The Realist Tradition: French Painting and Drawing 1830–1900 by Gabriel P. Weisberg, Petra ten-Doesschate Chu (review)

70 Books defines as the study of the effects of the acoustic environment or soundscape on the physical responses or behavioural characteristics of creatures living within it. Its particular aim is to draw attention to imbalances which may have unhealthy or inimical effects. He further says 'it is necessary to conceive of the soundscape as a huge musical composition. ceaselessly evolving about it, and to ask how its orchestration and forms may be improved to bringabout a richnessand diversity of effects which, nevertheless, should never be destructive of human health or welfare'. Well, the answer to all this is that the landscape, like Topsy, 'just growed'. No one orchestrated the European Alps, or the Himalayas, or the English Lake District, or the seascapesof the Hebrides. or the Grand Canyon, or the Sahara Desert. Similarly, no one (not even Schafer) orchestrates tropical thunderstorms. or the noise of the monsoon rains, or the fury of Atlantic gales, or the grinding of arctic ice-floes. or even the 'lake water lapping' of Innisfree. No one planned the changes in vowels and consonants from language to language unearthed by comparative philology, or the changes in the English language from dialect to dialect. or those more minute changes by which Professor Higgins claimed he could detect in which street in London's East End a person lives. In short. Schafer is an environmentalist. He wants to encourage pleasant noises, and suppress unpleasant noises, Just as other prefer green fields to 'dark Satanic mills' and I prefer (in the village where I live in England) waterside meadows rather than gravel pits. He will doubtless agree with Ivan Illich, who once remarked that 'The environment isjust another technologically determined concept' and (in the words of Richard North) 'in Shadow Work he celebrates Hugh of St Victor, who 900 years ago wrote that science's proper role was to heal the rift between man and his environment, rather than to conquer it in the Baconian manner familiar to later technologists'. Schafer's knowledge is vast, and he must have an extremely good index system for filing press cuttings and his own notes. His first illustration is the Music of the Spheres from Robert Fludd's book (1617). which more than slightly miscalculates our present diatonic scale. From this he proceeds via an incidental discussion of boilermaker's disease (the progressive loss of hearing due to the impact of high decibels from hammering metal plates) to the acoustics of the Sidney Opera House, with pauses on the way to listen to Aeolean Harps, and various bird songs. The index begins with Acoustic design and ends with Emile Zola. Persons of wide interests and having open minds. curious to listen to novel viewpoints and fascinated by the infinite variety of the wonderful world in which we live, will be able toopen this book at any page at random, and find something interesting and worth thinking about. I should add that he is himself a very serious and experienced musician and composer. The scope of the work is best given by listing the chapter headings. The Natural Soundscape. The Sounds of Life, The Rural Soundscape. From Town to City. The Industrial Revolution, The Electric Revolution. Notation, Classification, Perception, Morphology, Symbolism . Noise, Listening, The Acoustic Community. Rhythm and Tempo in the Soundscape, The Acoustic Designer. The Soniferous Garden, Silence. The Music Beyond. The Realist Tradition: French Painting and Drawing 183&1900. Gabriel P. Weisberg and Petra ten-Doesschate Chu. The Cleveland Museum of Art and Indiana University Press. Bloomington. Ind.. 1980. 346 pp., illus. ISBN: 0-910386-60-9. Reviewed by RCmy C. Saisselin' This volume is an elaborate and luxurious catalogueof a very important exhibition held at the Cleveland Museum of Art. the Brooklyn Museum. the St Louis Museum of Art. and the Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum. Kelvingrove. Although most museum directors use the word important for the pictures they buy and the exhibitions they show. this one deserves the name. The reason is that it is in the nature of a re-evaluation of a certain type of 19th-century French art on a historical, aesthetic and, as will soon be apparent, market level (since the works of long-forgotten, ignored...