The Great Animal Orchestra by Krause Bernie

Author:Krause, Bernie
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2012-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

Musical invention reflects modern views of ourselves and our increasing dissociation from the wild. Paralleling trends in science and the visual arts, composers, too, beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, began to echo the deconstructive inclinations that had become common in the rational philosophic and scientific communities. Tied only to a vague idealized notion of wildness, many composers drew on the voices of celebrity or signature animals, or on geological and weather events, to animate their music. Claiming “nature” as an inspiration, they, too, deconstructed the environmental whole and then reconstituted a selection of acoustic elements into a culturally resonant expression, assigning special meaning to a few particular organisms or events.

For example, Mozart wrote music lionizing his pet starling. The Sixth Symphony (the Pastoral) by Beethoven incorporates the voices of a cuckoo and quail, while Cantus Arcticus by the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara features recordings of common cranes. Heitor Villa-Lobos, from Brazil, wrote a piece called Uirapurú, highlighting the musician wren mentioned in the previous chapter. Vivaldi voiced the seasons. Debussy romanticized the sea. Olivier Messiaen’s music echoed the songs of birds he noted as “musical” while hiking in the French countryside with his wife, Yvonne. Messiaen didn’t limit his work with birds to just one or two compositions. He considered himself equally an ornithologist—aside from his many stunning pieces that assumed a range of different forms, he also took the songs and calls of ospreys, flycatchers, warblers, thrushes, and skylarks and transformed them into a number of musical strophes, highlighted in works such as Chronochromie, Des Canyons aux étoiles …, Réveil des oiseaux, and Oiseaux exotiques. Americans such as George Crumb and Alan Hovhaness wrote celebrations of whales, and Paul Winter jammed along with timber wolves in Common Ground, dedicating much of his musical repertoire and performing life to tributes of the natural world.

Although I enjoy a great acoustic venue enlivened with a world-class orchestra and a talented conductor, I find that, however respectful, brilliant, and conscientious the performance pieces may have been, in reality few of the musical works that claim nature as an inspiration speak to the essence of any natural environment I know. By featuring signature creatures selected from outside their rightful acoustic settings—animals whose voices just happen to fit the musical paradigms that composers are comfortable with—our compositions demonstrate a creative myopia: they present “nature” in terms of what the artist thinks it ought to sound like. We assess that which is deemed “musical” in our world and reject that which is not. We critically filter out “extraneous” sounds in favor of a preferred musical palette.

Marcel Proust understood the problem when he wrote in Swann’s Way: “Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them.” For me, our attempts at nature-related music evoke an intense longing for the more layered and richly textured voices that emanate directly from the wild. Either way, these

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