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15 | "songbirdsongs" and "Inuksuit": Creating an Ecocentric Music
- Northeastern University Press
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* * * * * * * * * David Shimoni 15 songbirdsongs and Inuksuit Creating an Ecocentric Music Can music be ecocentric? Can it communicate a view of the natural world that, instead of assuming a preeminent role for human beings, inherently values the entire biosphere? It is a question well worth asking, as growing environmental crises threaten both human and nonhuman life on the planet. People have sought to reflect on their connection to the rest of the natural world through music for a very long time, but many pieces of music inspired by the nonhuman natural world actually say more about the humans who composed them than about their source of inspiration. Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony , for instance, musically describes scenes in the country, but Beethoven himself said it was “more a matter of feeling than of painting.”1 In other words, Beethoven was more concerned with expressing a human, subjective experience than composing a physical description. Or take the innumerable songs about nightingales:2 typically they reveal a lot about the poet who identifies his nighttime thoughts with the nightingale’s song, but they illuminate little about the bird’s song itself. In fact, very few of the nightingales represented in these pieces exhibit any of the vocal complexity of actual nightingales. In contrast to the communion with nature that exists on the surface of these pieces, the radical simplification of birdsong in a piece that focuses on a human experience communicates an underlying anthropocentric perspective. Since the turn of the twentieth century, some composers have attempted to represent nature more “authentically.” Olivier Messiaen, for example, spent hours listening to and notating birdsongs before using them in compositions. In Messiaen’s preface to the score of Réveil des oiseaux for chamber orchestra and solo piano, he wrote, “There is nothing but birdsongs in this work. All were heard in the forest and are perfectly authentic.” The advent of recording technology seemed to further increase the potential for authentic representations of the natural world. In Ottorino Respighi’s Pini di Roma, Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Cantus Arcticus, or Alan Hovhaness’s And God Created Great Whales, the recorded sounds of birds and whales singing create a startling effect within orchestral pieces. It seems to me that the drive to authentically represent other musical beings in our music stems from the desire to integrate humans into the greater web 236 * shimoni of life through sound. We might ask, do these kinds of “authentic” representations communicate an ecocentric perspective any more than the earlier works focused on the human experience of nature? Let us focus on Messiaen briefly because he is closely associated with the representation of birdsongs. Certainly, Messiaen’s notations come closer to conveying the rhythmic and frequency contours of birdsongs than did the efforts of most composers before him. Additionally, when he uses birdsongs he often tries to keep them in their contexts, quoting not one song or species but several.3 In an interview with AntoineGoléa,Messiaenexplained hisuseof birdsongs this way: “It is in a spirit of no confidence in myself, since I belong to this species (I mean the human species), that I have taken birdsongs as a model. If you want symbols, we can further say that the bird is the symbol of freedom . . . Despite my deep admiration for the folklore of the world, I doubt that one can find in any human music, however inspired, melodies and rhythms that have the sovereign freedom of birdsong” (234). Messiaen clearly values birdsongs greatly. He says that he is attracted by their “sovereign freedom.” But can the freedom that he describes be preserved in a musical work that tries to capture it? Is it possible that pieces that imitate the nonhuman natural world “authentically” often undermine what they try to extol? In his book Aesthetic Theory, Theodor Adorno writes that nature and art are fundamentally opposed and that when we take a studied, or objectifying, approach to nature—whether in a natural park or an artwork—we rob it of its essence: “The concept of natural beauty rubs on a wound, and little is needed to prompt one to associate this wound with the violence that the artwork—a pure artifact—inflicts on nature. Wholly artifactual, the artwork seems to be the opposite of what is not made, nature . . . Through its duplication in art, what appears in nature is robbed of its being-in-itself, in which the experience of nature is fulfilled . . . Planned visits to famous views, to the landmarks of natural...