Murmurs of Earth

by Carl Sagan

  If we wished to challenge Gertrude Stein’s assertion that “one does not in one’s heart believe in mute inglorious Miltons,” a good place to start would be the Depression-era South and its music called, for good reason, the blues. Nearly every Southern city supported—if that is the word—black blues singers whose music could be heard on street corners and in churches and bars. For these singers, the critical assessment of passers-by could mean the difference between shelter and sleeping in the street; it is no accident that of the handful whose songs were recorded, the best were very good indeed, and that their legacy of poetry and music has been drawn upon by Western popular composers ever since.

  Johnson was born in Marlin, Texas, within a year or two of the turn of the century. He was blinded by his stepmother, who in a rage dashed a pan of lye in his face when he was seven years old. His mid-twenties found him surviving on the streets of Dallas on the strength of his guitar playing and powerful voice. Like several other accomplished blind blues singers, he managed through his music to attract and marry a devoted woman. Her name was Angeline. They married in 1927 and remained together until his death in the winter of 1949.

  Johnson was a master of slide guitar playing, a technique in which the guitar is tuned to an open chord and the strings stopped by sliding a bottleneck or other hard object over them; Johnson used a pocketknife. Slide playing gave the guitar a melodic flexibility reminiscent of a fiddle’s, and lent it a metallic edge that helped it cut through street noise.

  “Dark Was the Night” is based on an old Scots long-meter hymn. For this version, recorded in Dallas, December 3, 1927, Johnson altered the melody and replaced the lyrics with a wordless moan. The result, I feel, is one of the most fundamentally moving pieces of music ever recorded.

  Johnson died of pneumonia in Beaumont, Texas. His house had burned, obliging him and Angeline to sleep on a waterlogged bed. In Angeline’s words, “We had a—we burnt out there in the North End … and when we burnt out, why, we didn’t know many people, and so I just, you know, drug him back in there, and we laid on the wet bed covers—with a lot of newspaper. It didn’t bother me, but it bothered him. Yes. You see, he’d turn over. And I just lay up on the paper. And I thought if you put a lot of paper on, you know, that it would, you know, keep us from getting sick. We didn’t get wet, but just the dampness. You know, and then he’s singing, you know, and his veins opened, and everything. And it just made him, you know, sick.…[The hospital] wouldn’t accept him. He’d-a been living today if they’d accepted him. ‘Cause he’s blind. Blind folks has a hard time—you can’t get in the hospital.…”

  Johnson’s song concerns a situation he faced many times, nightfall with no place to sleep. Since humans appeared on Earth, the shroud of night has yet to fall without touching a man or woman in that same plight.

  Louis Armstrong

  “Melancholy Blues”

  * * *

  The year that Blind Willie Johnson recorded “Dark Was the Night,” Louis Armstrong made a series of recordings in New York that were to transform jazz. Music is no monarchy, and Armstrong evidenced no pleasure in the title “King of Jazz” bestowed on him by critics, but it is difficult to find a more influential twentieth-century musician in any field.

  His persistent optimism and his latter-day success encouraged us to forget that his childhood was harsh. His father left home when Louis was five, and the boy was brought up partly in the New Orleans Waif’s Home. In his autobiography Armstrong writes that his first girlfriend, his first wife and possibly his mother were prostitutes. As to the level of violence in the community, he recalled cheefully, “I ain’t never seen so much knife wailing. Toe-to-toe. One take a slice there, the other take a slice here. Man! Mary Jack died of it.”

  The solvent was music. “Music all around you,” Armstrong said. “The pie man and the waffle man, they all had a little hustle to attract the people. Pie man used to swing something on the bugle and the waffle man rang a big triangle.” There were men’s lodge bands, marching bands, dance bands, and on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, jazz bands rolled through the streets playing from flatbed wagons. (Armstrong speculated that the phrase “on the wagon” to designate sobriety dated from the New Orleans musicians’ decision whether to accept a wagon gig or drink all weekend.)

  Alan Lomax describes his view of the evolution of New Orleans jazz this way: “The late 1800s were hard times for blacks in the South, especially in New Orleans, because that’s where blacks had nearly seized power. There had been a lot of killing done. What little was left of their power was concentrated in early New Orleans black lodges. They organized marching bands to play at funerals. How could people stop you from holding a funeral? Everybody’s got to have a funeral.

  “The interesting thing is that horns in a polyrhythmic relation to drums is the principal orchestral form in Africa, and in putting together these lodge bands the New Orleans blacks went back to their ancestral roots. Their bands were full of horns and drums. They seized upon curved horns and straight horns and trombones, and they spoke through them. It was a language, and also an assertion of male strength and power. Black males were marching again, as if they were back in Africa. They hadn’t been able to do that during the whole of slavery.

  “The Africans were accustomed to using their instruments in a talking fashion, making them speak, and Louis, of all the great musicians, was the one who actually sang through his horn. And he changed the whole technique of instrumental playing in the West forever.”

  Listening to “Melancholy Blues,” it is difficult to argue with Lomax’s contention that we are hearing a musical people in the act of rediscovering their voice. The song’s roots, straight blues, harken back to black country music, but now the blues take on a bold new rhythm, handled on this track by banjo and tuba; recording engineers in 1927 had trouble with drums and the drummer here plays only cymbals. Over this come exuberant solos on trombone, clarinet and Armstrong’s horn.

  Chuck Berry

  “Johnny B. Goode”

  * * *

  When jazz rose up out of the blues and went to the cities, the rural soil from which blues had sprung was left behind. By the late 1950s, Armstrong found modern jazz just about the only type of music he didn’t like. It was only a matter of time until somebody returned to the countryside.

  Chuck Berry, an automobile assembly-line worker who moonlighted with pick-up bands in St. Louis, considered himself a blues singer. He especially liked slow blues, which he punctuated with elaborate electric-guitar playing. But he discovered that he was no crooner; audiences grew impatient with his slow tunes and responded only when the tempo picked up. Searching for upbeat material, Berry began writing songs that incorporated guitar riffs long employed in black and white country music, but now syncopated, sped up, and amplified. Audiences jumped to their feet and danced. Berry was helping to invent rock-and-roll, music that was to go around the world as had jazz a generation before. “Johnny B. Goode,” released in 1958, is about a poor boy in the country who makes the same discovery that Louie Armstrong and others made—that music might deliver him from obscurity and gain him respect. Its first verse sets the scene with the orderliness of an English ballad or a nineteenth-century novel—a log cabin in Louisiana where Johnny lives and learns to play the guitar. The second verse is remarkable for effortlessly shifting its perspective three times in four sentences. We first see Johnny alone, then from the point of view of the engineer on a train (Berry, born about 1926, was one of those Americans who still regarded trains as symbols of escape to the big city), then as the subject of praise from listeners, anticipating that of the crowds who will bathe him in admiration once he becomes a star. The third verse centers on Johnny’s mother’s prophecy that “maybe some day your name will be in lights.” The story ends there. Rock-and-roll songs normally have, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said of American lives, no second act.

  The vivid imagery in Berry’s lyrics helped establish an idea that had been glimpsed by jazz musicians
, that popular music could be a vehicle for poetry. But Berry himself, after a spate of writing that lasted only a few years, showed a lack of interest in innovation commensurate to that of the Homeric bards. At age fifty he was still performing the same songs, arguing rather persuasively that they emerged differently each time they were played. He traveled with a small suitcase and his guitar, hiring equipment and back-up musicians locally wherever he played. “I’m proud to say that if you call me in the morning, and there’s a plane going to where you’re at,” he liked to say, “I’ll play and please you in the evening.”

  Japanese Shakuhachi

  “Cranes in Their Nest”

  * * *

  The bamboo flute called shakuhachi came to Japan, as did many things, from China.

  Chinese imperial court orchestras maintained large pitchpipes used to tune the instruments, in the service of an admonition that uniform pitch was essential to preserving order in Heaven and on Earth. Bamboo tubes of various lengths, banded together, formed a large version of the panpipe, an instrument that keeps cropping up in Voyager music. At some point Chinese musicians took apart the pitchpipes and began playing them individually, with fingerholes drilled in the bamboo. Flutes came to be designated by their length, as this determined their fundamental pitch. The word shakuhachi is believed to be a corruption of the measurement of one such flute in Chinese as pronounced by the Japanese—isshaku hassun, meaning one shaku and eight sun, or about twenty-two inches.

  The shakuhachi became popular in Japan during the Edo, largely as the result of the intrigues of a group of komuso, wandering priests who wore wicker baskets on their heads that covered their face and concealed their features. Many of the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth-century komuso were ex-samurai who had been stripped of rank and privilege, including the privilege of carrying swords. Membership in the masked order enabled them to avoid potentially embarrassing confrontations with those they had bullied in the days when they were armed. In case these precautions proved insufficient, a number of the samurai-turned-priests took to carrying a shakuhachi that could be used as a club in a pinch. For these purposes, a larger and heavier version of the flute was preferred, one cut from the base of the bamboo, and it is from this model that the modern shakuhachi evolved. William Malm, a musicologist at the University of Illinois to whose scholarship we owe reconstruction of this story, writes: “This is perhaps the only instance in music history in which the practical necessity of self-defense was a major factor in instrument construction.”

  The shogun government reacted by requiring licenses of shakuhachi players. The samurai priests forged licenses. The authorities, rather than further anger what was, after all, a band of trained fighting men, offered the priests sanction if they would become government spies. They agreed and set up a series of headquarters from which they could, in Malm’s words, “fan out along the avenues and back alleys … playing a few soft melodies and overhearing equally intimate conversations,” from behind their wicker masks. “One finds today that the wandering komuso of Tokyo still have many acquaintances on the police force,” Malm adds.

  One of these ex-samurai, Kinko Kurosawa (1710-1771), traveled around the country gathering flute compositions of the fuke zen monks. His collection of thirty-six shakuhachi pieces is known today as the hon-kyoku, or “Original Pieces.” “Cranes in Their Nest” is one of these.

  The modern shakuhachi closely resembles the seventeenth-century samurai’s cudgel. It is a bamboo flute with fingerholes, one thumbhole, and no mouthpiece. It is played through a gash cut in the bamboo near the top. In trained hands it is capable of an impressive musical vocabulary. To construct a shakuhachi requires careful selection of a length of bamboo of appropriate thickness and size, as nearly circular as possible. In some cases the bamboo may be bent in the workshop to improve on nature. The interior is lacquered to improve the tone.

  Tradition dictates that original pieces be played with frequent dynamic rises and falls, frail rivulets of notes trailing off at the end of most phrases. The sound has been well described by Malm: “From a whispering, reedy piano, the sound swells to a ringing metallic forte only to sink back into a cotton-wrapped softness, ending with an almost inaudible grace note, seemingly an afterthought. It is a combination of all these musical idioms that produces feelings of vagueness and melancholy in the mind of many a listener.” Rhythm is not fixed and may be varied at the discretion of the soloist. Pitch is set in accordance with the resonance of the flute being played.

  The ideal of Japanese solo music is to produce a broad range of effects from a minimum of ingredients. The music is not annotated, and there is ample room for improvisation. Titles frequently are programmatic, but listeners are invited to allow their imaginations to roam beyond the indicated subject matter. In this piece, the titular subject is the affection of cranes for their offspring. Some listeners find the flute’s birdlike cry appropriate to Voyager’s lonely flight through space.

  Mozart

  Queen of the Night aria, No. 14, from The Magic Flute

  * * *

  The Magic Flute, Mozart’s last opera, premiered September 30, 1791, less than three months before Mozart’s death at age thirty-five. The Queen of the Night aria has been called “one of the most extraordinary depictions of character ever achieved in music,” and the character depicted is evil: “The vengeance of Hell boils in my heart; death and despair flame round me!” sings the queen, who rules from a throne decorated with stars. Upon completing the opera, Mozart resumed work on his Requiem, commissioned by an anonymous patron whom Mozart, as his health began to fail, suspected of having poisoned him with the ironic intent that the requiem become Mozart’s own. Before he could complete the work Mozart was dead, destined for a pauper’s grave. These grim circumstances have prompted some to view the opera in as tragic a light as the Requiem, but there is reason to think that the composer felt more cheerful about it.

  The opera had been commissioned by Emmanuel Schikaneder, who was then staging popular opera in a theater in the Vienna suburb of Wieden. Schikaneder enjoyed theatrics, drinking and womanizing, pleasures to which Mozart was not entirely a stranger. The production was something of a family affair. Schikaneder wrote the libretto and played the part of the bird-catcher Papageno, ad-libbing and mugging for the audience. Mozart’s sister-in-law Josefa Hofer played the Queen of the Night. Mozart described Josefa as “a lazy gross perfidious woman, and as cunning as a fox.” He thought her suitable to play the queen. The performances were successful, punctuated by applause and laughter, some of the latter occasioned by jokes Mozart played on his friends on stage. (In one scene, Schikaneder as Papageno was to play a set of prop chimes while a musician backstage provided the music; Mozart took over the chimes and dashed out a rainbow of improvisations while the audience laughed watching Schikaneder try to keep up.)

  Aficionados of Italian opera may be placated to consider that although this sole Voyager operatic selection is, of course, Austrian, Mozart learned to compose opera in Italy and wrote this aria specifically in the Italian bravura style. Readers not tired of hearing about panpipes may be interested to learn that Mozart too was charmed by them, having heard Indonesian pipes, imported during a general awakening of European interest in Asian music, and he incorporated them in much of The Magic Flute. They are not, however, heard in The Queen of the Night aria.

  I do not recall to what degree the choice was conscious, but in selecting music to go aboard a spacecraft that would sail in interstellar darkness, we found that we had included four pieces on the theme of night—Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night,” the Navajo Night Chant, the aboriginal song of the morning star, and this Mozart.

  Georgian Chorus—“Tchakrulo” Azerbaijan Bagpipes—“Ugam”

  * * *

  Voyager’s two musical selections from the Soviet Union come from a ganglionic zone, the Caucasus. Since deep prehistoric times the valleys of this mountain range between the Black and the Caspian seas have witnessed sh
ifting tides of migration to and from Asia, the Mideast and the Mediterranean. The region’s location subjected it to these migrations; its mountain barriers discouraged their frequency and helped distill the cultures of those who remained. The results have arrested the attention of travelers for centuries. Jason sought the Golden Fleece in the Caucasus. The Arabs called the region a “mountain of languages,” and when Roman legions reached the Caucasus, they found it necessary to employ the services of interpreters in eighty languages. Many travelers commented on the sophistication of the music they heard there.

  The Azerbaijanis are a Turkic people who migrated from the East in historical times. Their religion is Islam. The solo bagpipe piece on Voyager displays a haunting series of variations played over a drone rich with subdominants, in which may be heard hints of both the lands where they arrived and lands left behind; the music holds something recognizable for listeners from Spain to Afghanistan.

  It was collected by Henry Cowell, the American composer and pianist who in his middle years became increasingly interested in world folk music, to the extent that he altered his own path of composition to pursue a course he termed “neoprimitive.”

  The Georgian song was recorded by Radio Moscow as part of a national program intended to encourage folk musicians. Appropriate to an area that has been called a “polyphonic island,” the song is performed in three voices, exchanged among a chorus and two soloists. In Georgian, the word “tchakrulo” means both “bound up,” like a bundle of hay, and “hard” or “tough.” The song accuses a regional prince of injustice to the peasants, then asserts that the ordinary people will set things right—so both meanings of the title are explored. In the subtle authority of the music may be heard strains that run through Western classical music today, evidence supportive of the argument that Georgians were the inventors of Western polyphony.