Walden X 40: Essays on Thoreau

12. Flute

recto runningfoot 53 1 2 . F l u t e In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat playing the flute. (120) And now to-night my flute has waked the echoes over that very water. (107) Although Thoreau’s intermittent moralizing could make him denounce music as “intoxicating,” grouping it with wine, liquor, coffee, and tea (“Ah, how low I feel when I am tempted by them! [147]), he, like his father and brother, played the flute, and he took his instrument with him to Walden. We even know his favorite song: “Tom Bowling,” written by Englishman Charles Dibdin (1745–1814), who seems to have specialized in ersatz folk ballads about sailors. Catherine Moseley describes Thoreau’s musical taste as “mainstream bourgeois”; he had little interest in what we now call “classical music” but instead preferred “extremely elaborate and sentimental” songs that were excessive and “florid.” The same Thoreau who sternly advised “read the best books first, or you may not have the chance to read them at all” (Week, 98) enjoyed tunes like “Pilgrim Fathers” and “Evening Bells.” In particular, as Moseley points out, “Tom Bowling” “does not seem the likely favorite of one whose cry was ‘Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.’” Susan Sontag once observed that we should not expect anyone to have “good taste” in more than one area. Wittgenstein , for example, who insisted to Bertrand Russell “that nothing is tolerable except producing great works or enjoying those of others ,” liked Carmen Miranda movies. Nevertheless, because we have 54 verso runningfoot grown used to regarding musical preferences as a clue to personality, the knowledge of what Thoreau must have been playing while idling in his boat on the glassy surface of the pond on long summer evenings seems to open a previously undiscovered door. Thoreau was never indifferent to what he heard, and he was eager to provide Walden with a soundtrack. After the book’s introductory chapters (“Economy,” “Where I Lived and What I Lived For,” “Reading ”), the first to detail his everyday life in the woods is “Sounds.” First-time Walden readers are often surprised by how much space that chapter devotes not to natural phenomena but to the rattle and scream of the Fitchburg train that roared past his cabin several times a day. Nevertheless, Thoreau also records the noises made by pigeons, fish hawks, reed birds, a carriage and team, town bells, cows, minstrels , whippoorwills, screech and hooting owls, a wagon crossing a bridge, dogs, bullfrogs, squirrels, blue jays, a hare or woodchuck, geese, loons, and foxes. He does not mention his own flute-playing until later. Thoreau begins “Sounds” by comparing “written languages” to “the language which all things and events speak without metaphor” (78). Sound, in fact, may communicate more directly than any other medium. Citing filmmaker Robert Bresson, Noël Burch has pointed out that “sound, because of its greater realism, is infinitely more evocative than an image, which is essentially only a stylization of visual reality.” Evidence confirms Bresson’s insight: a January 1945 live recording of Furtwängler conducting Brahms’s Symphony no. 1 in Berlin, with audible coughs from the audience, provides a more urgent sense of being in that concert hall in that ruined city than do films of the same event. More than the music, it’s the coughing and shuffling that produce this effect. As Gilberto Perez notes, “The visual scene, however vividly presented, will always tolerate the pastness of a narration; but the moment a character speaks [or a spectator coughs], the action comes to life before us.” Thus, if by some miracle , we had a recording of Thoreau playing his flute in the woods, it might bring us closer to his experience than all of “Sounds.” The sound would “speak without metaphor.” (with Brenda Maxey-Billings) 54 f ...