The landscapes of Handel and Haydn are as rich in detail as the paintings of Breughel and they are just as carefully structured. Michelangelo had criticized the Flemish painters for failing to exercise selection in their subject matter; instead of focusing on one thing they included everything in view. Indeed, the compositions to which I have alluded share a similar feature, for they are wide-angle tableaux; the composer observes the landscape at a distance. Nature performs and he provides the secretarial services.
Only in the landscapes of the romantic era does the composer intrude to color nature with his own personality or moods. Natural events are then made to synchronize or to compete ironically with the moods of the artist. I have already mentioned how this technique of sympathetic vibration originated in pastoral poetry (Theocritus, Virgil), where it came to be known by literary critics as “the pathetic fallacy,” but we do not encounter effective employment of the technique in music history until the song cycles of Schubert and Schumann.
Schubert has often made the landscape perform for him. In a song such as “Der Lindenbaum” ("The Lime Tree") from Die Winterreise, the moods of the poet-composer stimulate the tree, causing its branches to move gently (summer) or violently (winter), while day and night thoughts are distinguished by major and minor tonalities. In Schumann’s Dichter-liebe, the landscape maintains its gay summer colors while the poet’s joy turns to grief, a bitterly ironical situation which is fully exploited in contrasts between vocalist and pianist.
Throughout the history of Western music, the sounds of nature (particularly those of wind and water) have been frequently and adequately rendered, as have bells, birds, firearms and hunting horns. We have already touched on street cries and have also mentioned the suggestibility of the solo woodwind instrument for the pastoral landscape. Let us inspect a few of the others.
Music, Bird-Song and Battlefields Bird-song in music has a parallel in the enclosed garden of literature. Before the landscape of Europe was cultivated, nature presented a vast and fearful spectacle. The medieval garden was an attempt to create a benign and flowering place where love, human and divine, could be fulfilled. Thus, in the Cave of Lovers from Gottfried of Strassburg’s Tristan:
At their due times you could hear the sweet singing of the birds. Their music was so lovely—even lovelier here than elsewhere. Both eye and ear found their pasture and delight there: the eye its pasture, the ear its delight. There were shade and sunshine, air and breezes, both soft and gentle. …
The service they received was the song of the birds, of the lovely, slender nightingale, the thrush and blackbird, and other birds of the forest. Siskin and calander-lark vied in eager rivalry to see who could give the best service. These followers served their ears and sense unendingly. Their high feast was Love, who gilded all their joys.
Birds contributed to the felicitous atmosphere of the garden, and they were deliberately attracted there by means of feeding and fountains. In Persian gardens, birds had been retained in huge nets. It may well be that the peculiar value set on gardens in the later Middle Ages is a legacy of the Crusaders, who also appear to have brought back the arts of lyric poetry and song from the Middle East. It was in this diminutive meadow then, behind the protective wall of the castle, that the troubadour art flourished, and the voices of the birds were often woven into their songs. It is the same pleasant and docile atmosphere that Nicolas Gombert and Clement Jane-quin extended in their Chants des Oiseaux. Bird-song will always suggest this delicacy of sentiment and I would go so far as to suggest that it appears in music in deliberate contradiction to the brutalities and accidents of external life. It is this way that it enters in opposition to the malignant forces of Wagner’s Ring, and it is sustained by Olivier Messiaen in our time for the same reason.
The case of firearms is in opposition to this. The cannon was first effectively employed by Edward III of England at Crecy in 1346 and again during the siege of Calais in 1347; but the first full-fledged musical treatment of firearms seems to have been Janequin’s vocal exhibition piece La Bataille de Marignan of 1545.
Frerelelelan fan farirarirarirariri—went the trumpets
Von von von patipatos pon pon pon—went the cannons.
The effect must always have been comical, with the result that instrumental versions of battle scenes quickly took precedence over vocal in examples too numerous to mention, until we arrive at Beethoven’s Battle Symphony, where the imitative gunfire is replaced by the real thing—another sign of Beethoven’s evident pugilism.
The devices of program music transform the real space of the concert hall into a garden, a pasture, a forest or a battlefield. These metaphorical spaces gain and lose in popularity over the years, and a study of this subject would give us a good idea of the changing attitudes of urban man to the landscape. To illustrate I will take just one theme, one I have already introduced: the hunting horn. We can now follow its symbolic transformations over a critical period, from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth.
The Hunting Horn Explodes the Walls of the Concert Hall to Reintroduce the Countryside Hunting horn motifs were employed for colorful effects in numerous symphonic works during the eighteenth century. Haydn’s La Chasse symphony (No. 73) is a good example. The robust tones of the horns at once cut through the other instruments to suggest the spirit of outdoor life. “Hark!” sings the chorus in Haydn’s Creation, as the horns are sounded,
The clamorous noise that through the wood is ringing!
How clear the shrilling of horns resounds!
How eager the hounds are all baying!
Now speeds the fear-rous’d stag: they
follow, the pack and the hunters too.
The famous huntsmen’s chorus from Weber’s Freischütz expresses the same passion for outdoor life and the high, free spirits of the hunt.
Once the horn has taken on a clear symbolic function, ironic transformations can be played over it. Thus, in Weber’s Oberon, the opening three notes on the solo horn—one of the most evocative effects in all music—transport us to the wonderful, perfumed gardens of the Orient. The hunting horn has become a magic horn, capable of moving the audience beyond local fields to distant pays de chimères.
In the symphonies of Brahms and Bruckner there is, if I am not suffering from a distended imagination, a perceptible transformation of the hunting horn into what we might call the horn of authority, for a certain hectoring quality, almost a stubbornness, is evident here which is absent from the spirited treatment given it by earlier composers.
We have another example of irony in Schubert’s“Die Post” from Die Winterreise, where the distant post horn dances across the acoustic horizon in the piano accompaniment, while the singer’s joy of anticipation turns to melancholy when he realizes that he will receive no letter from his beloved.
More than any instrument, the horn symbolizes freedom and love of the outdoors. When sounded in the concert hall, it collapses the walls and transports us again to the unrestricted spaces of the country. For those who were accustomed to hearing horns regularly, just beyond the city wall, this effect must have been immediately appealing. The horn of freedom achieves heroic proportions in Wagner’s Siegfried, where it becomes the acoustic symbol of the hero who will one day bring about the collapse of a moribund civilization.
But the most interesting transformation of the horn for our purposes is the last, the one we might call the horn of memory. The most eloquent examples of this transformation are to be found in the symphonies of Gustav Mahler. Already we have it clearly indicated in the opening movement of Mahler’s first symphony of 1888. Here hunting horn motifs are suggested first, distantly, on the clarinets, then by offstage trumpets, and finally, very slowly, very nostalgically, on the horns themselves. As the movement gathers impetuously toward its climax, the horns in glissando rips break away in a very rage for freedom. But it is the floating and sentimental quality of Mahler’s distant horns that are most memorable, for they prefigured t
he transmogrification of the landscape itself. Today there is no open countryside left in Europe; there are only fences and parks.
The Orchestra and the Factory If the solo flute and the hunting horn reflected the pastoral soundscape, the orchestra reflects the thicker densities of city life. From the earliest days the orchestra had shown a tendency to grow in size, but it was not until the nineteenth century that its forces were co-ordinated and its instruments strengthened and scientifically calibrated to give it the complex and powerful sound-producing capabilities which, in terms of intensity alone, made it a competitor with the polynoise of the industrial factory. But there were even greater parallels between the orchestra and the factory, as Lewis Mumford explains:
… with the increase in the number of instruments, the division of labor within the orchestra corresponded to that of the factory: the division of the process itself became noticeable in the newer symphonies. The leader was the superintendent and production manager, in charge of the manufacture and assembly of the product, namely the piece of music, while the composer corresponded to the inventor, engineer, and designer, who had to calculate on paper, with the aid of such minor instruments as the piano, the nature of the ultimate product—working out its last detail before a single step was made in the factory. For difficult compositions, new instruments were sometimes invented or old ones resurrected; but in the orchestra the collective efficiency, the collective harmony, the functional division of labor, the loyal cooperative interplay between the leaders and the led, produced a collective unison greater than that which was achieved, in all probability, within any single factory. For one thing, the rhythm was more subtle; and the timing of the successive operations was perfected in the symphony orchestra long before anything like the same efficient routine came about in the factory.
Here, then, in the constitution of the orchestra, was the ideal pattern of the new society. It was achieved in art before it was approached in technics. … Tempo, rhythm, tone, harmony, melody, polyphony, counterpoint, even dissonance and atonality, were all utilized freely to create a new ideal world, where the tragic destiny, the dim longings, the heroic destinies of men could be entertained once more. Cramped by its new pragmatic routines, driven from the marketplace and the factory, the human spirit rose to a new supremacy in the concert hall. Its greatest structures were built of sound and vanished in the act of being produced. If only a small part of the population listened to these works of art or had any insight into their meaning, they nevertheless had at least a glimpse of another heaven than Coke town’s. The music gave more solid nourishment and warmth than Coketown’s spoiled and adulterated foods, its shoddy clothes, its jerry built houses.
The orchestra was then an idealization of the aspirations of the nineteenth century, a model which the industrialist-kings tried to emulate in their factory routines.
Even the musical forms cultivated by the nineteenth century seem to have an imperialistic bias: thus, in the first-movement form of the symphony, home base is established (exposition), colonies are developed (Durchführung) and the empire is consolidated (recapitulation and coda). It was during this period, too, that the bass bars of all stringed instruments were carefully replaced to produce greater volume of sound; also new brass and percussion instruments were added and the piano replaced the harpsichord, which was no longer strong enough to be heard in the new instrumental consort. The substitution of the punched-string piano for the plucked-string harpsichord typifies the greater aggressiveness of a time in which objects were punched and beaten into existence by means of new industrial processes. Material had once been stroked, carved or kneaded into shape; now it was slugged. The strengthening of the piano, which exchanged sound quality for sound quantity, disturbed the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, who realized that amplified music would lead to increased community disturbance.
Complaints of annoyance caused by neighbourhood pianos are by no means as old as the piano itself. In Mozart’s and Haydn’s day the piano was a weak, thin box with a soft tone, scarcely audible as far as the front room. The complaints began with the introduction of the piano’s stronger tone and extended range, and became a painful outcry only thirty or forty years ago, after the piano manufacturers began in earnest to increase the sound output of the instrument. … The full tone and carrying power of the modern piano arise from its great size, its colossal weight and the tensions of its metal-strengthened frame. … The instrument has gained this offensive power and offensive character for the first time in our day.
The power these new technical developments permitted was first seized by Beethoven. It would be wrong to think of Beethoven as a product of the Industrial Revolution, which, after all, hardly touched Vienna during his lifetime, but he was certainly an urban composer and his pugilistic temperament made the “offensive” character of the new instruments specially appealing for him, as can immediately be sensed in touching or hearing the opening notes of a work like the Hammerklavier Sonata, Op. 106. In principle there is little difference between Beethoven’s attempts to épater les bourgeois with full-fisted sforzando effects and that of the modern teenager with his motorcycle. The one is an embryo of the other.
The Meeting of Music and Environment The imperialism of nineteenth-century music reached its apex in the orchestras of Wagner and Berlioz, which were specially expanded to make possible a grandiloquent rhetoric, designed alternately to thrill, exalt and crush swelling metropolitan audiences. Berlioz’s ideal orchestra was to include 120 violins, 16 French horns, 30 harps, 30 pianos, and 53 percussion parts. Wagner had similar ambitions and ended up with an orchestra that constantly threatened to drown the singers—a problem which caused him much anxiety. It is in this light that one can appreciate Spengler’s criticism of Wagner’s art as a sort which “signifies a concession to the barbarism of the Megalopolis, the beginning of dissolution sensibly manifested in a mixture of brutality and refinement.”
When the orchestra continued to expand into the twentieth century it was primarily percussion instruments that were added, that is, non-pitched noisemakers capable of sharp attack and rhythmic vitality. The pastorale and the nocturne then ceased to exist and were replaced by the machine music of Honegger’s Pacific 231 (1924), an imitation of a locomotive, Antheil’s Ballet Méchanique (1926), which employed a number of airplane propellers, Prokofiev’s Pas d’Acier(Dance of Steel), Mossolov’s Iron Foundry and Carlos Chávez’s HP (Horsepower), all dating from 1929. Poets like Ezra Pound and F. T. Marinetti were also going through machine periods, as were painters like Léger and the artisans of the Bauhaus. In 1924 Pound had written: “I take it that music is the art most fit to express the fine quality of machines. Machines are now a part of life, it is proper that men should feel something about them; there would be something weak about art if it couldn’t deal with this new content.”
The anomie of modern city life had already been effectively described in Satie’s deadpan musique d’ameublement—the original Moozak. When Satie designed this entertainment for the intermission of a play at a Paris art gallery in 1920, he intended that the spectators should move about and ignore the music, which was to be regarded merely as so much upholstery. Unfortunately, everyone stopped to listen. Music was then still something to be prized; it had not yet flipped over to its new function as background drool; and Satie had to rush about crying, “Parlez! Parlez!”
From our point of view the real revolutionary of the new era was the Futurist experimenter Luigi Russolo, who invented an orchestra of noise-makers, consisting of buzzers, howlers and other gadgets, calculated to introduce modern man to the musical potential of the new world about him. In 1913 Russolo proclaimed the event in his manifesto The Art of Noises (L’ Arte dei Rumori):
In antiquity, life was nothing but silence. Noise was really not born before the 19th century, with the advent of machinery. Today noise reigns supreme over human sensibility. … In the pounding atmo-sphere of great cities as well as in the formerly silent countryside, machines crea
te today such a large number of varied noises that pure sound, with its littleness and its monotony, now fails to arouse any emotion. … Let’s walk together through a great modern capital, with the ear more attentive than the eye, and we will vary the pleasures of our sensibilities by distinguishing among the gurglings of water, air and gas inside metallic pipes, the rumbling and rattlings of engines breathing with obvious animal spirits, the rising and falling of pistons, the stridency of mechanical saws, the loud jumping of trolleys on their rails, the snapping of whips, the whipping of flags. We will have fun imagining our orchestration of department stores’ sliding doors, the hubbub of the crowds, the different roars of railroad stations, iron foundries, textile mills, printing houses, power plants and subways. And we must not forget the very new noises of Modern Warfare.
Russolo’s experiments mark a flash-point in the history of aural perception, a reversal of figure and ground, a substitution of garbage for beauty. Marcel Duchamp did the same thing about the same time for the visual arts by exhibiting a urinal. It was outrageous because, instead of perpetuating the picture-window mythology of the traditional art gallery, the public was confronted with a doorframe back to the place they had just left.
When John Cage opened the doors of the concert hall to let the traffic noise mix with his own, he was paying an unacknowledged debt to Rus-solo. An acknowledged debt was paid him by Pierre Schaeffer during the formative years of the musique concrète group in Paris. In the practices of musique concrète it became possible to insert any sound from the environment into a composition with tape, while in electronic music the hard-edge sound of the tone generator may be indistinguishable from the police siren or the electric egg-beater.
The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World Page 14