Sounds Wild and Broken, page 27
The experience of music, then, embeds us not only in the ecology and history of the world, but in the particular qualities of the human body. One of these qualities is our special human ability to wield tools and craft ivory, wood, metal, and other earthly materials into instruments. Another is the musicians’ ability to animate these mergers within listeners’ bodies, through sound. Music incarnates us, literally “making us flesh.”
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Might the internal, subjective experience of human music also ground us in the earth and unite us with the experiences of other species? Our culture mostly says, no, music is uniquely human. Philosopher of music Andrew Kania tells us, for example, that the vocalizations of “non-human animals” are “examples of organized sound that are not music.” Further, because singing creatures like birds and whales “do not have the capacity to improvise or invent new melodies or rhythms,” they “should no more count as music than the yowling of cats.” Musicologist Irwin Godt concurs, writing that “the birds and bees may make pretty sounds . . . but despite the effusions of the poets, such sounds are not music by definition. . . . It makes no sense to muddy the waters with non-human sounds. This is a fundamental axiom.”
When I step outside the walls of the performance hall or seminar room, spaces whose “fundamental axiom” is the sensory exclusion of the beyond-human world, these ideas seem to me hard to defend.
If music is sensitivity and responsiveness to the vibratory energies of the world, then it dates back nearly four billion years to the first cells. When sound moves us, we are also united to bacteria and protists. Indeed, the cellular basis of hearing in humans is rooted in the same structures, cilia, possessed by many single-celled creatures, a fundamental property of much cellular life.
If music is sonic communication from one being to another, using elements that are ordered and repetitive, then music started with the insects, three hundred million years ago, then flourished and diversified in other animal groups, especially other arthropods and the vertebrates. From the katydids animating the night air in a city park, to the songbirds that greet the dawn, to the thumping fish and caroling whales of the oceans, to the musical works of humans, animal sound combines themes and variations, reiteration and hierarchical structure. To argue that music is sound organized only by “persons” and not “unthinking Nature,” as philosopher Jerrold Levinson has done, is akin to claiming that tools are material objects modified for particular use only by humans, thereby excluding the artisanal achievements of nonhumans like chimpanzees and crows. If personhood and the ability to think are the criteria by which to judge whether a sound is music, then music is a multiplicity encompassing the many forms of personhood and cognition in the living world. Erecting a human barrier around music in this way is artificial, not a reflection of the diversity of sound making and animal intelligences in the world.
If music is organized sound whose intent is wholly or partly to evoke aesthetic or emotional responses in listeners, as Godt and others claim, then the sounds of nonhuman animals must surely be included. This criterion aims, in part, to separate music from speech or emotional cries, a challenging line to draw even in humans where lyrical prose and poetry erode the division from one side and highly intellectualized forms of music chip away at the other. All animals live within their own subjective experiences of the world.
Nervous systems are diverse, and so the aesthetics and emotions that are part of these experiences no doubt take on multifarious textures across the animal kingdom. To deny that other animals have such subjective experiences is to ignore both our intuitions from lived experience (we understand that our pet dog is not a Cartesian machine) and the last fifty years of research into neurobiology, which now can map within the brains of nonhuman animals the sites from which emerge intention, motivation, thought, emotion, and even sensory consciousness. Laboratory and field studies show that nonhuman animals, from insects to birds, integrate sensory information with memory, hormonal states, inherited predispositions, and, in some, cultural preferences, producing changes in their physiology and behavior. We experience this rich confluence as aesthetics, emotion, and thought. All the biological evidence to date suggests that nonhuman animals do the same, each in their own way. For the cat, then, “yowling” is music if it stimulates aesthetic reactions in feline listeners. The subjective responses of other cats are the relevant criteria by which to judge the sound’s musicality. That we presently find it hard to access the sentient experience of cats demonstrates human technological and imaginative limitations, not the absence of music in their caterwauling. Further, the current models of the evolution of animal communication strongly suggest that the coevolution of aesthetics and sonic display explains much of the diversity of sound that we hear in other species. Sonic evolution without aesthetic experience has little diversifying power. Aesthetic definitions of music, then, are biologically pluralistic, unless we make the unsupported and improbable assumption that experiences of beauty are uniquely human.
If music is sound whose meaning and aesthetic value emerge from culture, and whose form changes through time by innovations that arise from creativity, then we share music with other vocal learners, especially whales and birds. In these species, as in humans, the reaction of individuals to sounds is largely mediated by social learning and culture. When a sparrow hears a mate or rival sing, the bird’s response depends on what it has learned of local sonic customs that have been passed down culturally. When a whale calls, it reveals to others its individual identity, clan affiliation, and, in some species, whether it is up-to-date on the latest song variants. These responses are aesthetic: subjective evaluation of sensory experience in the context of culture. Often this results in richly textured patterns of sonic variations across the species’ range. Cultural evolution in these species also changes sound through time, at a pace that is swift in some and leisurely in others, depending on their social dynamics. New sonic variations arise through diverse means: selecting sounds best suited to changing social and physical context, mimicking and modifying sounds from other individuals and species, and the invention of entirely new twists on old patterns. These diverse forms of animal music combine tradition and innovation, just as human music does.
If music is sound produced through modification of materials to make instruments and performance spaces in which to listen, then humans are nearly unique. Other animals use materials external to their bodies such as nibbled leaves or shaped burrows to make or amplify sounds but none make specially modified sound-producing tools, even the skilled toolmaking primates and birds. Music, then, separates us from other beings in the sophistication of our tools and architecture, but not in other regards. We are, as other musical animals are, sensing, feeling, thinking, and innovating beings, but we make our music with tools in a built environment of unique complexity and specialization.
As human musical sounds flow into us and move us, we are embedded in nested forms of music: the experience of themes and variations within the piece; the tension between novelty and tradition within the musical genre we are hearing; the cultural particularity and interconnectivity of the style of music we’re hearing; and the special form of music in the human species, an art form emerging from and living in relationship with the diversity of music in other species.
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Walking into the august spaces of Lincoln Center, I felt that the dominant narrative of our age was being forced onto me, an alienating falsehood: that we live apart from and above all other earthly beings. But, as the orchestra filled the hall with sound, I was plunged back into reality, a joyful return.
Animality. Connection. Belonging. No wonder we feel music so deeply. We have come home. Home to the nature of our bodies, both in the sensory present and through evolutionary history. Home to the ecological connections that give us life. Home to the beauty and fissures in our relationships with other cultures, lands, and species.
On the program that night were three compositions that told stories of belonging, connection, and fracture: Steven Stucky’s “Elegy,” from his longer work August 4, 1964; Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto; and Julia Wolfe’s Fire in My Mouth. Copland’s piece draws North American jazz and South American popular music into twentieth-century North American orchestral music. Instead of looking back, resurrecting the sounds of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European concert halls, the work seeks to interweave American musical ideas with European orchestral traditions. Stucky and Wolfe explore pivotal moments in US histories of war, and of civil and workers’ rights. Wolfe also draws our imaginations into the materiality of instruments and everyday objects. In her evocations of the sounds of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and the terrible fire that killed many of its workers, she calls on violin bows whishing through air, fingernails on the varnish of wooden instruments, books thrown to the ground, and the coordinated snap of hundreds of scissors. This music—beautiful, troubling, opening—deepens our capacity to feel the injustices of past and present, and to understand how protest and societal change rise out of grief, offering an invitation to connect with the wounds of the past and the questions of the present. Art here is not an anesthetizing ornament but part of the human quest for meaning. I walked out of the sound-proofed hall and onto the plaza moved and inspired.
Music wakens or deepens within us the capacity to experience beauty through connection to others. This has been sound’s role in the animal kingdom for hundreds of millions of years, now expressed in our species as one of the most powerful experiences we can have of our own bodies, emotions, and thoughts, and those of others. This is why we make music at moments of importance in our lives and at times of significant transition: in civic and religious gatherings, and in the lives of communities joining couples and burying the dead.
Now our power, greed, ignorance, and insouciance have ignited global crises of mass extinction, climate, and injustice. We need more than ever to listen to others with our bodies, emotions, and minds. Can we expand the circle of who and what is included in this “other” that we come to know through music? Because music is both fully human and entirely of this earth, music embodies interconnection and belonging. This remains true even when we wrap ourselves in architectures and cultural practices that evince separation and superiority. The belief in a maestro species, “he who is greater,” can be dissolved by music’s unifying powers. Experiences of musical beauty can knit us back into life’s community. But we must first choose to listen.
PART V
Diminishment, Crisis, and Injustice
Forests
The spicy aroma of bruised sassafras leaves envelops me as I stride under a canopy of oak. Thorny greenbriars snatch my legs. I dodge the nastiest tangles in the understory, but mostly I try to walk a straight line. A pedometer on my hip counts paces: 260, equal to 200 meters from the last survey point. I swing my backpack to the ground and retrieve a clipboard. A tick clambers over the tape that I’ve used to seal socks to trouser legs, a defense against the dozens, sometimes hundreds, of blood seekers I encounter each day. Pluck, pinch, flick. Gone.
I jab the stopwatch and pour my attention into my ears, keeping eyes on the forest canopy.
Husky voice, phrases of four up and down notes. Scarlet tanager, twenty meters away.
Chippy-chup, a flutter of high sound. Two American goldfinches, twenty-five meters away.
Slurred, bright phrases, alternating inflections up and down, a question and an answer. He sings, Where are you? There you are. Red-eyed vireo, close, only five meters away, above me on a maple branch.
Two crows fly over, caw caw-CAW.
In the distance, fifty meters away, a rapidly modulated whistle, building to an emphatic end, we-a-we-a-WEE-TEE-EE. Hooded warbler.
Click. Five minutes are up. Scrawl on the datasheet: “Transect V, point 2. Time: 0610. Wind: Beaufort 2. Temperature: 25°C. Vegetation: white oak and red maple canopy; sourwood, blueberry, and sassafras understory.” I pull out a range finder and turn its dial as I gaze through the two eyepieces, checking my distance estimates. Stow the gear. Sip of water. Two hundred and sixty paces to the next five-minute count. Repeat five hundred times.
From mid-May to mid-June, over two years, I threaded survey lines across the forests, tree plantations, and rural settlements of the southern Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee, on land that forced removals took from its Cherokee citizens in the 1830s. A satellite photograph of the region now shows a swath of green tree canopy running from Kentucky to Alabama through a landscape otherwise dominated by agriculture and urban areas. The region is one of the largest blocks of forest in the eastern United States. Unlike the National Forest and National Park lands to the east, the forests here are mostly privately owned. As the largest temperate forested plateau in the world, the region is a biodiversity hotspot, especially for salamanders, migrant birds, land snails, and flowering plants. The Natural Resources Defense Council calls the region a threatened biogem. The Open Space Institute has three funds dedicated to land conservation in the region.
At the time of my surveys, in 2000 and 2001, the diverse oak and hickory forests of the region were being leveled and turned to monoculture plantations of loblolly pine trees, a species native farther south and much favored by the pulp industry for its rapid growth. At the time, timber corporations and state agencies either denied that conversion of forest to plantation was underway or claimed that the change was of little consequence to biodiversity, pointing at housing development as the main threat to the region’s forests. Aerial photographs refuted the denial, showing an accelerating rate of forest clearing and plantation establishment. The effects of forest loss on biodiversity were harder to pin down. These changes cannot be seen from aerial photographs. But they can be heard, and so I set out into the woods with a clipboard to listen.
A complete inventory of all the species in any landscape is impossible. We don’t know the identity of most microbes and many small invertebrates. Among known species, enumerating each one could occupy dozens of scientists for years. Conservationists therefore focus their efforts, hoping that samples of a few species will reveal patterns relevant to all. In forests, surveys of birds are the most commonly used technique to rapidly assess biological diversity. Birds are sensitive to changes in vegetation, insect abundance, and the physical structure of habitats. Their populations are like probes into the hidden properties of habitats. Many species could serve this role, but birds have a special advantage. They sing. A few minutes of listening can reveal the outlines of a bird community. Sampling other species requires hours of sifting through soil, setting out traps, examining specimens in the hand or under a microscope, or sequencing DNA. Birdsong also entrances human senses, and many naturalists have spent years learning and appreciating their sounds. Finding skilled birders is easier than finding qualified nematode, fungus, plant, or insect taxonomists. Birds also stimulate human concern more than many other animals. Compared with studies of less charismatic creatures, studies of birds yield information more immediately appealing to human aesthetics and ethics. Song, evolved to mediate social interactions within species, is now a conduit for humans to listen across species boundaries.
Clearing the land for a pine plantation is a brutal assault. First, every tree is cut. Sometimes the trees—oaks, hickories, maples, and a dozen more species—are taken to mills to be pulverized into cardboard or, for the larger logs, sawn into lumber. Much of the forest is stacked in piles the size of churches and burned. Any remaining saplings and understory are then bulldozed. Trucks or helicopters finish the job of “suppression” with herbicide. Without poison, many of the forest plants would resprout. Millennia of fires and windstorms have taught the vegetation to rebound. But the plantation demands not resilience from the former forest, but near annihilation. Rivulets and forest wetlands were often bulldozed along with the forest. Downstream, what were clear mountain streams ran like chocolate milk, so opaque that I could not see my skin through the water in my cupped hands.
Clearing complete, immigrant laborers, mostly teenagers and young men, plant rows of pine saplings from nurseries. The pay, according to a 2003 study in Alabama, is between $0.015 and $0.06 per tree. A fast planter can make $80 a day, ten times the rate of pay for agricultural work in Mexico. The work is hard and the pace unrelenting. In the words of one planting contractor from Alabama, “We have offered up to $9/hour without a single American worker lasting more than 3 days. . . . It’s not a good job. Without the migrant workers, agriculture and forestry would die in this country.” The newsprint and toilet papers that come from these plantations exact a heavy toll on both the land and human bodies. They also contribute little to local economies. Local government officials complained that logging trucks do not even buy their fuel in the counties where the plantations grow.
Short of a layer of asphalt, it is hard to imagine a more thorough transformation of the forest. The change is evident to any resident or visitor. But human testimony from these lands is rare. The timber company owns tens of thousands of acres. There are no settlements on the land, few public roads into the heart of these operations, and the surrounding rural counties are sparsely populated. Stories of the forest seldom leave these places. Scientific measurement can be a missive from an otherwise unheard landscape. Science is not only a process of study and discovery, it is also a way to bear witness, albeit via human ears listening to a tiny portion of the forest community’s many inhabitants.
