For the Yanomami, the rhythms and melodies of rain striking vegetation and the surface of puddles are strong features of their traditional music, as they are for other groups living in tropical rain forests—including the Jivaro. A tribe once completely isolated in the tropical Brazilian mountains and rain forests, the Yanomami use rainsticks to incorporate their acoustic environment in their ceremonies and music. Their soundscapes include the sound that the thickest leaves in the forest canopy make as they strike one another in uncoordinated contact, oscillating in breezes that precede afternoon thunderstorms. As I mentioned previously, the forceful torrent of rain at the leading edge of rainforest squalls sounds incredibly loud—it comes on so fast that there is no way to avoid it. The sensation is one of anticipation, which is translated into music as dynamic expression contrasted with quiet passages. When the rain passes and the downpour eases off in the distance, the forest soundscape returns in a slow, transitioned cross-fade with the added feeling of reverberation, which was not as present before the storm. In the wet forest every voice echoes with extended life and energy.
At times like these, the Ba’Aka women will scatter throughout the dense Dzanga-Sangha to gather seeds and fruit, and to sing in bursts of sound, picking up on the bird and insect voices that have returned since the storm moved on. The women’s singing reverberates for nearly ten seconds throughout the forest before fading out, leaving the dreamlike impression that their voices go on forever.
Of course, the Ba’Aka are a living culture, and their music remains fluid—especially when outside influences encroach on tradition. Contemporary impacts on Ba’Aka music come primarily from two sources: contact with recorded and broadcast media, and missionaries. Over the last few years, their music has begun to shift, reflecting influences of more restricted modern harmonies and rhythm. Now, with the Ba’Aka’s neocolonial contact with the cash economies of China, France, Belgium, Germany, and other countries—where many forms of resource extraction are endemic—the older, more restorative societal structures are quickly breaking down, and the fragile connections that once bound the Ba’Aka emotionally and practically to their roots has been corrupted. Because they rely more and more on the economic models of civilization, members of the Ba’Aka have been forced into prostitution, poaching, the black-market distribution of drugs and cigarettes, and trafficking in rare animal parts. Contact has also introduced diseases that have proven to be particularly virulent given the group’s low resistance.
In general, missionaries are fairly selective when it comes to the souls they wish to save. Because there is nothing of great monetary value to be gotten from the Ba’ Aka—no exotic skins, medicinal plants, minerals, or gemstones—and access to their remote forests is difficult, evangelists, until the recent discovery of rain-forest hardwoods, have been slow to reach out to them with any fervor. But they have had some presence in Ba’Aka communities for decades, and within the past half century several denominations declared that the music and dance of the Ba’Aka weren’t spiritual enough for the sensitive ears of the Trinity. Their “primitive” music was discouraged on the grounds that, by performing it, the confused converted would never be able to enjoy the benefits of eternal salvation. Finding only minimal comfort in modern spiritual certitude and the faux excitement generated by electronically produced music, the Ba’Aka are now in the midst of a struggle to temper the seductive influences of contemporary media in favor of their ancient links with the living world.
Unlike the Ba’Aka’s music, Western song hasn’t been inspired by the biophony for thousands of years. Rather, like many of our art forms, our music is self-referential—we continuously draw on what has already been done, traversing a never-ending closed loop that turns in on itself like a snake devouring its own tail. We have thrown everything at the medium—electronics, mathematically structured scales and composition, logic, emotion, religious constraints, combinations of instruments, indiscriminate source materials (such as sound samples of birds, mammals, vacuums, cannons, city ambience, and banging trash cans)—and yet true holistic connections to the soundscapes of the wild have hardly been tapped as sources of inspiration.
CHAPTER SIX
Different Croaks for
Different Folks
Although the Muir Woods recordings were primitive in quality, Paul Beaver and I were staggered by how forceful the raw material was, just hearing it on its own. We often found ourselves in the studio, listening to the soundscapes not so much for inspiration or as a respite from our labors but for the experience of being mesmerized for long periods absorbing the ambient material, playing it over and over, conjuring images of what the sounds might visually represent. Even Paul, who had little affinity to the natural world, would sit alone in the studio quietly assimilating the tracks. I now realize that we were rediscovering by accident a part of the living world that our culture had by and large forsaken.
During the process of composing In a Wild Sanctuary, Paul and I were immediately faced with a dilemma. How would we integrate natural sound into musical structure, when we were so uncertain about the idea of natural sound as music? We had no clue at the time that it, too, might have structure, and we were both new to the concept of integrating a wholly foreign audio component into more familiar forms; we spent many hours experimenting with textures, relative levels, and musical timbres and rhythms before we determined that natural sound and music, as we had come to understand them, were at least aesthetically compatible.
I find it ironic that I am writing a book about something that our ancestors knew intuitively—something that would have been a fundamental part of the fabric of their lives and that needed no explanation. Early humans would have had an intimate relationship with their soundscapes; they would have learned to “read” the biophony for essential information. Their music would have been an intricate, multilayered transformation of the sounds they were immersed in—the local creature life as a collective, as well as the sounds of the landscape.
Our music always reflects our influences—our background, education, culture, and links to the environment in which we surround ourselves. Yet when composers of the past three centuries or so promoted their works as being connected to nature, our own idealized version of nature was reflected back to us in a narrowly closed loop. Mostly it consisted of single voices picked for how each might be incorporated in our compositions in a predetermined way—nothing but faint echoes of the wild. How did our music become so detached from nature? Is anyone making music today that reflects our deep ancestral links to the wild? And how would our music sound if we could somehow harness all the experience and technologies we possess and find a way to reconnect once again with the nonhuman creature world for one brief moment?
• • •
Our adversarial relationship with the natural world found traction at early stages of written history. Around the third millennium BCE, much of the land east of the Mediterranean was covered with vast cedar and pine forests—resources that supplied the people of the Fertile Crescent with firewood and building materials, sustaining the populations with abundant sources of food. It was a woodland so beautiful and rich that it is considered to be one of the possible inspirations for the mythological Garden of Eden mentioned in the Book of Genesis. But as human numbers grew and struggles for dominance over limited resources materialized, the area changed rapidly.
There is an early reference to the razing of the cedar forests in the Epic of Gilgamesh. As the story unfolds, Gilgamesh—a historical Mesopotamian character who ruled Uruk (now Iraq) around 2500 BCE but who has been transformed through many narratives into a demigod with superhuman powers—decided to ensure his status by constructing a huge wall, ramparts, and a temple. The problem was that the forests were thought to be a dwelling place for the Mesopotamian gods and therefore off-limits to human beings. The cedar forests were guarded by the demon Humbaba, who protected them from all comers. Not to be denied access, Gilgamesh and his army attacked Humbaba at a vulnerable moment a
nd prevailed. “So Gilgamesh felled the trees of the forests and Enkidu cleared their roots as far as the bank of the Euphrates.” (Enkidu was a companion of Gilgamesh who was supposed to symbolize a close connection to the wild natural world.) In the forest, they cut the tallest trees, built rafts, and floated the materials down the river to Uruk, where construction on the city gate and ramparts began.
While at first this activity had little impact on the forest, it did fuel the drive for further extraction by the Phoenicians—the gods had been overcome and the chain of protection broken—who used the timbers to construct their boats and cities. But the greatest impact didn’t occur until a few hundred years later.
According to biblical accounts, around three thousand years ago King Solomon hired seventy thousand axmen and eighty thousand haulers and ordered the cedar forests of Lebanon cut down for the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem—the first literary instance of a massive and disastrous clear-cut that to this day has lingering consequences. A few patches of the cedars and secondary-growth pine forests that once stretched between Jerusalem and Bethlehem survived into the nineteenth century. Now, except for a small number of biological island reserves—such as the Al-Shouf Cedar Nature Reserve, which contains three small cedar groves representing a quarter of the remaining trees in the country—they are all gone.
Ecohistorians have determined that the great initial loss of the Lebanese forests may have instigated a regional biomic change, causing much of the area to be overcome by desert because the deforestation and agriculture so radically altered the water table, streams, and river systems. Wildlife lost its fragile hold in the region. While we have no idea what the old forests sounded like, with their special mix of creature life, we do know, from the selective and clear-cut logging I and many of my recording colleagues have experienced, that the disappearance of a land cover of trees means the destruction of relevant biophonies.
In the first and most often cited of several biblical creation myths in Genesis 1:28, we are mandated to conquer, fill, and subject the earth to our will, driving a wedge between humans and the wild and setting the stage for our culture’s view of nature. But the proactive tide against “nature” advanced in earnest around the fourth century. After the Nicene Council, dance was judged to have overtones of sacrilege, hedonism, and paganism—things to avoid if one wanted spiritual purification. The human body itself, undulating and suggestive in many forms of dance—and considered evil in its wildest state—was deemed suspect and threatening to authority. While music and dance were still part of early Christian rituals in the first and second centuries, the eroticism and animism they suggested, particularly free from institutional constraints, were still a bit too liberating for an ascetic priesthood bent on controlling the newly converted and illiterate populations.
The Roman emperor Constantine asked his priests to put a label on what was considered the wild—the unknowable, uncertain, uncontrollable, dangerous, and untrustworthy. The word they chose was natura. (Note the Latin feminine ending.) “At enmity with God” (a common early Church interpretation of the word), nature was also referred to as the “carnal mind.” Those who wished to live in harmony with the natural world were considered to be primitive, unenlightened, wicked, pagan, or all of the above. Given the Church’s unparalleled influence on European culture, this suspicion and fear of the wild became a strong and persistent undercurrent of developing Western thought.
Different types of music were discouraged or banned outright, especially that which originated with early Christian groups such as the Gnostics—both they and their music were thought by the council to be too secular. Thus began a millennium of various degrees of musical suppression. In the Middle Ages, a notable peak in the intensity of these divine limitations, the Church went so far as to ban the augmented fourth interval—considered the “devil’s note.” (This is the interval from C-natural to F-sharp—the opening two notes of the song “Maria” from West Side Story, for example.) Secular music was rebuffed, and only certain types of religious-based compositions were allowed. Savonarola’s Florentine reign during the closing days of the fifteenth century was marked by the famous “bonfire of the vanities,” a historic moment when particular music and musical instruments went up in flames along with other cultural artifacts such as books—and paintings by Botticelli, who got so swept up in the group hysteria that he tossed many of his own works into the inferno.
Until very recently a similar restriction was imposed on indigenous cultures such as the Ba’Aka, who, when first visited by European missionaries, were strongly dissuaded from performing their ancient music. According to Chuna McIntyre, a Yup’ik Eskimo singer and dancer, when evangelists finally made contact with his family in the southwestern region of Alaska a few years after the turn of the last century, his tribe’s music was suppressed in favor of sanctioned Christian hymns. As the Native music was driven underground, it was furtively kept alive by the elders in his tribe—McIntyre secretly learned the old songs and drumming and dance routines from his grandmother. Shortly before her death in the early 1990s, he recorded them. More recently, Russian Orthodox and Moravian church leaders have been less resistant to the old religion and its songs, and the Yup’ik once again perform their Native music as part of the sustaining and open voice of the community.
Massing into protected enclaves such as perched villages and walled cities, Europeans ventured less frequently into the natural world, partly because forest resources near villages were being depleted (and were thus farther away) and becoming inaccessible. Their increasing ability to grow and store food necessitated the expansion of fortifications built to repel invasion and theft. “Nature” took on a mantle of myth exaggerated through narratives of its perils—dangerous, child-consuming beasts and dark, foreboding forests where those who ventured too far were likely to encounter grave danger. Despite our deep psychic connection to the heart of the natural world, the idea of wildness that was central to the social fabric of our ancestral groups was repressed, characterized as embodying evil, and/or framed as irrelevant.
Even by the thirteenth century, when Thomas Aquinas formalized the notion that the soul was unique to humans, Westerners had no longer expressed much need to articulate music through the voices of animals. The divine had taken a different tack. The sacred message of Genesis was firmly in place. The view of the wild as a resource—one of wood, skins to make us warm, meat and selective flora to keep our stomachs full, metals to produce plowshares and weapons, and animal and fossil fuels to use for heating and cooking—was firmly entrenched.
Beginning around 1200 BCE (when music was first notated), instead of performing with the sounds of the natural world, we gradually began to express ourselves musically—both inside and outside our protected cities—by arranging solo or ensemble sound performances on their own merits. Even the musical instruments of early humans—the bone, stone, and reedlike artifacts discovered on forest floors and in caves—had ranges of expressiveness that reached, in some cases, far beyond their original mimetic intent, thus freeing musicians to expand their creations outside the limits of wild sound.
With its roots becoming more obscured over time, Western music in particular went through a medieval stage of internalized and somber holiness. The music favored by the clergy was performed in religious venues, where thick stone walls were designed in part to create the auditory illusion of expanded interior spaces through long reverberation. At the same time—intentional or not—the substantial partitions kept the sounds of the natural world from intruding. Sacred (and even secular) music became a diminished reflection of the wild aspects of a feral human soul. Although forest spirits had at one time been celebrated in early musical forms, these medieval tendencies toward inwardness and detachment were significant departures from the ecstasy that our bond to nature had once stirred.
From the Renaissance to the present, Western culture has ardently drawn its understanding of the world from the growing influence of science. Examples of
such influence can be found in the work of Renaissance painters such as Giotto, da Vinci, Raphael, and Brueghel, who inserted idyllically sanitized scenes in their nature images, exacerbating the notion that humans can improve on what is inherently chaotic. This same vision inspired the reactive designs of well-crafted parks such as the Tuileries (Paris), Hyde Park (London), Central Park (New York), and the gardens at Versailles—each one marketed as a rational improvement on the wild Eden.
At about the same time that scientists of the eighteenth century began accumulating and studying animals, collecting them in large numbers from their wild habitats, curing the skins in arsenic and storing them in museum drawers, the father of taxonomy, Linnaeus, devised a way of categorizing every organism. While immensely helpful to organizing the specific details of our environment, taxonomy intensified the trend toward imposing our own sense of order on the natural world. Nature, for us, became a contradictory and fragmented collection of single parts in which even the word itself was a symbol of division.
The Great Animal Orchestra Page 13