Murmurs of Earth

by Carl Sagan

  The problem was that some disharmony is intrinsic to the octave, the basic unit of Western music. Every method of tuning has to put it somewhere. In Pythagorean tuning, certain intervals, the major thirds and major sixths, were sacrificed to disharmony so that others, the fifths, could be tuned perfectly. Composers avoided writing harmonies in the dissonant intervals. By the early sixteenth century, composers had begun to experiment with parceling out the inherent disharmony more equitably, all along the octave. No one interval would sound with Pythagorean purity, but music could be written in a full range of harmonies and in any key, without having to avoid the dangerous shoals of the major thirds and sixths. Few listeners noticed the disharmonies when they were spread thin.

  Various systems were proposed to deploy the disharmonies more or less equally along the octave. All were called “tempering,” meaning that they moderated the dissonance by diluting it. The secondary tones generated by the harpsichord, clavichord and piano tended to mask the moderate inequities that resulted, suiting these instruments for displays of the virtues of tempering. It is not known which system of tempering Bach favored, or for which instruments he wrote The Well-Tempered Clavier, but the work clearly was intended to show the freedom and flexibility tempering had to offer.2

  Book 1, twenty-four preludes and fugues in keys climbing up through the octave, was published in 1722. More than twenty years later, Bach repeated the task with twenty-four more preludes and fugues. By this time the question of tuning had been settled in favor of the even-tempered approach, and composition of the second book was probably motivated less by didactic purpose than by Bach’s passion for design. The second set of compositions has come to be designated Book 2 of The Well-Tempered Clavier, although Bach himself did not so title it.

  The prelude developed from the interval prior to a concert when musicians tune their instruments. From it came the overture and the prelude employed in church organ music, and the prelude associated with the fugue in secular works. Bach elevated the form to a new prominence, exploring new comparisons between a prelude and its fugue. In the C Major, the prelude, intricate and subtle, is attached to a fugue of contrasting simplicity. Bach had borrowed the subject of the fugue from an earlier composer, halved its time, and expanded upon its subject. The four voices of the prelude and the three of the fugue work at close quarters, dashing out in displays of freedom while retaining a discipline pleasing for being so obviously voluntary. Wanda Landowska compared the fugue’s gait to that of a well-trained thoroughbred, able to run but prepared to draw up short at a command.

  Gavotte en rondeaux from the Partita No. 3 in E Major for Violin

  Here is an example of art music arising from folk music. The gavotte was a traditional French dance. Polyphonic fiddle-playing was an old German custom; the fiddler often sat at a small organ, working the foot pedals as accompaniment. Bach employs the gavotte as a round and elaborates the simple dance melody polyphonically. The effect of multiple voices is achieved by what has been called “implied polyphony.” Snatches of bass line are posted like signs along a roadway, with such skill that the listener’s mind fills in the line well beyond what is actually being played. On a less analytic level, the piece reveals that Bach remained sensitive to the uncomplicated pleasures associated with this old dance. The melody itself has great charm.

  Like the ch’in composition on the Voyager record, Bach’s six sonatas and partitas for solo violin challenge a solitary musician working with a somewhat recalcitrant instrument to create music that opens out to the horizons. In the success of composer and performer, national boundaries fade, so that in this piece, for example, the influences of French music upon the theme, and of Italian technique upon the method of playing, are absorbed and transformed into music that almost supersedes nationality.

  The Gavotte en rondeaux is highly compressed, a characteristic it shares with several other selections on the Voyager record, among them “El Cascabel,” “Johnny B. Goode,” the New Guinea men’s house song, “Flowing Streams,” the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and Bach’s Prelude and Fugue. The Voyager spacecraft is a compact object, designed with weight a major consideration, and the music on the record seems to reflect some of the same imperatives. There is something satisfying about an artist’s making stringent demands upon time.

  Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F, First Movement

  The music section of the Voyager record begins on this note of energetic optimism. We have no grounds to suppose that an extraterrestrial listener would recognize human optimism or pessimism, or for that matter human “music” as such, and so to permit ourselves emotional considerations in choosing music for an interstellar artifact represents an act of faith. But what else could we do? We began the music with Bach.

  He wrote the Brandenburg concertos at the age of thirty-six, during one of the happiest periods of his life, when he enjoyed the friendship of a sympathetic patron, Prince Leopold, and when the death of his wife Maria Barbara still lay in the future. Bach was familiar with the concerto grosso form as it had developed in the hands of Corelli, Vivaldi and others, but as usual he was ill content to work entirely within existing boundaries, and viewed the commission as an opportunity to both innovate and sum up. Bach’s taste in innovation lay not in shattering existing forms, but in demonstrating unexpected resources within them, in the manner of a haiku poet.

  Bach’s talent for polyphony, demonstrated in two voices in the violin partita and in three and four voices in the Prelude and Fugue in C, is exemplified here in the tonal richness of the orchestra. Albert Schweitzer was prompted to call the Brandenburg concerti “the purest product of Bach’s polyphonic style.”

  In the opening eight bars, the recorder, oboe, solo violin and first violins play in unison beneath trills from the trumpet and viola to introduce the theme of the concerto, announced by the solo violin. The oboe and then the recorder take up the theme. A variation on the trumpet follows, in the onset of one of those hill-and-valley chases that make Bach’s allegro movements invigorating. A semiquaver bass accompaniment of the early bars has meanwhile been transformed into a solo theme on the trumpet, and a harmonic line that appeared originally on the viola has descended to become the bass. This is the sort of effect that we get throughout the movement, and it is pure Bach—diversity within order, wit within discipline, the music passing like a caravan of dancing acrobats reciting poetry.

  The second Brandenburg pressed the art of trumpet playing to its limit, and considerable scholarship has been expended to determine just how trumpets of the time were constructed if, without the aid of valves, they were to play it. Bach was forced to concede that some trumpet figures he would have liked could not be played; the concerto theme is altered in bars 21 and 22 of the first movement as a concession to the limitations of the instrument. This departure from plan, detectable to anyone who analyzes the music, might prove interesting to musical scholars in remote times or places.

  Javanese Gamelan

  “Kinds of Flowers”

  * * *

  At first sight, a gamelan—the word means orchestra—looks like a vision of the Industrial Revolution gone off in a joyful direction. The chief material is bronze. The instruments are percussive. They describe shapes suggestive variously of cooking pots, steam boilers, oil drums and railroad engines. A full gamelan looks as if it could haul a dozen freight cars through a mountain pass if the cosmos were put together a little differently. The gamelan has been put together, however, not to make time but music.

  The sound, chiefly bell and gong tones, resembles rain in slow motion. Increase the tempo and the rain turns to wind. The singing is full and unaffected, the work of people with both eyes on the present. Rhythms sound in accordance with tone, shorter intervals on high instruments, longer intervals on deeper instruments; some big brass gongs, larger than a man, are struck rather rarely. Once assembled, orchestras are named and an effort is made to keep them together for some time. Gamelans a century or more old ar
e not uncommon.

  Western interest in gamelan dates from at least 1899, when Claude Debussy heard one in Paris. The music is beautiful but can take some getting used to. The nineteenth-century Dutch East India Company ambassador who reported that “music in the East is still in its cradle and is practiced only upon very simple and monotonous instruments” was echoed by a NASA attorney who in 1977, upon hearing “Kinds of Flowers,” a piece in which rhythm plays something of the role that prophecy plays in King Lear, volunteered, “I can detect no rhythm in this piece whatsoever.”

  How this unique music sprang up in Java and in its neighboring island Bali is not fully understood. Hindu colonists brought bronze percussive instruments with them to Java, but bronze drums had been in use on the island before the Hindus arrived. Chinese and Indian musicians reached Java, but no one is certain how they might have generated music so markedly different from their own. The popularity of pentatonic (five-tone) tuning in gamelan has been offered as evidence of Chinese authorship, but pentatonic tuning turns up all over the world.

  “Kinds of Flowers” is a ketawang, or short, gamelan piece, performed here with an orchestra of about thirty-five players and perhaps a dozen singers. It was recorded January 10, 1971, in the reception hall of one of the four major royal courts of central Java by Robert Brown, now director of the American Society for Eastern Arts, Center for World Music, in Berkeley, California. The words, sung with unstrained gusto, refer to two of nine sorts of flowers symbolic in Javanese Hinduism of the nine rasas, or moods. The piece ends with a flex in rhythm, a short acceleration followed by a ritard.

  Pygmy Girls’ Initiation Song

  * * *

  The pygmies of the Ituri forest in Zaire, Africa, constitute one of nature’s many examples that strength can wear the cloak of weakness. A friendly people, they have welcomed Sudanese, Bantu, Arab and Western travelers. They have no government and settle differences by friendly discussion, say anthropologists who have lived with them. They discourage competition and encourage cooperation. In one pygmy game, half a dozen children climb a young sapling until the top bends to the ground, then all jump off at once. If one child jumps too soon, it spoils the game. If one holds on too long, attempting to demonstrate a superior bravery, he or she is launched through the air. The pygmies have no priests and display little formal religion beyond a reverence for the rain forest. Their philosophy is one of acceptance. In a song about night in the forest, they remind themselves that “if darkness is, then darkness is good.” Nomads, they rarely occupy any one site for more than a few months. Living in this fashion, they have occupied the Ituri forest since at least the twenty-fifth century B.C., when their presence was recorded by Fourth Dynasty Egyptians.

  Today, as when the Egyptians wrote of them, the Mbuti (as Ituri pygmies collectively are called) erect no monuments, show little interest in the visual arts, and rarely play musical instruments. Their joy lies in storytelling, song and dance.

  Not surprisingly, these arts have become highly refined. The Mbuti sing some songs by assigning one note to each singer in a circle, so the melody spins around at a dizzying rate. Others are done as rounds, the parts sometimes orbiting in opposite directions. Close harmony in parallel seconds is common, sometimes sung by dancers who dance very close together, almost touching, as if to illustrate the structure of the music. The Mbuti sing polyphonically and have been observed to incorporate into songs the echo of their voices bouncing off the trees of the rain forest.

  The Voyager selection comes from an alima, or girl’s puberty initiation rite. The word is derived from lima, the Bantu term for moon, as the rite marks a girl’s first menstrual period. (The pygmies appear to have lost their original language, and they incorporate words adapted from their neighbors.) This alima song was recorded by the anthropologist Colin Turnbull, who lived with the Mbuti for six years. As Turnbull describes the ceremony: “For the pygmies it’s a time of enormous joy when a young girl gets her first menstrual period. It’s announced to the whole world. Her family is congratulated, because now she can be a mother, and what greater joy for a girl? At the same time they recognize the increased responsibility, because among the Mbuti, no child may be born out of wedlock. In fifty years of field work, anthropologists have found no documented case of any child being born out of wedlock there. When a girl first menstruates, she will sometimes wait for a friend to also have her first period, and then the two of them invite their friends, both older and younger, to join them in an alima house where they live for a month.

  “During this time, boys who come to court them may enter the alima house and sleep with the girls of their choice, but only with the approval of both the girls and their mothers. The mothers guard the house and prevent any undesirable youths from entering; they will give any such youth a good fight. Once inside, a youth may sleep with one or a number of girls by mutual agreement. It’s considered a time of experimentation, with long-range marriage in view. Until this time sexual intercourse was merely pleasurable; now it is also a responsibility.

  “The boys and girls talk and think in terms of both physical and emotional satisfaction, and usually, though not always, a marriage results from the alima experience. Divorce is a rarity.…Once a couple is absolutely certain that they are fitted as life partners, the boy makes a nominal gift to the girl’s parents—it may be a bow and arrow—and if this is accepted he will then present a large antelope he has killed himself as an indication of his ability to fill the role of hunter. If the girl’s parents accept these gifts, the boy and the girl then set up a household together.

  “The alima is one of the most joyous festivals in the Mbuti culture because it concerns itself with life and with the responsibilities of parenthood.

  “These people are among the most primitive in the world,” Turnbull adds. “They have no stone tools. They use only bamboo and other forest products. Yet in terms of human relationships and their ability to control those relationships for the benefit of society as a whole, I very soberly, out of both personal experience and academic judgment, believe them to be vastly more advanced than we are. I mean no criticism of ourselves. It merely shows that as civilization has progressed, our problems have become so complex that we can’t afford the human considerations that to the Mbuti are foremost.”

  Senegalese Percussion

  * * *

  The music of Africa displays the imprint of a people who migrated south some two thousand years ago, whose language presaged Bantu, and whose influence on all the arts lent the continent a semblance of unity. We find it today in the regular company of travel and labor, the rhythms of music and motion—an old tapestry still being woven.

  The African emphasis on rhythm in music has been interpreted, even by some relatively sympathetic students, as evidence of primitivism. The argument, which satisfied political as well as aesthetic predispositions, was that African percussion betokened a culture that had yet to discover the superior charms of refined melody and harmony. This misapprehension can be laid to rest on at least two grounds. First, African music contains plenty of melody and harmony, some of it extremely sophisticated; the pygmy song on Voyager offers one of many examples. Second, studies using electronic data-processing techniques to analyze hundreds of recordings of African music indicate that it evolved as a matter of preference, in the hands of people who experimented with a wide variety of the world’s music; in other words, ignorance of alternatives appears to have played no important role in African musical history.

  This recording, made in Senegal in 1963 by Charles Duvelle, is of music played to accompany field work. The instruments are drums, bells, and three flutes, the flutes employed exclusively for punctuation. Listening to it calls to mind a line from the Li Chi, the first century A.D. Chinese book on music: “Music creates joy.…Man cannot exist without joy, and joy cannot exist without movement.”

  Mexican Mariachi

  “El Cascabel”

  * * *

  This express-train rendition of
a popular old Mexican song is performed by Lorenzo Barcelata and the Mariachi México. Barcelata comes from Michoacán, a state on the central Pacific coast of Mexico whose black population has influenced music of the region. The swapping of solos is characteristically Mediterranean, but the rapidity of the trade-off and the overlapping of the parts is African. It is also characteristic of American jazz and rhythm and blues. Its effect in “El Cascabel” is energetic. Barcelata’s mariachi orchestra, despite its impressive size and full tone, seems agile as a school of flying fish.

  After an opening flourish on fiddles and horns to establish the theme, Barcelata sings with Spanish bravura. The song is based on a double entendre (“What a pretty bell, my dear/Who gave it to you?/…If you want to sell it to me, I’ll give you a kiss”), but the words, familiar to most Mexican listeners, have only secondary importance. Barcelata’s voice quickly gives way to a soaring fiddle run full of rhythmic variations and punctuated by trumpets. The back-up vocalists take a turn, with flutes above; then comes a seesaw set of fiddles in a descending run. Guitars and gitarrones pump out rhythm with the energy of men shoveling coal to save a sinking ship. Cornets and fiddles join in a rapid exchange. The voices, all male, end on a ritard in the descending figure described by the fiddles and trumpets. It seems to be over almost as quickly as it began.

  Blind Willie Johnson

  “Dark Was the Night”

  * * *

  Out of the enslavement of Africans arose a strain of music in America that has captured the affection of the twentieth-century world. Specialists debate where the seams of definition lie between blues, jazz, jitterbug, and rock-and-roll, but all are cut from the same cloth, three bolts of which are aboard Voyager.