok wood, snake skins, antelope horn, and porcupine quills on African drums, harps, and lutes. Boxwood and brass in European oboes. Wood, silk, bronze, and stone in se, shiqing, and yunluo, Chinese percussive and stringed instruments. Music emerged from human relationship with the beyond-human world, its varied sounds around the world revealing not only the many forms of human culture but the diverse sonorous, reverberant properties of rock, soil, and living beings.
But for all its magnificent and often fine-grained ecological and cultural rootedness, human music is not narrowly provincial. Music’s power to connect stretches far beyond its unifying effects on listeners in the present moment. Music making binds the ecological, creative, and technological histories of seemingly distant cultures. Ideas and materials have moved from one place to another since the dawn of instrumental music. The swans whose bones gave Paleolithic artisans material for flutes were not part of the fauna of the tundra around the caves. Transport or trade brought the swan’s wing bones into the places where they became musical instruments. Human desires have driven trade for instrument making ever since. Listeners seek sound that pleases and moves them. Musicians demand stability and consistency from their instruments. Our eyes delight in the form, hue, and surface ornamentation of instruments, a visual complement to sonic beauty. All these qualities demand the best materials, stimuli for trade.
The extensive trade network that connected China, India, western Asia, North Africa, and Europe—the “silk road” of the first millennium CE, carried ivory east from Africa to Asia, silk strings west from China to Persia, and southern Asian tropical woods to temperate regions. Ideas about the forms of instruments moved alongside materials used in instrument making. Double-reed instruments and bowed stringed instruments came to Europe from Africa and western Asia. Lutes, drums, harps, and trumpets arrived in China from central and western Asia.
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial land seizures, forced labor, and rail and shipping networks brought new materials to European instrument makers. When a modern orchestra, folk group, or rock band takes the stage, the air comes alive with the sounds of vibrating plant and animal parts, the voices of forests and fields reanimated through human art. But we also hear the legacy of forced occupation and resource extraction, now turned to modern globalized trade. Melodies soar from hollowed mpingo wood in oboes and clarinets, a voice from East African savannahs. Electric guitarists press their hips into the mahogany bodies of their instruments and slide their fingers over Madagascan rosewood fingerboards, playing with slices of giant rain forest trees. String players bow with horsehair tensioned by South American Pernambuco wood. Many bows are tipped with ivory or tortoiseshell. All of these European instruments had long precolonial histories, grounded in local soils and materials, but were transformed into their modern forms, in part, by the export to Europe of materials from colonized lands. The changes wrought by colonialism create striking visual differences among the European instruments of different ages in the Met galleries. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, dark tropical woods and abundant use of ivory replaced much of the lighter boxwood, maple, and brass of earlier European instruments.
