Soundscapes and spell songs (part 1)
Dear friends:
Happy New Year to you! I am writing this entry, sitting on the grass at the magnificent Kirstenbosch national botanical gardens in Cape Town - listening to a chorus of birdsong.
Recently I’ve been working with various legends of how music came to be. I’ve been thinking of the ephemeral and evocative qualities of music. The magic of how when strings are plucked, chords struck and voices raised in song, patterns of melody and rhythm are released to reverberate as sound in the air, to be received by our finely tuned aural passageways and recognised as music, with its tremendous powers to strike our emotions. Hearing music, we feel uplifted. We jump to our feet and dance. Or the mournfulness of a tune brings tears to our eyes. Or sweeps us up in a passionate rage.
Music has an extraordinary power to captivate us, and hold us spellbound. And of course, we humans are not the only creatures who make music. Humpback whales fill the seas with their haunting and complex vocals.
Countless species of songbirds, wolves, lemurs, cicadas, frogs and others all lend their characteristic, often defining, voices to their environs. Even the trees sing their own distinctive songs as the wind rustles through their leaves - a sound that is called psithurism, which comes from the Greek word for ‘whispering’.
When we really stop and pay attention to all these voices, we cannot deny the powerful animacy of the living world. Ancient myths from around the world celebrate the creative life force that is music. These myths also raise tantalizing questions about the origins of music, as well as its power to animate our emotions and imbue our perceptions of the world with vibrancy, depth, harmony and joy.
One story I’ve been working with is the legend of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent of Mesoamerican lore1. Quetzalcoatl, the god of the wind, goes on a mission to bring music to the world, which is a sad and muted place, devoid of sparkle. He travels across the sky to the palace of the Sun, where musicians in robes of different colours play a wide array of music, filling the palace with the lightness, sweetness, joy, intensity and passion of their many different songs. The Sun is greedily determined to keep all the musicians to himself. As Quetzalcoatl approaches, he commands the musicians to fall silent and hide themselves from the wind god. This infuriates Tezcatlipoca, the god of creation, who whips up a powerful storm, covering the Sun in a cloud of darkness. Quetzalcoatl shelters the terrified musicians under his wings, and brings them down to Earth, where they finally spread the joy of music among the whole of creation, as we see in this passage (Ober, C. 1994):
‘The earth could also feel that something new was coming - something it needed and had secretly been wishing for. As the wind god came nearer, the earth let out a slow sigh of relief. Its fruit began to ripen and its flowers began to bloom with new, deeper colours… Finally Quetzalcoatl touched down on the earth with the musicians and singers. They looked around curiously at the silent, waiting planet. Then they began to play. Through forests and valleys, deserts and oceans they wandered, filling the air with music. Soon people learned to sing and play, and so did the trees and birds, the whales and wolves, the running streams, the crickets and frogs, and every other creature. From dawn to dusk the melodies spread until music covered the earth.’
Reading this passage, I was reminded of a fascinating book I read several years ago on soundscape ecology: The Great Animal Orchestra by Bernie Krause. You can get a taste of it by watching his TED talk:
Krause began his musical career as a studio recording artist, working with groups like the Doors in the 1960s. But he went on to discover an unexpected passion for recording the natural soundscapes of different habitats around the world.
As he discovered over decades of field recordings, each place has its own particular acoustic signature, shaped by its particular tapestry of life combined with the features of the landscape. The geophony, as Krause terms it, is the acoustic register of features like mountains, rocks, forests, plains - as well as the ephemeral qualities of the season, weather and time of day. These geophonic and temporal features - whether it is cold, or windy, or raining, or the air is damp, for example - provide the sonic backdrop, as it were, through which the birds, insects and other animals weave their own voices. The interplay of all these living and nonliving inhabitants and features make up the distinct acoustic signature of a place.
Re-reading Krause’s book today, I think about sound with a fresh perspective of wonder. I wonder at the intricate processes life has evolved to perceive sound, and to communicate and make meaning through sound. Essentially, sounds are pressure waves created by vibration. Clapping your hands, plucking a guitar string, or operating a drill releases sound waves that travel through the air (or through a liquid or gas) to be received by your sensitively tuned ears. Like all the senses, hearing is a wonder of evolution. How did life evolve the capacity to hear sound, let alone develop something so complex, collaborative and evocative as music from different expressions of sound?
In his book, Krause writes of visiting an elder named Angus Wilson of the Nez Perce people in what is today known as Oregon, and being taken to a sacred ground at a stream by a lake, where suddenly the silence was shattered by the rising of the wind funneling down a rocky mountain pass. Suddenly, the place lit up with the most improbable blasts of different tones and harmonics - a great and baffling envelopment of sound that seemed to just burst out of nowhere.
As Krause describes it, he and his colleague were completely mystified, until the elder led them up the stream bank, where they saw beds of reeds of different lengths, which had been broken off by the wind: ‘As the air flowed past the reeds, those with open holes at the top were excited into oscillation, which created a great sound - a cross between a church organ and a colossal pan flute.’
The elder Angus Wilson then plucked a reed, blew through it, and remarked: ‘Now you know where we got our music. And that’s where you got yours, too.’
For most of human existence, the natural world (of which of course we are part) has sung its songs and spoken its rich and complex stories - which people have listened to and emulated. But what happens to us humans when the natural living world falls silent? When landscapes and oceans are filled with machine noise, and the songs of the living world are drowned out, losing their potency and coherence?
Tragically, very few of the ecologically rich soundscapes Krause captured early on in his career remain intact today.
As the voices of the living world fall increasingly silent, we humans suffer an impoverishment of language as well as songs. The writer Robert Macfarlane observed the wilds receding from cultural consciousness - as words like acorn, willow and wren were steadily being dropped from a popular children’s dictionary. In response, he and illustrator Jackie Morris collaborated to produce the Lost Words, an exquisitely rendered book of spells ‘designed to be spoken (or sung!) out loud in order to summon back these words and creatures into our hearts.’
As Macfarlane remarked: ‘We’ve got more than 50% of species in decline. And names, good names, well used can help us see and they help us care. We find it hard to love what we cannot give a name to. And what we do not love we will not save.’
The project has steadily grown into a wider collaboration of artists and musicians, who have produced two spell books and two musical albums - the latest released in December 2021. I particularly love this exquisite Lost Words Blessing from the first album, and have been moved to tears every time I listen to it:
Friday after next, I’ll continue with part 2 of this essay, and a deeper exploration of soundscape ecology, and why the world has such a strong need for music.
This week, I am inspired by the beauty of human collaborations to restore our enchantment with the living world in all its glorious songs. I am listening with joy and gratitude to the dawn choruses of birds, and to the light, playful, percussive touch of the wind in the trees. I am singing my own powerful spells of enchantment and protection to the bright and exquisite sunbirds and sugarbirds, the intricate fynbos and the ancient, gnarled milkwood trees that form parts of the living tapestry here in southern Africa.
What songs of enchantment will you sing to the living tapestry where you are? Let me know - as always, I would love to hear from you. Wishing you a 2022 filled with the joyous vibrations of music!
With love,
Megan
P.S. Working on Living Stories over the last few months has been an incredible joy and privilege, and I’m thrilled that you are here for the journey! People are now reading Living Stories on every continent except Antarctica. My dream for 2022 is to continue growing Living Stories, so that it can reach even more curious, thoughtful and passionate people out there who love stories and the living world. If you have enjoyed reading this, please consider subscribing (it’s free :). And if you already subscribe, THANK YOU!! I invite you to share Living Stories far and wide with others who might also enjoy it.
As always, my brief telling here is an amalgamation from various sources (and I often put my own spin on it too). I try to share and acknowledge sources in as ethical and practical a manner as I can, if possible through direct links to the source material. There is a lot more to say about this process, so I’ll very likely write an entry about it soon!
Fabulous read, informative, entertaining and thought provoking.
Very lovely from start to finish Megan!