An Echo in Knoxville

     “Thoreau’s Pastoral Symphony” was the title of the public lecture I gave at the University of Tennessee on October 3. It was sponsored by the university’s Humanities Institute and their School of Music. As at the University of New Hampshire last March, I spoke about Thoreau’s remarkable attention to sounds in the natural world and what we might, for music and sustainability today, learn from them. (To stream a video of this lecture, go to http://www.sustainableunh.unh.edu/sustainabilityunbound/) “Music,” Thoreau wrote, “is the sound of circulation in Nature’s veins.” In this University of Tennessee lecture I was able to concentrate on Thoreau’s fascination with echo, with the way echo orients creatures in space and also alters our sense of time. Here is an excerpt from the lecture:

    “With an echo we have a doubling, as if time is stopping and running backwards on itself as the echo returns to the listener. Listening to the echo of a distant drum, Thoreau writes, personifying time, ‘Suddenly old Time winked at me, -- Ah, you know me, you rogue. . .’  Here Time addresses Thoreau as a ‘rogue’ for having found Time out, having known Time by the echo. At this point—it is in the Monday section of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers—Thoreau breaks into a visionary poetry very like that of Emily Dickinson:

          'Then idle Time ran gadding by
           And left me with Eternity alone;
           I hear beyond the range of sound,
           I see beyond the verge of sight, --'

     The encounter with the echo sharpens the writer’s senses, alters his sense of time and space, and enables him to peer into the workings of universe. In the same book he quotes Iamblichus in Taylor's translation, on sphere music thus: ‘Pythagoras . . . extended his ears and fixed his intellect in the sublime symphonies of the world, he alone hearing and understanding, as it appears, the universal harmony and consonance of the spheres, and the stars that are moved through them, and which produce a fuller and more intense melody than anything effected by mortal sounds.’ Thoreau did believe in a version of the theory attributed to Pythagoras which we refer to as the music of the spheres, whose harmonies were based on the mathematical ratios believed to exist between their astronomical intervals; and this was an instance in which Thoreau’s ecstatic experience with the echo confirmed it. Except for Pythagoras himself, humans were supposedly unable to hear this music; but Thoreau felt that he heard it all around him in the sounds emerging from the silences of the natural world. Therefore he pursued it on his daily walks, attended to what he heard, and seldom failed to make note of it in his journals. Thoreau never wrote a pastoral symphony. He never needed to: it was all around him.”

     I also spoke some about Thoreau’s belief in the echo as a signal of co-presence; on one occasion he likens the echo of his voice to the sound of a friend reading his verse back to him. And I spoke about Thoreau’s comparison of echo and reflection, referencing Hudson River School paintings (see the entry for Aug. 30, 2012 in this blog for some of them). I contextualized it within the music and sustainability discussion by suggesting that “this discourse proceeds along two fronts: one, how people can sustain music; and two, how music san sustain people. How people can sustain music gets us into issues involving best practices for the sustenance of music cultures. How music can sustain people gets us into issues of the role of music in the sustenance of life on planet earth. Both of these ways of thinking about music lead us to policy: the first primarily to cultural policy affecting the future of music cultures; and the second to a variety of cultural, economic, and regulatory policies affecting musical activities and their relation to the future of life on the planet.” The Thoreau lecture was an exploration along the second of those two fronts. 

     The audience of students and faculty filled the concert hall auditorium. The thought occurred to me that Thoreau himself had given many public lectures, although he was quite ambivalent about doing so. Several faculty—from the English department, from American Studies, from Religious Studies, and of course from from the School of Music—attended, along with many students and some from the university community in Knoxville at large. After the lecture, there were many thought-provoking comments and questions, and the discussion went on for about a half hour. I can’t recall when I’ve ever given a lecture to so many people that resulted in such a long discussion afterwards. Many people had a stake in different aspects of the talk: cultural policy, sustainability, music psychology, ecocriticism, cultural criticism, and Thoreau himself.

     The chair of Religious Studies spoke at some length in response to my point about co-presence and the way sound sacralizes space (see this blog, April 18, 2011). She had been thinking along the same lines for some time, but was unable to get her colleagues in comparative religion to pay much attention to sound-worlds. After the talk I was taken to dinner by a dozen or so faculty members, she among them; and she asked me why I thought that was. I said that in some ways this is the fault of those in music who have unwittingly erected a barrier with our special language (musical notation and music theory) to describe sound structures. The result is that many academic professionals outside of music feel ill-equipped to discuss it because they don’t know the language. What we in music don’t realize is that this wall not only shuts others out but it also shuts us in. I will pursue this with her after I return from the conferences in New Orleans.

Thoreau's Pastoral Symphony

Next week I will be speaking at the University of Tennessee's School of Music, and later in Boston, on "Thoreau's Pastoral Symphony." Of course, Thoreau never wrote a symphony; but he had a singular understanding of music and its place in the natural world, one which has a good deal of affinity with contemporary composers of ambient music and environmental sound art. Here I want to say a few things about Thoreau's musical background and conclude with a word about how his understanding of music can shift our understanding from people sustaining music to music sustaining life.

Indeed, a very prominent mid-20th century American intellectual historian, Perry Miller, disparaged Thoreau's understanding of music. “Thoreau had an insatiable hunger for music,” he wrote. “His untutored flute-playing has become a legend. He could invoke Beethoven, but he knew little about music, had virtually no chance to learn. . . . The second chapter of 'The Service,' that on heroic music, is pathetic in its revelation of musical illiteracy. What he could learn of music, aside from his little 'music box' and Emerson's Aeolian harp, was only what he might hear through the windows of some burgher's house wherein a daughter of respectability was practicing her piano lessons" (Miller, Consciousness in Concord, p. 146). 

But Thoreau’s pastoral symphony was not, like Beethoven’s, a representation of pastoral; it was pastoral. After all, Thoreau didn’t just write about pastoral; he actually experienced it in his cabin at Walden Pond. And so in these public lectures I will claim that Thoreau’s pastoral symphony was the music of the whole world of Nature, humans included, with which he vibrated sympathetically. 

Thoreau understood Beethoven’s music, the music that Professor Miller said he was ignorant of, as a kind of human echoing of the music of Nature; that is, of natural sounds. Miller’s characterization was at best ungenerous; but was it also correct? What, exactly, was Thoreau’s musical background? Was he really musically illiterate? Was he limited to music boxes, Aeolian harps, and listening through a window to some respectable young lady practicing the piano? David Henry Thoreau (he later reversed his given names) was born in 1818 and spent most of his youth in rural Concord, Massachusetts. What musical education would have been available to a young man of his time and place?

If he had been a musical prodigy Thoreau might have studied performance with a master, but musical conservatories had not yet been introduced in the United States, and the formal study of music history, literature and criticism was even further in the future. We know Thoreau played the flute, loved to sing popular and folk songs, and enjoyed dancing (his mother had sent him to dancing school as a boy). In order to play the flute he would have had to had some kind of tuition which likely would have involved learning musical rudiments, if he had not already learned them in singing school as a boy, in grammar school or, more likely, in church. We can suppose that he was musically literate at least in the limited sense of someone who could read for an instrument and who knew musical intervals, melody, rhythm, and harmony. Also, he was renowned for his unusually keen ear; he could discriminate among different birds singing simultaneously and had a knowledge of each one's song (that is, he could sing it back) as well as a mnemonic device for remembering it (Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau, 195, 265, 354-355.)

As a young man, Thoreau went to dances and other entertainments (Ibid, 73). He did not study music at Concord Academy (where he was enrolled from age 11 until he went on to Harvard) but then it was not offered. He did not receive a musical education at Harvard either because, as far as I can tell, it was not offered. Lowell Mason established his Boston music academy when Thoreau was fourteen years old, with instruction in singing and theory, and therefore launched his music education in the schools program too late for Thoreau to have taken advantage of it. Where else might he have received his education in music? Most likely it was from his father, John Thoreau, who "took great pleasure in music and often played the flute in the parish choir as a young man" (Ibid, 8). His older sister Helen "gave music lessons" in Concord (Ibid, 10). His sister Sophia was "fond of music" and "sang and played the piano well" (Ibid, 12). So instead of being limited to what he could overhear from a respectable neighbor lady playing the piano, he in fact grew up in a musical family; his father sang and played the flute, he himself played the flute, and his two sisters played piano, one well enough to give music lessons. In point of fact, then, his musical education would have been more advanced than most of his peers for that time and place. 

Miller's conclusion about Thoreau's musical illiteracy is, therefore, likely incorrect; but as Thoreau had a much broader concept of music than Miller, the critique is also somewhat beside the point. Thoreau did not write in his journal about the soirees in the family home when he played flute and his sisters played the piano, or the social occasions when he was called on to sing popular songs and ballads. His writings did not chronicle his social life. He did write about times when he and his companions, boating on rivers and lakes, break into songs of camaraderie; and he gives some of the lyrics. We recognize these as occupational folksongs of the sort that folklorists later collected from sailors and loggers. And he also wrote about those times when adrift in a boat on a lake or pond he plays his flute in a meditative way, the scene usually compared to pastoral. Seldom did he comment about concert-going, although we know he attended them; once he wrote, in typical perverse fashion, that opera must be for deaf people. (In fact, his hearing was acutely sensitive and until the last years of his life he could recognize very soft sounds over long distances.) He mentioned Beethoven and other Western art music composers very occasionally, and usually in a complimentary way. But most of his writing about sound and music concerned the sounds he heard in the natural world: frogs, crickets, birds, the sounds of the wind and rain, and also the ambient sounds of children playing, church bells tolling, and people chopping wood and surveyors halloing through the woods to mark their location.

To digress for a moment, when I was a sophomore at Amherst College I met Perry Miller. He had come down from Harvard, where he taught, to lecture us on Roger Williams, in our American studies course. He had written a book on Williams, and in his lecture he argued that the Puritans who ruled the Massachusetts Bay Colony had been ethically wrong to convict him of sedition and heresy and to exile him from the Colony for proclaiming his views on religious freedom. Another professor had taken an opposite view, that the colonial magistrates had the right to banish someone from their community who was a threat to its very fabric. Like most of the students, I sided with Miller when I was asked to write about the conflict. Who, after all, could oppose freedom? Later in the course, as we explored First Amendment rights, I began to understand more about the context. Williams was, in effect, screaming "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, the classic case. Therefore, when I read Consciousness in Concord, I was surprised at Miller's condescension toward Thoreau, his lack of essential sympathy. 

Thinking with Thoreau here, we begin to see the importance of music as sound, and of sound in sustaining life on planet earth. As I've written earlier, one approach to music and sustainability is to ask how we can sustain music; and I've addressed that in various writings on this blog and elsewhere. Another approach to music and sustainability, however, comes from acoustic ecology and is to ask how music is involved in sustaining life on planet earth; and it is in reply to this question that Thoreau's larger scope pertains, for he understood sound to be the natural language of the universe. Thoreau never wrote a pastoral symphony. He never needed to: it sounded all around him. We may not share his Romantic views, but insofar as sound is the primary medium of communication among the creatures of the universe, interference with and threats to the natural soundscape make inter-species communication increasingly difficult, to the point that they endanger the sustainability of life. 

Echo and Reflection

That sound can turn space sacred is one of the principal reasons music is so central a part of ritual performance. (See this blog, April 18, 2011: "Sound Sacralizes Space.") Most Euro-Americans do not often think of sacred space in the world of Nature. A few anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, poets and folklorists study indigenous cultures that do think in those terms. Some music composers, particularly environmental sound artists, also tend to think this way. Recently, I've become interested in echo both literally and as a figure for that sacralization of sound. And thinking about echo led me to mirrors and reflections. 

Echo, I have been thinking, is to hearing what reflection is to seeing. Reflection challenges our normal perception of space. Echo transforms our perception of both time and space. Both are doublings (though not exact imitations); original and near-copy are both present, the reflection simultaneously with the original, the echo later, though usually overlapping in time. (That is, the original sound remains in memory, if not still present to the ear, when the echo is heard.) 

Echo Lake, New Hampshire

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was fascinated by both echo and reflection. He wrote about his encounters with echo chiefly in the woods and on or around lakes. His interests were aesthetic and appreciative, curious and scientific. He liked to hear the echo of his own voice, as well as the echoes of other sounds--church and school bells, axe blows, the shouts of children, the sounds of thunder, the tapping of the woodpecker, a falling branch, the song of a bird. Why was an echo "good" (strong) at one time and place, and weak at another? How did American Indians use echo to measure distance and guide them on their journeys? (He had a chance to observe this in his trip to Mount Katahdin, Maine, and he wrote about it in his Journal and in The Maine Woods.)

Frederic Edwin Church, Mt. Katahdin (Maine) from Lake Katahdin (1850)

More generally, Thoreau asked what happens to sound as it travels over distances? Echo helped him develop a proto-theory of ambient sound; he may well have been one of the first to do so. 

Sanford Robinson Gifford, Lake Scene (1861)

Thoreau wrote about his encounters with reflections in pools and lakes. For example, "The lake is a mirror in the breast of nature, as if there were nothing to be concealed. . . It is the earth's liquid eye. . . I should wither and dry up if it were not for lakes and rivers. I am conscious that my body derives its genesis from their waters. . . " (Journal, Dec. 2, 1840). Here he writes from a perspective of naive realism, as if the reflection were an exact copy of the original. Years later, a more careful and scientific observer, he is puzzled that the lake reflection he sees is not an exact copy, and wonders in his Journal from what standpoint (not his own) it might be. He concludes that there is no standpoint from which the reflected image would be an exact imitation of the original.

Asher B. Durand, Thanatopsis (1850)

While Thoreau in the mid-19th century was living out his pastoral at Walden Pond and writing about echo and reflection, American luminists were painting echo and reflection into their pastoral visions of forests and bodies of water. This cannot be coincidental. Rather than portray Narcissus looking at his reflection in the pool with the nymph Echo by his side, they painted natural landscapes with lakes and rock formations, rivers and ocean estuaries, cliffs and mountains, echo and reflection in the same scene.

Thoreau's vibrating to the sounds of the natural world is the aural equivalent of Emerson's transparent eyeball, in which the sense of self disappears into the ecstasy of hearing (or, following Emerson, of seeing). It is the same when sound sacralizes space and time. Every good musician has felt those magic, ecstatic moments, when the self or ego disappears and you are at one with your voice or instrument: you are your voice or instrument. In those moments time and space become something other, and you experience the music playing (or singing) you, not the reverse. 

Martin Johnson Heade, Thunderstorm on Narrangansett Bay (1868)

The luminists achieved a similar effect, as if they had become transparent eyeballs, eliminating the appearance of their painterly selves by removing from their paintings the marks of their creation. They did so by concealing their brush strokes, as in Heade's arresting painting of the thunderstorm on the bay above, an example of the Romantic sublime. Durand (above), Fitz H. Lane, Heade, and, in some of his paintings, such as his "Eel Spearing at Setauket," William Sidney Mount were among those who brought this luminist vision into being.

In Heade's thunderstorm the artist has vanished inside the painting much as the musician has become the music, the voice merged into the echo. Here, reflections are doubled: the water is dark, reflecting the sky, and this darkness contrasts with the white reflections of the boats' sails. Meanwhile, we see the jagged lightning and, in our mind's ear, we hear the echoing thunder. Listening to those paintings one may hear the co-presence of sound that is characteristic of sacred space.

     "Each more melodious note I hear
       Brings this reproach to me,
       That I alone afford the ear,
       Who would the music be."
                                -Thoreau, from "The Service"

Catching Up

   Various summer activities have prevented me from posting in over a month, so this will be kind of a catch-up entry. Further pursuing music and sustainability through sound studies in the natural world, I've turned to a couple of concepts, namely reflection and echo, that seem to hold possibility. I hope to say more about them here and in my public lectures in the fall. Three await: one at the University of Tennessee, another at Northeastern University, and the third at the Ecomusicologies conference in New Orleans.

   An invitation came along to spend nearly a week in early October in Knoxville at the University of Tennessee, giving a talk on music and sustainability, visiting some classes and speaking about my work and theirs, and being available to faculty and graduate students. This short-term visiting professorship is agreeable work and something I've done before, at the University of Alabama, and also at Florida State University. I very much look forward to that, and to an event coming right on its heels, a symposium at Northeastern University with special guests from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. I was invited to give a presentation in the symposium, and will look forward to seeing some old acquaintances from China including Professor Zhang Boyu, who will be leading the symposium. One of the other presentations is by the Chinese scholar Yu Renhao and is titled "Music of Original Ecology and Original Ecology of Music." I'm not sure what "original ecology" means in this context, but am eager to find out. Finally, I will be presenting at the Ecomusicologies 2012 conference in New Orleans at the end of October, on Thoreau's importance for students of ecology and music. I will have more to say about all this in the coming weeks.