The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts

Introduction: Does Nature Understand Music?

Introduction Does Nature Understand Music? Some say music is the universal language. This couldn’t possibly be true. Not everyone speaks it; not all understand it. And even those who do cannot explain what it says. No one knows how music speaks, what tales it tells, how it tugs at our emotions with its mixture of tones, one after another, above and below. You can be moved by music and have absolutely no idea what is going on. Language is not like that. You must be able to speak a language to know what is being said. Music is only in part a language, that part you understand when you learn its rules and how to bend those rules. But the rest of it may move us even though we are unable to explain why. Nature is one such place. It can mean the place we came from, some original home where, as Nalungiaq the Netsilik Eskimo reminds us, “people and animals spoke the same language.” Not only have we lost that language, we can barely imagine what it might be. Words are not the way to talk to animals. They’d rather sing with us—if we learn their tunes without making them conform to ours. Music could be a model for learning to perceive the surrounding world by listening, not only by naming or explaining. For to know and to feel the meaning of music are two diVerent things. We may not know the reason why the coyote is howling, or have any idea why the brown thrasher sings nearly two thousand songs. (Scientists haven’t a clue why this one bird needs to know so many more tunes than any other.) With only a little eVort, the whole world can be heard as music. We can hear sounds whose meanings are not intended for us as if they were music and soon call them beautiful. This is part of music’s power. This book considers the many ways music can engage and define nature. Music here becomes a form of knowledge, if you will, that links us more closely to the reverberations of the surrounding world. As soon as you begin to pay attention, the borders become less clear. On the enclosed disc you will hear an Australian bird that sounds as controlled in its singing as a human composing a tune on a flute. You will hear compositions that mirror the work- [ 1 ] david rothenberg ⢇ ings of nature in their manner of operation, an aesthetic dream most often attributed to John Cage. Cage learned of it from art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy, who had extracted it from Aristotle’s vision of techne—a word that once meant both “art” and “tool.” Addressing nature as a manner of operation, we complete processes that have been left unfinished, leaving a place for the ingenuity that so marks human presence on the earth. But no music can exist without the given ways that sound behaves, with or without the human impulse to organize and perceive it. At the same time, music seems to be about little else beside itself—the play of tones up and away, the game of noise and silence. Once I rode east, from Reykjavik, on a jacked-up bus with huge balloon tires, over moraines and outflows beneath a great glacier in southern Iceland. My companion, Elias Davidsson, was a former orchestral composer who now makes music by banging on stones collected from the far corners of his country . “Many people collect stones,” he remarked, “but usually they choose those that look or feel a certain way. I instead go for the sound. I hold the rock up in the air. I suspend it from wires or strings. Then I strike it with mallets or with other stones, building xylophones of strange complexity. This is the music I make out of this country.” A party was under way when we arrived at the tiny stone hut in which we would live for several days. Twenty farmers and their families had walked over the glacier from the other side, a journey of several days. They were members of a choir that had been formed in a remote community by one of the farmers who had become crippled years ago and could no longer work the land. So a while back he had started this singing group and brought music to this isolated village. Now the group had carried him over the mountains to this...