In Harmony with Nature: The Sheep Episode in Richard Strauss's Don Quixote, op. 35

In Don Quixote, Sancho Panza rides with Don Quixote along a road and encounters clouds of dust (1.18). Don Quixote mistakes the clouds for two approaching armies, and Sancho warns that what appear to be armies actually are herds of sheep approaching. Don Quixote enters into battle against the wooly creatures and kills seven before two shepherds throw stones at him and knock out several of his teeth. In 1897, the German composer Richard Strauss (1864-1949) created a symphonic representation of this scene in the second variation of his symphonic poem Don Quixote, op. 35. Among many musical references within the work, Strauss recreates the baaing of the sheep, placing the listener in Don Quixote's position within the scene.

The many representations of animals within nineteenth-century musical works merit close examination, both from a theoretical standpoint and for what they show us about contemporaneous views toward animals. The emerging field of nature musicology illuminates our understanding of how animals were viewed in the past. Nature musicology may be defined as the study of how non-human animals and natural landscapes are represented in musical works. Nature musicology scholarship examines how and why human composers represent phenomena associated with the outdoors. This differs from zoomusicology, in which scholars study the musical aspects of sound or communication made by non-human animals. For centuries, composers have used instruments and voices to replicate animal sounds, and historical musicologists have ignored these animal representations, dismissing them as unworthy of attention. In the Journal of the American Musicological Society, music historian Peter Burkholder dismisses a mass by sixteenth-century composer Johannes Martini that includes the call of the cuckoo: "This last Mass uses borrowed material only in the broadest sense—interspecies borrowing, as it were—and will not be discussed here" (Burkholder 481). Similarly, current Animal Studies scholarship in the humanities neglects music, focusing mainly on literature and iconography.

Animal representations are more frequent in late-nineteenth-century musical works than in works of other eras. One reason for their presence is the fact that Romanticism in art music emphasized a program or narrative, and portraying the human relationship with either nature or other powers beyond human control. The sheep episode is particularly apt for questioning how orchestral music represents animals, given the complexities of the sheep vocalizations, Don Quixote's character, and his perceptive delusion. In what follows, I compare music and animal communication, investigating how the sheep episode operates and the contributions of recent scholars. Afterwards, I analyze in detail Strauss's representation of sheep in Don Quixote, op. 35, focusing on how Strauss uses dissonance.

Language: The Sonic and the Associations

This essay problematizes American ethnologist Peter Marler's claim that both human music and animal songs are primarily nonsymbolic and affective (Jakobson 50). While human instrumental music is non-symbolic, the term "song" as defined in human language may not be appropriate for animal utterances that we do not understand. Marler notes that lexicoding (when signal elements are given meaning) is exclusively human (Marler 31). Many film and literary works imply that through the affective mode of communication, humans can express emotions to animals. For example, Kornél Mundruczó's 2014 film White God asserts the power of affective communication from human to animal. Near the film's ending, the young protagonist Lili sounds her trumpet in a Budapest street and assumes the physical position of an orchestra conductor, as an army of over two hundred canines halt their advance and lie down before her in the half-circle position of an orchestra. Historically, trumpeters have signaled the onset of military attacks, and in cartoons, a person holding a trumpet often signifies an important news event. Moreover, trumpeters play taps at military funerals, a commemoration of the passing of a sentient being into another state. The scene in White God implies a parallel in the animal world: the canines interpret the trumpet sound as having significance. While we do not know exactly how the dogs interpret the piece of music...