Murmurs of Earth

by Carl Sagan

  Bulgarian Shepherdess’ Song—“Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin”

  * * *

  The presence of two bagpipe pieces, Bulgarian and Azerbaijani, aboard Voyager prompts the reflection that astronomy and music unite in the history of the shepherd. The need to attend to flocks each night turned shepherds into students of the stars and authors of constellations. In several parts of the world they employed bagpipe music to soothe the sheep and keep them together in the darkness. Alan Lomax points out that the sound of early bagpipes resembled the baaing of sheep, as did the bagpipe itself, which often was made of sheepskin with the hooves still on it. “My guess is that the bagpipe is a shepherd’s instrument because the sheep responds to it as if it were one of them,” Lomax says. “The instrument lies in the shepherd’s arms like a sick lamb—often in Bulgaria it’s covered in wool—and it produces a kind of bleating sound. The sheep follow the sound and stay close to the shepherd. In that way a shepherd can keep his flock together at night even while they are grazing. I’ve been with Spanish shepherds who played all night long. Some know hundreds of tunes. I suspect that shepherds created much of our European tune-stock; they had plenty of time, and a captive audience.”

  In this song, recorded in the isolated mountain village of Arda, the bagpipe music closely resembles a shepherd’s call. The words celebrate a familiar folk figure, the outlaw who harasses occupation troops. Delyo is his name and “hagdutin” describes his calling as an outlaw-bandit of the variety of Robin Hood or Brennan on the Moor. Delyo sides with the peasants and warns Turkish officials not to try to convert them to Mohammedanism. The Turks ruled Bulgaria for five centuries, and while the words of this song express resistance to that situation, the melody shows signs of Turkish influence. The bagpipes play with a terrific force more than matched by the singing of Valya Balkanska, who manages to retain an air of charm while sounding as if she could make herself heard three valleys away.

  The quality of Bulgarian folk music is matched by its quantity. One collector, Vasil Stoin, had transcribed 12,000 folk songs by the time of his death in 1939. At the suggestion of the composer Béla Bartók, the emphasis then shifted from transcription to tape-recording in the field. Today the archives of the Bulgarian Institute of Music hold over 100,000 songs.

  Stravinsky

  Sacrificial Dance from The Rite of Spring

  * * *

  The Rite of Spring represents a raid by a keen intellect upon a zone of the imagination that developed when our ancestors lived in societies resembling those we now elect to call primitive. The idea for the piece came to Stravinsky in a dream, “a scene of pagan ritual in which a chosen sacrificial virgin danced herself to death,” as he recalled it. “Being a Russian,” he added, “for me this image took form as the epoch of prehistoric Russia.” Stravinsky’s opening theme was borrowed from a folk tune rooted in a Carpathian shepherd’s song of unknown antiquity, and throughout the piece he exercised an option that would most closely associate him with the primitives: he emphasized rhythm.

  The reception afforded the work at its premiere at the Theatre de Champs-Elyseés in Paris in 1913 is history. The dancers couldn’t hear the orchestra for the catcalls. The musical press termed the composition “hideous” and “barbaric.” Seven years later the New York critic Deems Taylor wrote: “It sounds like cacophony because I am not used to it, and it probably sounds all alike for the same reason that Chinamen all look alike to me; I’m not well acquainted.”

  Still later, the Rumanian composer and music writer Roman Vlad, who had been born six years after The Rite of Spring was composed and so grew up in a musical world that had long ago reassured itself that the work was perfectly acceptable, wrote: “Here, perhaps for the first time in musical history, rhythm plays a major role in the musical discourse, sweeping all the melodic and harmonic elements wholesale into the vortex.” (Italics added.)

  It may seem remarkable that such a sentence could be written in a world where rhythm had been playing “a major role in the musical discourse” for thousands of years, but the remark offers a clue to understanding the shouts of rage on the night of its premiere. The Western world finds it convenient, in this season of its predominance, to imagine that because our voices speak most loudly, nobody else has much to say. The Rite of Spring threatened this false assumption by introducing into the concert hall a replica of the music of our denigrated prehistoric ancestors and of their contemporary kin, the citizens of the “underdeveloped” world. To the degree that the work succeeded as music, it was bound to engender anger. It reminded us of how much we owe to people we have forgotten.

  The outrage soon abated and The Rite of Spring was absorbed by our civilization with a quiet gulp, like a rabbit swallowed by a snake; what happens in concert halls never really changes the world. Stravinsky wrote nothing like it again, declining to make a career of mining the neolithic. The composition built no bridges between cultures. It was more like a shout across the river.

  Navajo Night Chant

  * * *

  The Navajos, today the most populous group of American Indians, are related to the Apaches. They migrated to the Southwestern United States a thousand years ago as hunters, later to adopt agriculture and sheep-herding under the influence of the Pueblos.

  The Night Chant belongs to Grandfather of the Gods, one of thirty-five major Navajo ceremonies. It lasts nine days. Its purpose is to initiate boys and girls into the tribe’s ceremonial life. The dancers conducting the ceremony wear masks which—like the horns of the New Guineans and the Australian aborigines and the bagpipes of the Solomon Islanders—are prepared over a period of weeks or months under strict control and to the accompaniment of ritual. The singing is in unison. Singers rehearse for months beforehand, striving to introduce new songs and variations the appeal of which might lead to their being adopted as a permanent part of the ceremony. An innovation in this particular song is that the normal male voice alternates with an eerie falsetto.

  The sole accompaniment to the voices on the Night Chant is provided by gourd rattles, shaken in dance motion by the dancers as they move; as a beguiling consequence one can almost see the dance by listening to the recording.

  The Night Chant was recorded by Willard Rhodes, then of Columbia University, who made more than a thousand recordings of American Indian music.

  Anthony Holborne “The Faine Round,” from Paueans, Galliards, Almains, and Other Short Aeirs

  * * *

  Constraints of time permitted few efforts on Voyager to depict the history of music. This short piece for recorder consort marks one exception. Listen to “The Fairie Round” in conjunction with the New Guinea men’s house piece or the Melanesian panpipes, and the recorder’s ancestry in wooden horns and panpipes is apparent. Listen to it next to Bach and it sounds connected forward in time as well.

  This snatch of Renaissance music was recorded under the direction of David Munrow, whose death May 15, 1976, at age thirty-three was mourned on both sides of the Atlantic by enthusiasts of Middle Ages and Renaissance music. In his short career, Munrow organized the Early Music Consort of London and gave concerts of all-but-forgotten music that both exhilarated and instructed audiences. He released thirty-three record albums of early music and appeared as a bassoonist on many recordings of the standard repertoire as well, including five versions of the Brandenburg concerti. Informed of Munrow’s death, his associate John Currie, chorus director of the Scottish Opera, said: “Happily he lived long enough to establish with a very wide public that there is no such thing as music which is dead simply because it is old.”

  Peru

  Wedding Song

  Panpipes and Drum Song

  * * *

  The Spanish invaders found Peruvian musicians playing many sorts of instruments made of wood, stone, bone and metal. The efflorescence of their music then and now may allow us, without at all disparaging the music of other South American peoples, to agree with the musicologist Robert Stevenson that “musically speaking, the And
ean peoples outstripped all other New World enclaves.” As we might expect from people whose high-altitude home has given them the largest thoracic capacity in the world, Peruvians like to sing and play wind instruments.

  The wedding song, sung in pure, unaffected tones by a Peruvian village girl of about fifteen, was recorded in 1964 by John Cohen, a popular American folk singer. “Karen Bundy, a Peace Corps volunteer, said she knew some little girls who knew some nice songs and would sing them for us,” Cohen recalls. “As we were recording, the girl’s mother knocked on the door and wanted to know what was going on. Fortunately the knocking didn’t turn up on the tape.” This was in Huancavalica, high in the Andes.

  The words of this Inca song represent a young girl’s lament for having married when too young to know what she was doing. “You took me to church on Sunday; I thought it was time for mass.…” she sings. “The band played, I thought it was your birthday. [I was a] fool.” The girl Cohen recorded had endured no such experience herself, and this, I think, adds to the charm of the recording—as it has been said, at the other end of the spectrum, that the effectiveness of Billie Holiday’s wishful “The Man I Love” derives from the fact that the singer doesn’t believe the words.

  Signal evidence that men navigated the Pacific in prehistoric times is to be found in similarities of musical instruments in South America with their counterparts in China, India and the South Pacific. Few of the similarities are more striking than the construction of panpipes on both sides of the Pacific. The scales and pitches customarily employed are the same, and ancient Chinese and South American musicians alike sometimes constructed their instruments in two joined sets of six pipes each.

  The Voyager selection is played on one of these two-row panpipes. Hollow wood sticks are cut to different lengths, open at the top; sound is produced by blowing across the opening. The ramshackle, irregular tempo of the drum accompaniment is intentional and evidences no lack of expertise; the player deliberately manipulates the rhythm in favor of the unexpected. It may be played here by a one-man band. Musicians playing panpipes and drum simultaneously can be seen on pottery painted in Peru prior to the Inca conquest, and on the streets of Peruvian cities today.

  Melanesian Panpipes

  * * *

  The principal music of Malaita, a 115-mile-long island in the Solomon Islands of the Pacific, is the panpipe ensemble. The pipes are made with great care and beautifully ornamented. Of the two types of panpipes used in the Solomons, single-row and double-row, the inhabitants of Malaita prefer the single-row variety.

  Their songs concern the sights and sounds of nature, and are accompanied by stories elaborating on their emotional tone and the lessons they can teach. The stories are not normally revealed to audiences, but are conveyed privately among musicians, as in a guild.

  When a panpipe group gets together to play, they normally rehearse the tune once through by playing it softly to themselves—this in itself can be quite lovely—then play it twice at full volume. Counterpoint is common, although the tune on Voyager is played in simple harmony.

  The traditional music of Melanesia is disappearing, a sad story echoed in many parts of the world. For years Christian missions discouraged its performance and encouraged younger islanders to think of it as “old-fashioned,” a doctrine that persists in some quarters. “This astonishing attitude is still defended today,” reports a French musicologist who has recorded Melanesian music, “by the missionaries of the two Protestant churches of Malaita, the South Sea Evangelical Mission (SSEM) and the Seventh-Day Adventists (SDA).…For decades the colonial power has repeated to the Melanesians that any ancestral customs are scornful. And in 1970, the Solomon Islands radio devoted to traditional music and oral literature together, all in all, fifteen minutes a week.”

  The Reverend D. A. Rawcliffe of Pawa warns that unless this trend is reversed the instruments themselves will disappear along with the music they play. Panpipes “used to be common in most islands,” he writes, but “are now found only in a few, notably in Malaita.…And even there a mere handful of men know how to make them now.”

  Australian Horn and Totem Song

  * * *

  Sandra LeBrun Holmes, a respected collector of aboriginal music, dance and visual arts, was born on a small sheep station near Broken Hill in western New South Wales, at the hands of an aboriginal midwife. She has lived and worked amongst the aborigines for over thirty years. Her arms and chest bear the scars of slashes made in ceremonies to initiate her into their tribes.

  “Since childhood I have regarded aborigines as my own people,” she writes. “I have sought to preserve and record their songs, their dances, and—them. I always felt a deep compassion for them and as I grew up became more and more identified with them, and so my deep interest, love, and life’s work has deepened until it is all that is meaningful to me and gives me happiness. I am seeking to save some of their visual and recorded history and their sacred places and their pride. Inevitably I have come up against harsh racism and am called either an eccentric or a ‘white nigger.’ My great dream is to establish a teaching museum somewhere, to teach whites to understand aborigines and to recognize them as human beings who have their own religions and identity.”

  The two song excerpts that appear on the Voyager record were recorded by Holmes in 1958 on the Crocodile Islands of Arnhem Land, the largest of Australia’s aboriginal reservations, an expanse of 31,200 square miles in the Northern Territory. The instruments are ironwood clap sticks and the didgeridoo, a large wooden drone trumpet. The didgeridoo lacks fingerholes, and getting sound out of it requires massive volumes of air. To meet its demands, musicians develop their lungs and lower back muscles over the years. A solo voice chant is heard on the second song.

  Life in Arnhem Land is not particularly harsh by aboriginal standards—there are tribes in the central regions that subsist entirely on insects—but it is sufficiently unrelenting that music of the region reflects a preoccupation common to aboriginal art, anxiety over the caprice of nature. In a subsistence society, vicissitudes of climate can spell hardship or death. Many aboriginal rites seek to placate nature, to ask that the days and seasons proceed in a reasonably moderate and predictable fashion.

  In one of these excerpts, a singer of the Millingimbi tribe imitates a devil bird, a pancultural symbol of fate’s dangers that was no stranger to Sophocles. In the other excerpt, the morning star, Barnumbirr, is ceremonially lifted up into the eastern sky from the land of the dead; its rising will be followed by the warmth of dawn. The gravity of the music fits the concerns from which it springs.

  New Guinea

  * * *

  From the island of New Guinea comes another sample of ancient tribal music, this played on two large hardwood horns. Listeners will notice the beauty of the alto theme sounded at the beginning and end. The intervening duet may at first sound repetitious. Closer listening reveals that the same figure is never played twice in quite the same way. The variations prove to follow a structure of their own, and attending to them—an exercise something like attempting to reconstruct an unsounded voice in a Bach fugue—introduces the listener to a music the nature of which I would call hypnotic. The closest parallel in nature I can think of is the interlocking call of crickets—a sound that, once you attend to it, displays patterns of bottomless variety.

  New Guinea has been inhabited by humans since prehistoric times, sustaining that interplay of people from surrounding cultures we so often find at the roots of accomplished music. Most natives of Papua, New Guinea, live in male-dominated societies led, as elsewhere in Melanesia, by a “big man” who owes his leadership not only to heredity but also to his demonstration of appropriate abilities. He and his followers spend much of their time in the men’s house, an elaborately constructed dwelling whose carved hardwood roof beams may tower thirty or forty feet over the village. Prior to important ceremonies, the village males gather in the big man’s house and play this trancelike music on large horns. The horns, a ma
le symbol, may not be played, or in some cases even viewed, by women.

  Alan Lomax, in what may not be too great a leap of analogy, sees this way of life echoed in the New Orleans black men’s lodges whose horn music produced Louis Armstrong. Lomax describes a New Guinean ceremony: “In New Guinea the men’s music plays an important part in the yam/pig economy. There is great pressure to acquire more land to raise more yams to feed more pigs and people. Ceremonial feasts are held to cement alliances—and incidentally to slaughter some of the pigs that are eating the tribe out of house and home. At these feasts the men put on displays of aggressive singing and dancing. The thunder of their choirs and stamping feet can be heard miles away. The dancers wear elaborate shoulder and head decorations of leaves and feathers sometimes rising ten or fifteen feet into the air, like trees waving in the wind. The design of these costumes match Picasso or Matisse, but they fade after a day or so and are thrown away. Days and weeks of planning and work in the men’s house go into creating these ceremonial displays. One group in western New Guinea carves images of alligators, many of them eighteen to twenty feet long. When the ceremony is over, all are discarded, thrown in the river, to make way for the next year’s creations. These people are fantastic artists.”