Sounds Wild and Broken, page 26
Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European colonizers picked out the material most pleasing to their ears and most useful to instrument-making workshops. A few European materials made the grade and were retained, even as “exotic” woods and animal parts became more readily available. Spruce and maple, especially, remained the favored wood for the bodies of stringed instruments and the soundboards of pianos. Calfskin topped tympani. These European materials were joined by ivory, favored for its workability and stability, and tropical woods whose density, smoothness, elasticity, and tones met musical needs: mpingo’s tight, silky grain; Pernambuco’s extraordinary strength, elasticity, and responsiveness; rosewood’s warmth and stability; and padauk’s resonance. These tropical woods all belong to the same taxonomic family, tree cousins to the beans, and have tight-grained, dense wood from slow-growing trees. Most take seventy or more years to reach harvestable age. On a concert stage, we hear the voices of tree elders.
The industrial economy continues the same path, plucking materials and energy from around the world. Long-buried algae drilled from oil wells are distilled and polymerized into plastic keyboards. Amplifiers are plugged into an electric grid powered by the incineration of mined coal, the flow of water through dammed rivers, or the decay of mined uranium rock.
The tropical woods and ivory most favored for instrument making are now mostly threatened or endangered. Nineteenth-century exploitation has turned to twenty-first-century ruination. Demand for materials for musical instruments, though, was not the primary cause of many of these losses. The volume of ivory used for violin bows and bassoon rings was dwarfed by exports for tableware handles, billiard balls, religious carvings, and ornaments, although piano keys consumed hundreds of thousands of pounds of tusks in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Pernambuco was extirpated from most of its range not by violin bow makers, but through overharvesting for dye made from its crimson heartwood. The country Brazil gets its name from brasa, “ember” in Portuguese, for the glowing-coal color of the wood whose trade was so important in the founding of the country.
Mpingo woodlands are in decline, driven by export for instruments and flooring, and by local uses for carving. Compounding the problem of overharvesting is the twisting, gnarled form of mpingo trunks. Carving straight billets for oboes and clarinets from such wood is challenging, and often less than 10 percent of the cut log is usable. Rosewoods, often used for guitar fingerboards, are mostly exported for furniture, with more wood in one bed frame or cabinet than in any guitar shop. Although trade in many rosewood species is restricted by international law, the wood is now so valuable that financial speculators and luxury goods manufacturers drive an illegal market worth billions of dollars yearly.
The sound of contemporary music is therefore a product of past colonialism and present-day trade, but, with very few exceptions, it is not a driver of species endangerment. Indeed, the relationships between musicians and their instruments—often built over decades of daily bodily connection—serve as an inspiring example of how we might live in better relationship to forests. An oboe or violin contains less wood than a chair or stack of magazines, yet this single instrument yields beauty and utility for decades, sometimes centuries. Contrast this with the culture of overexploitation and disposability that pervades so much of our relationship to material objects and their sources. For example, we threw out more than twelve million tons of furniture in the United States in 2018, 80 percent of it buried in landfills, most of the rest burned, and only one-third of 1 percent recycled. Much of this furniture was sourced from tropical forests, often supplied to the United States through manufacturing hubs in Asia. Such trade is increasing and the World Wildlife Fund states that the “world’s natural forests cannot sustainably meet the soaring global demand for timber products.” If the rest of our economy took as much care of wood products as musicians do of their instruments, the deforestation crisis would be greatly eased.
Driven to action by a desire to honor the materials with which they work, some musicians and luthiers are now at the forefront of seeking alternatives to the exploitative use of wood, ivory, and other materials from threatened species. This is especially important work because musical instruments are now far more numerous than in past centuries. More than ten million guitars and hundreds of thousands of violins are made annually. Such volume of trade cannot be built on rare woods. It is therefore now possible, with some searching, to find instruments made from wood certified to come from sustainable logging operations. The Forest Stewardship Council, for example, puts its stamp of approval on several new lines of instruments. The Mpingo Conservation & Development Initiative in southeastern Tanzania promotes community-based forest management where local residents own, manage, and benefit from mpingo and other woodland species, managing forests sustainably to help the local economy. Instrument makers are also introducing new materials, relieving pressure on endangered woods. Until the late twentieth century, only twenty tree species provided most of the wood for guitars, violins, violas, cellos, mandolins, and other Western stringed instruments. Today the variety of wood sources for instrument making has increased to more than one hundred species. Alongside this diversification of natural products, manufactured materials like carbon fiber and wood laminate are substituting for solid wood.
In the decades that come, unless our path changes, it will not be the overharvesting of particularly valuable species that challenges our sources of wood and animal parts for instruments. Instead, the loss of entire forest ecosystems will remake the relationship between human music and the land. The forests from which we now draw our most precious musical raw materials are in decline. In the first dozen years of this century, forest loss exceeded gain by nearly three times, a global net reduction of more than 1.5 million square kilometers. Tropical forests fared worst, followed by the spruce and other boreal forests of the north. Increasing fire, forest clearing for commodity crops, and changing climate will likely accelerate these changes in coming decades. Music will, in future, still give voice to the Earth, just as it always has. It will tell of the ancient bond between ecosystems and human artistry but also of extinction, technological change, and the subjugation of forests by human appetites.
A few old instruments—carefully tended by musicians—now evoke the memory of the departed or degraded forests. On the stage at Lincoln Center, we hear woods from past decades and centuries. Sherry Sylar plays on oboes whose woods were harvested decades ago in the early twentieth century. Each one has a “passport” documenting the wood’s provenance, showing that it was not obtained through recent cutting of now-endangered trees. When we talked, she described how some colleagues scour the country for sales of older oboes, hoping to find instruments with good wood from ages past. The music of Sylar’s violinist colleague, Sheryl Staples, comes from a Guarneri violin. Its woods are at least three hundred years old, harvested from spruce and maple forests that grew on a preindustrial Earth. Although wood for instruments still comes from the Fiemme Valley forests in northern Italy that supplied Guarneri and Stradivarius, springtime there now comes earlier, summer is hotter, and winter snowpack is diminished compared with that of previous centuries. This yields wood with a looser, less sonorous grain than the tight woods of past centuries. In another hundred years, it is likely that heat, droughts, and changed rainfall will push alpine forests off these mountain slopes. Music often now speaks of the Earth as it was, not as it is, a memory carried in wood grain.
Sitting in my seat at the Lincoln Center, I arrive in intimate contact with the world’s forests—their past and future—and the history of human trade. The sounds of the orchestra are worldly, immersing me in the beauty and brokenness of both biodiversity and human history. Music is not transcendent or abstracted, it is immanent and embodied. In a time where forests are in crisis and mass extinction is underway within life’s community, it is perhaps time to unshroud and honor these relationships from which music blooms.
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I first held a violin in my late forties. Placing it under my chin, I let go an impious expletive, astonished by the instrument’s connection to mammalian evolution. In my ignorance, I had not realized that violinists not only tuck instruments against their necks, but they also gently press them against their lower jawbones. Twenty-five years of teaching biology primed me, or perhaps produced a strange bias in me, to experience holding the instrument as a zoological wonder. Under the jaw, only skin covers the bone. The fleshiness of our cheeks and the chewing muscle of the jaw start higher, leaving the bottom edge open. Sound flows through air, of course, but waves also stream from the violin’s body, through the chin rest, directly to the jawbone and thence into our skull and inner ears.
Music from an instrument pressed into our jaw: these sounds take us directly back to the dawn of mammalian hearing and beyond. Violinists and violists transport their bodies—and listeners along with them—into the deep past of our identity as mammals, an atavistic recapitulation of evolution.
The first vertebrate animals to crawl onto land were relatives of the modern lungfish. Over 30 million years, starting 375 million years ago, these animals turned fleshy fins into limbs with digits and air-sucking bladders into lungs. In water, the inner ear and the lateral line system on fish’s skin detected pressure waves and the motion of water molecules. But on land the lateral line system was useless. Sound waves in air bounced off the solid bodies of animals, instead of flowing into them as they did underwater. In water, these animals were immersed in sound. On land, they were mostly deaf.
Mostly deaf, but not totally. The first land vertebrates inherited from their fishy forebears inner ears, fluid-filled sacs or tubes filled with sensitive hair cells for balance and hearing. Unlike the elongate, coiled tubes in our inner ears, these early versions were stubby and populated only with cells sensitive to low-frequency sounds. Loud sounds in air—the growl of thunder or crash of a falling tree—would have been powerful enough to penetrate the skull and stimulate the inner ear. Quieter sounds—footfalls, wind-stirred tree movements, the motions of companions—arrived not in air, but up from the ground, through bone. The jaws and finlike legs of these first terrestrial vertebrates served as bony pathways from the outside world to the inner ear.
One bone became particularly useful as a hearing device, the hyomandibular bone, a strut that, in fish, controls the gills and gill flaps. In the first land vertebrates, the bone jutted downward, toward the ground, and ran upward deep into the head, connecting to the bony capsule around the ear. Over time, freed from its role as a regulator of gills, the hyomandibula took on a new role as a conduit for sound, evolving into the stapes, the middle ear bone now found in all land vertebrates (save for a few frogs that secondarily lost the stapes). At first, the stapes was a stout shaft, both conveying groundborne vibrations to the ear and strengthening the skull. Later, it connected to the newly evolved eardrum and became a slender rod. We now hear, in part, with the help of a repurposed fish gill bone.
After the evolution of the stapes, innovations in hearing unfolded independently in multiple vertebrate groups, each taking its own path, but all using some form of eardrum and middle ear bones to transmit sounds in air to the fluid-filled inner ear. The amphibians, turtles, lizards, and birds each came up with their own arrangements, all using the stapes as a single middle ear bone. Mammals took a more elaborate route. Two bones from the lower jaw migrated to the middle ear and joined the stapes, forming a chain of three bones. This triplet of middle ear bones gives mammals sensitive hearing compared with many other land vertebrates, especially in the high frequencies. For early mammals, palm-sized creatures living 200 million to 100 million years ago, a sensitivity to high-pitched sounds would have revealed the presence of singing crickets and the rustles of other small prey, giving them an advantage in the search for food. But before this, in the 150 million years between their emergence onto land and their evolution of the mammalian middle ear, our ancestors remained deaf to the sounds of insects and other high frequencies, just as we, today, cannot hear the calls and songs of “ultrasonic” bats, mice, and singing insects.
The evolutionary transformation of parts of the lower jaw of premammalian reptiles into the modern mammal middle ear is recorded in a sequence of fossilized bones, stony memories from hundreds of millions of years ago. As embryos, we each also relive the journey. During our development, our lower jaw first appears as a string of interconnected small bones. But these bones do not fuse into a single lower jaw as they do in living or ancient reptiles. Instead, the connections among them dissolve. One bone becomes the malleus of the middle ear. Another becomes the incus bone that connects the malleus to the stapes. A third curls into the ring that holds our eardrum. And one elongates into our single lower jawbone.
When I lifted the violin to my neck and felt its touch on my jawbone, my mind filled with imaginings of ancient vertebrates. These ancestors heard through their lower jaws as vibrations flowed from the ground, to jaw and gill bones, to the inner ear. The violin drew me into a reenactment of this pivotal moment in the evolution of hearing, without the indignity of prostrating myself. High art meets deep time? Not in my incapable hands, but certainly in the artistry of accomplished musicians.
Bone conduction of sound gives violinists a different experience of sound than their listeners. Most of the sound flows through air, joining player and audience. But sound waves also flow up through the jaw, turning the bones of the head into resonators that fatten the experience, especially for low notes. These vibrations also run down through the shoulder, into the chest. Playing the violin without such bodily contact—resting it on a spongy cloth against the shoulder and forgoing jaw contact—yields an insipid experience. The instrument feels distant, even though it sounds loudly in our ears.
The violin’s form gives it a special connection to the far recesses of our evolution, but this is just one of the many ways the human body is intimately connected to the materiality of instruments.
From our seats in the hushed auditorium, we listen and watch: Fingertips brush, press, and slide along strings. Cellos stir the skin and muscles of inner thighs. Reeds tremble between wet lips. Breath flows across the open mouths of flutes. Hands, arms, and shoulders pound tympani and send shudders through maracas. Lungs cry out through trembling lips, their agitations shaped and amplified by brass coils soaked through on the inside with the moisture of human breath.
Through the orchestra, we experience a direct connection not only to the distant stories of ear bone evolution but also to the living presence of animal sensuality. The groin-thrusting and guitar-neck stroking of rock musicians is the most unsubtle example, but these antics pale in comparison to the diverse bodily intimacies on display at an orchestral concert. The composition of music often tells of desire, passion, or heartbreak, stories or emotions all the more powerful for being evoked not as abstractions, but as products of moving lips, flowing blood, activated nerves, and animated breath, the bodily homes of love and erotic desire.
But music’s relation to the human body is far more than this. A catalog of the many ways that musicians’ bodies connect to their instruments sounds racy partly because we live in a culture where sensuality is equated with sexuality. Music, though, gives voice to the diverse ways that the body can give us sensual experience. Sexual, sometimes yes. But the body also grieves, exults, bonds, explores, strives, hungers, builds, and rests. An accomplished musician—through their intimate relationship with their instrument or voice, built through years of muscular, sensory, intellectual, and aesthetic training—invites us into these experiences. Every note is an extension of bodily movement, a sonic pathway from the interior of one person to another. Nerve to nerve we connect, sound wiring us into “the other.” Even the tempi of music are manifestations of our body, beats that often reflect the one-two rhythm of bipedal walking, ticking within a range that exactly spans the pumping rate of the human heart.
If you play an instrument, you understand. My own amateur relationships with the violin and guitar connect me back into my body. The guitar’s sound waves leap into my chest, up into the throat, a centering flow. Singing with the guitar is a matter of unifying vocal folds with the vibratory tones of wood. The song is breath, flesh, and forest. The violin takes me deeper into chimeric union. Every knot or strap of muscular tension reveals itself through the bow and its rosined passage over strings. A hairbreadth’s difference in the position and angle of fingers on fingerboard levers tone up, down, or into blurry hesitation. I ease my neck and shoulders, and the sound clarifies, like a gleam from sunlight on clear water. But my experiences are shallow compared with those immersed in the discipline and artistry of instrumental music. Sherry Sylar told me, “Playing the oboe is an addiction for me, I feel grounded when I play it, the sound resonates throughout my body. It is an organic experience that nothing else quite replicates.” A live concert invites listeners into the simultaneous and unified experience of dozens or hundreds of such bodily exultations.
