The Library of Ice

by Nancy Campbell

  Carmen does not only use voices and instruments to recreate the sounds of her environment, she also allows it to make its own music. In a resonant, calm voice she describes the ‘cracks, booms, pings, bangs, sniffles and shots’ emitted by the ice of the great lakes – and how she ‘harvests’ them by immersing hydrophones deep beneath the frozen surface. She presses a key on her laptop and the noise of ice in conversation, its shards chinking and clanking, sporadic yet melodic, transforms the atmosphere in the wood-panelled room. Her recording demonstrates that a frozen lake is far from being a static, silent space. She’s coined a term for the sounds made by ice: cryophonics. ‘I believe the ice has a voice,’ she says, ‘and the sounds it produces in its natural state are an ongoing, ecological form of music. My approach to the use of these sounds is a borrowing or re-performance of this music.’

  Gathering ice voices requires a pragmatic attitude as well as technical prowess. Setting out in her recording uniform of bobble hat and headphones, carrying a hydrophone and Zoom H4n field recorder, first Carmen must judge whether the lake ice will support her weight. The standard safety recommendation is 6 inches of ice. Carmen studies the ice thickness figures compiled weekly by the Yellowknife fire department, but ice can be unpredictable. Sometimes unexpected areas of thin ice are reported, and it is important to respect the potential dangers. Once Carmen is on the ice, she needs to get the hydrophone under it; her equipment also includes an axe and a hand-powered augur with which she can drill up to 1.5 metres through midwinter ice.

  The act of recording has intensified Carmen’s relationship with her surroundings. She has had transcendent experiences while working on the exposed lake in temperatures of -30°C, huddled against the wind, tucking the field recorder inside her parka so the batteries don’t freeze:

  All of a sudden I was aware of how cold the water might feel if the ice opened beneath me, how the wind blew ancient and new all at once, how alone I was, how alive I was. As my heart slowed, I realized that I was getting cold. Heat was leaving my body and moving into the snow, into the ice, into the air. Sound was still leaving the ice and moving into the water, into the hydrophone, into my ears. At this moment, I felt I was growing roots down into the ice through my boots.

  Just as ice affects the composer’s body, so the body can affect the ice. Carmen uses her knowledge of ice behaviour to ‘play’ it, even before downloading the sound files from the field recorder onto her laptop. She might choose the location and time of day to get a particular effect, or even manipulate thin ice with her weight to generate percussive sounds. Yet she prefers ice unmediated by human influence, emphasizing that the best results are down to chance:

  The degree of unpredictability in individual cracks, booms and clatterings is one of the main qualities that has fuelled my current fascination with ice sounds. These sonic events are repetitive but their recurrences are constantly varied and without pulse. However, I think that ice sound patterns approach an organic logic, as if the repetitive quality of these sonic events has a way of working that is structured at some level, but which is so complex that, from my personal experiences of listening to them, I am left with an impression of a pattern that blurs randomness and predictability.

  The previous spring, Carmen had recorded the sounds of candle ice. At the end of May, the ice on Great Slave Lake grows thinner and gradually breaks into huge free-floating pans, which in turn splinter into long shards of ice. During their brief existence, Carmen explains, ‘these crystalline shapes are pushed by the wind and waves to jostle against each other, creating beautiful masses of sound or delicate individual sound-events with a glassy or metallic timbre.’ Of course, the precise sounds the hydrophone picks up will be down to chance. Back in her studio, Carmen selected some of the sound files using a digital audio workstation, keeping the integrity of the ice’s voice by editing as little as possible. She then combined these electro-acoustics with a score for piano, violin and cello. There is a difference between the sounds made by movement of ice against ice, and that of hair on gut and felt on wire. So that the audience can appreciate the subtle music of the ice, there are moments when the sound files are heard alone, or the other instruments play only very thin textures over them.

  I’m curious about how Carmen outlines her intentions for the musicians. The score of Candle Ice places the electroacoustic track, described as ‘unprocessed candle ice sounds’ on a fourth stave below those of the piano, violin and cello. In contrast to their dynamic notation, the ‘ice track’ appears as a continuous, bold wavy line. A performance note for the first movement reads: ‘Candle ice begins to float free’. It opens with the clear ice track, somewhere between a glockenspiel and a tambourine, like the noise of distant stars. Then the piano comes in, a few hesitant notes, and the inquisitive strings. The three musicians are instructed to play in a ‘shimmering’ and ‘shining’ manner. The score builds to the intense energy of the third movement, in which ‘wind and waves begin to move the ice’ and the penultimate movement, ‘in agony – the death throes of the ice!’ These dynamic sequences express the great amount of energy the ice requires to change its physical state. Candle Ice concludes with a ‘quiet melt into lake-water’. Ice clinks resolve into lapping water, the jagged line on the score becomes smaller, lighter – and fades out.

  Carmen explains how she ‘translates’ the wider ideas associated with ice in her music. In both Candle Ice and The Ice Seasons, the six-part structure of the works reflects the symmetry of ice. Specific playing techniques can be used to express the ice’s physical qualities: in The Ice Seasons, she stipulates spiccato, jeté and pizzicato with their ‘dryer, pointed timbres’ to evoke the tiny ice crystals. As well as transcribing the sounds she hears, Carmen sometimes uses digital analysis. She describes the creation of a sonogram from three seconds of a field recording of candling ice: ‘I chose nine prominent frequencies made by individual pieces of ice clinking, and moved these to the closest equal temperament pitch. I reduced this to the pitch collection C#, D#, F, G, G# and A#.’ Carmen’s use of technology in her composition is as bold as that of scientists investigating the possible future phases of ice.

  Our coffee breaks take place in the corridors of the Nordic House. Daylight tumbles down the long shafts of Alvar Aalto’s cylindrical skylights, as if we are standing under holes drilled through midwinter ice. (I remember that the poet Goethe called architecture ‘frozen music’.) As the voices of other delegates echo round us, I ask Carmen about her archive of ice sounds. She records the environment wherever she travels, she tells me, but ice is her longest-running sound collection, and the audio files, photographs and videos run to many gigabytes. ‘I have several backups. My system is pretty rough – usually based on the date and where I was, and sometimes what the ice activity was at that point.’ Field recording helps preserve soundscapes that are rapidly changing – or even disappearing, but most practitioners are adamant that it is not about building a library for its own sake, but about listening, learning and passing on.

  In the spring of 2014, leading up to the premiere of Candle Ice by the Gryphon Trio at the Ottawa Chamber Music Festival, Carmen kept a video ‘ice diary’ of Great Slave Lake. I watch it online after the conference. In late May, as the ice broke free from the shore, she waded out into the lake to investigate the floating ice pans. The following day, the ice has dispersed further, forming an opaque mass in the middle of the lake. She has to canoe out to reach it and, dropping her hydrophone into the water, she experiences a new sound: ‘air bubbles (trapped in the ice all winter) are floating free to the surface all along the pan’s edge, making beautiful, gentle pip-popping sounds – like the lake is raining air’. The little bubbles rise rapidly from the ghostly cloud of ice. As Carmen puts it, spring is ‘winning the battle’.

  II

  It was strange to talk about Greenland at the conference in Iceland: the two countries are very different but people often confuse them. At least my audience in Reykjavik knew that they were not in Greenlan
d. As I began to introduce my work, I wondered what would have happened had I stayed in Upernavik when Grethe had asked me to. Might I have become like that mysterious Frenchman, whose name and history no one knew, who lived on a small island up the coast and appeared in his dinghy every month to stock up on beer and batteries? Would I have witnessed extraordinary things, or been consumed by boredom?

  Some people did seem to think I had relocated to the far north.

  ‘I thought you were . . . somewhere cold?’ friends would say vaguely when they encountered me at events in London. This was sometimes followed by the question, ‘What is it about you and cold places anyway?’ Around this time the poems I’d written in Upernavik, and later while missing Upernavik, were published and the book’s existence confirmed people’s belief that I was elsewhere – somewhere cold. It dawned on me that I had almost managed to achieve what I’d once dreamed of: I had imagined my way back to Greenland.

  What is it about cold places, anyway? I needed an answer to the question that didn’t require an all-night conversation over several glasses of wine. Was my obsession the sum of the snowy walks in Scotland I had taken as a child? Or was I drawn back to cold places for even more distant reasons, because I was born during a snowstorm, in the winter that became known as England’s Winter of Discontent due to the strikes and bad weather?

  I never did achieve my dream of a dandelion-clock paperweight, but when I was six years old I was given a snow globe with a pine forest in it and a log cabin, and an old woman picking up sticks to take into the cabin to light a fire. When I shook it, disproportionately large flakes of snow fell very slowly through whatever viscous liquid the globe contained. I could watch them for hours: a quick shake of the wrist, then a slow storm.

  My father was often away during those years. Once, having returned from a particularly long trip, he told me a bedtime story in countless instalments about how my toys were lost and trying to find their way back home; they had become separated from each other, as well as from me. I don’t remember the plot, or even whether the toys found each other again as the nights passed – though I’d like to think the whole point of the exercise was that they did. I only remember one episode clearly, which must have pleased me more than the others: my pale Pierrot was walking through a white-out, with no sense of where he was, when he saw a shadowy figure emerging through the snow. It was an old woman, and she was gathering firewood.

  What puzzles me about this story is that the sad clown seemed to be glad that he had stumbled into entrapment within a snow globe. Was this my objective too? As the years passed, the glass dome had developed a crack and air bubbles entered. They floated to the top whichever way I turned the globe, limiting the performance of the falling snow, and bringing my suspension of disbelief in the old woman’s world to an end.

  I can’t give this as an answer.

  In October 1917 a group of railway engineers were building a bridge across the Tanana River at Nenana in Alaska, some miles upstream from the point at which it joins the Yukon River and flows onwards into the Bering Sea. They watched the river waters freeze over, and bet $800 on the exact date and time that the ice would break up. A hundred years later, the Nenana Ice Classic competition has become an institution. Every spring a tripod capped with a scarlet flag is planted deep in the ice. It is connected by a cable to a clock on the shore that stops when the tripod tumbles into the water, and gamblers still bet on the day, hour and minute it will fall.

  Those who are serious about their stakes in the Nenana Ice Classic competition will research past break-up records carefully. Figures indicate that the ice begins to disperse between 20 April and 20 May. While the average date of break-up is 5 May, the results are becoming more random. But the odds of winning are probably still better than a slot machine – and as Alaska law doesn’t allow lotteries, this is the only occasion where residents are encouraged to bet on anything.

  There are two ways the river might break up. The first is referred to as a ‘mush-out’. It occurs when the ice rots and snow upstream melts gradually into the river, so the water flow increases. This is most likely to happen when temperatures rise above freezing during the day, followed by a freeze at night. The second eventuality is more dramatic. The volume of water flowing downriver increases rapidly, lifting the ice and smashing it. This will happen when there is a sudden warm period in late April or early May, and is more likely after heavy snow.

  The annual collapse of the Tanana River tripod has left an uninterrupted record of Alaska’s spring climate, a rare resource in a science that needs years of data to draw conclusions. Researchers at the National Snow and Ice Data Center study the charts created by the gamblers. Tanana’s results are not unusual: records from a number of northern lakes and rivers (including lakes Baikal in Russia, Kallavesi in Finland and Suwa in the Kiso Mountains of Japan) show significant trends towards later freeze-up and earlier break-up.

  I watch the centenary of the Nenana Ice Classic ceremony online, flipping between short home movies of an event that actually lasts hours, even months if you count the anticipation that starts the moment the tripod is first hoisted onto the ice in early March. At nearly 7 metres high, the efforts of many of the town’s three hundred inhabitants are needed to erect it. (At least they are already acquainted with the ice on which they’ll be putting their money.) The crucial cable that connects the tripod to the clock is festive with bunting so that viewers can see it clearly from the shore. Water has been visible in the centre of the Tanana for several hours before the ice on which the tripod stands starts to edge downriver during the afternoon of 23 April, and crowds begin to gather.

  I enjoy Caleb’s video most of all those I watch. It has an irresistible exuberance. His camcorder pans the shoreline, filming the backs of other amateur filmmakers also documenting the occasion. ‘I’m recording!’ his commentary begins. ‘There she goes,’ he shouts, ‘the 2016 ice!’ Over the shoulders of onlookers, we see the tripod making stately progress on its pan, but the black-and-white beam stands tall. It looks as though it may be another mush-out year. ‘There we go!’ Caleb says again, but more doubtfully, as the tripod stalls but remains upright, showing no sign of tripping the cable. There are mutterings from the crowd, most of whom have paid $2.50 to place a bet in the hope of winning the $300,000 jackpot. Is the system fair? Some people claim the ice had already broken up, since everything but the pan the tripod stands on has been swept away. The tripod has almost reached the bridge where the Alaska railroad crosses the river when the bunting tenses and rises from the water, and the ruby pennant flickers in the wind. The tripod begins to tip away from the pan in which it was embedded and – Caleb’s video cuts out. I have to turn to another source to discover that at 3.39pm Alaska Standard Time, the tripod sank into the water.

  Further south, Thoreau recorded the weather at Walden Pond from 1846 to 1860, and noted that break-up dates varied from 15 March to 18 April. ‘This pond never breaks up so soon as the others in the neighborhood,’ he wrote, ‘on account both of its greater depth and its having no stream passing through it to melt or wear away the ice. It indicates better than any water hereabouts the absolute progress of the season, being least affected by transient changes in temperature.’

  When the Massachusetts ponds were ‘over-hung by oak woods and solemn pines bent down with snow or bristling with icicles’, he got out his skates. Ice created a shortcut. Distances changed. In an essay published in 1843, two years before Franklin set off on his final expedition, Thoreau wrote that Flint’s Pond was almost unrecognizable under snow, ‘unexpectedly wide and so strange’ that it bore comparison to the Arctic, and he imagined the fishermen to be ‘sealers or Esquimaux’. A winter walk became an expedition:

  Before night we will take a journey on skates along the course of this meandering river, as full of novelty to one who sits by the cottage fire all the winter’s day, as if it were over the polar ice, with Captain Parry or Franklin; following the winding of the stream, now flowing amid h
ills, now spreading out into fair meadows, and forming a myriad coves and bays where the pine and hemlock overarch . . . No domain of nature is quite closed to man at all times, and now we draw near to the empire of the fishes. Our feet glide swiftly over unfathomed depths, where in summer our line tempted the pout and perch, and where the stately pickerel lurked in the long corridors formed by the bulrushes. The deep, impenetrable marsh, where the heron waded and bittern squatted, is made pervious to our swift shoes, as if a thousand railroads had been made into it. With one impulse we are carried to the cabin of the muskrat, that earliest settler, and see him dart away under the transparent ice, like a furred fish, to his hole in the bank; and we glide rapidly over meadows where lately ‘the mower whet his scythe’, through beds of frozen cranberries mixed with meadow-grass. We skate near to where the blackbird, the pewee, and the kingbird hung their nests over the water, and the hornets builded from the maple in the swamp.

  Everything Thoreau mentions – with the exception of the muskrat – is a vanished memory of summer. Even the cranberries frozen beneath the ice are already part of the past.

  Towards the end of his life, Thoreau read John Evelyn’s Kalendarium Hortense; or, the Gard’ner’s Almanac, first published in 1664, which details garden activities by the season. In addition to his prose writings, he began to consolidate his observations in lists and charts that he too called his ‘Kalendar’. The residents of Concord have continued Thoreau’s tradition, taking their own annual readings of the environment. In recent years, the break-up of the Walden ice has occurred at least two weeks earlier than in Thoreau’s day.