The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World (20 page)

Music is of two kinds: absolute and programmatic. In absolute music, composers fashion ideal soundscapes of the mind. Programmatic music is imitative of the environment and, as its name indicates, it can be paraphrased verbally in the concert program. Absolute music is disengaged from the external environment and its highest forms (the sonata, the quartet, the symphony) are conceived for indoor performance. Indeed, they seem to gain importance in direct ratio to man’s disenchantment with the external soundscape. Music moves into concert halls when it can no longer be effectively heard out of doors. There, behind padded walls, concentrated listening becomes possible. That is to say, the string quartet and urban pandemonium are historically contemporaneous.

The Concert Hall as a Substitute for Outdoor Life
The concert hall simultaneously brought about absolute musical expression and also the most decisive imitations of nature. The conscientious imitation of landscape in music corresponds historically to the development of landscape painting, which seems to have been first cultivated by the Flemish painters of the Renaissance and developed into the principal genre of painting in the nineteenth century. Such developments are explicable only as a result of the displacement of the art gallery farther and farther from the natural landscape in the hearts of growing cities. Imitations of nature were then created to be exhibited in unnatural settings. Here they functioned as so many windows, releasing the spectator onto different scenes. An art gallery is a room with a thousand avenues of departure, so that once having entered, one loses the door back to the real world and must go on exploring. In the same way, a descriptive piece of music turns the walls of the concert hall into windows, exposed to the country. By means of this metaphorical fenestration we break out of the confinements of the city to the free
paysage
beyond.

This is certainly true of the nature descriptions of eighteenth-century composers such as Vivaldi, Handel or Haydn. Their landscapes are well populated with birds, animals and pastoral people—shepherds, villagers, hunters. Their descriptions are colorful, exact and benign. The music of Haydn is certainly not bereft of drama, but it is a music of happy endings, as we observe in
The Seasons
, where, following the storm, the clouds part to reveal the setting sun, while the cattle turn refreshed to the stable, the curfew bell sounds (the measures of the orchestration suggest that it is eight o’clock) and the world turns to that “soothing sleep that guileless heart and goodly health” ensures. For Haydn nature is the grand provider, and the pastoral people of his tableau enjoy an “easy and insatiable exploitation of the land and its creatures.”

Given the differences in style, Handel’s landscapes are close in tone to those of Haydn. In a work like
L’Allegro ed il Penseroso
, adapted from Milton’s famous duet of poems, we are presented with all the familiar features (birds, gently rolling countryside, hounds and horns) but in one of the arias, for baritone and chorus, there is an uncommon description to the words

Populous cities please me then,

And the busy hum of men,

for here oboes, trumpets and kettledrums join the orchestra and chorus in a rousing tribute to metropolitan life. Living in the city, Handel was one of the first composers to be influenced by the bustle of urban activity and is said to have derived inspiration from the singing and noises in the streets. Although he possessed an orthodox musical talent for nature description, there is nothing in musical literature to compare with Handel’s ear for urban acoustics until we approach the scores of Berlioz and Wagner.

The landscapes of Handel and Haydn are as rich in detail as the paintings of Breughel and they are just as carefully structured. Michelangelo had criticized the Flemish painters for failing to exercise selection in their subject matter; instead of focusing on one thing they included everything in view. Indeed, the compositions to which I have alluded share a similar feature, for they are wide-angle tableaux; the composer observes the landscape at a distance. Nature performs and he provides the secretarial services.

Only in the landscapes of the romantic era does the composer intrude to color nature with his own personality or moods. Natural events are then made to synchronize or to compete ironically with the moods of the artist. I have already mentioned how this technique of sympathetic vibration originated in pastoral poetry (Theocritus, Virgil), where it came to be known by literary critics as “the pathetic fallacy,” but we do not encounter effective employment of the technique in music history until the song cycles of Schubert and Schumann.

Schubert has often made the landscape perform for him. In a song such as “Der Lindenbaum” ("The Lime Tree") from
Die Winterreise
, the moods of the poet-composer stimulate the tree, causing its branches to move gently (summer) or violently (winter), while day and night thoughts are distinguished by major and minor tonalities. In Schumann’s
Dichter-liebe
, the landscape maintains its gay summer colors while the poet’s joy turns to grief, a bitterly ironical situation which is fully exploited in contrasts between vocalist and pianist.

Throughout the history of Western music, the sounds of nature (particularly those of wind and water) have been frequently and adequately rendered, as have bells, birds, firearms and hunting horns. We have already touched on street cries and have also mentioned the suggestibility of the solo woodwind instrument for the pastoral landscape. Let us inspect a few of the others.

Music, Bird-Song and Battlefields
Bird-song in music has a parallel in the enclosed garden of literature. Before the landscape of Europe was cultivated, nature presented a vast and fearful spectacle. The medieval garden was an attempt to create a benign and flowering place where love, human and divine, could be fulfilled. Thus, in the Cave of Lovers from Gottfried of Strassburg’s
Tristan:

At their due times you could hear the sweet singing of the birds. Their music was so lovely—even lovelier here than elsewhere. Both eye and ear found their pasture and delight there: the eye its pasture, the ear its delight. There were shade and sunshine, air and breezes, both soft and gentle. …

The service they received was the song of the birds, of the lovely, slender nightingale, the thrush and blackbird, and other birds of the forest. Siskin and calander-lark vied in eager rivalry to see who could give the best service. These followers served their ears and sense unendingly. Their high feast was Love, who gilded all their joys.

Birds contributed to the felicitous atmosphere of the garden, and they were deliberately attracted there by means of feeding and fountains. In Persian gardens, birds had been retained in huge nets. It may well be that the peculiar value set on gardens in the later Middle Ages is a legacy of the Crusaders, who also appear to have brought back the arts of lyric poetry and song from the Middle East. It was in this diminutive meadow then, behind the protective wall of the castle, that the troubadour art flourished, and the voices of the birds were often woven into their songs. It is the same pleasant and docile atmosphere that Nicolas Gombert and Clement Jane-quin extended in their
Chants des Oiseaux
. Bird-song will always suggest this delicacy of sentiment and I would go so far as to suggest that it appears in music in deliberate contradiction to the brutalities and accidents of external life. It is this way that it enters in opposition to the malignant forces of Wagner’s
Ring
, and it is sustained by Olivier Messiaen in our time for the same reason.

The case of firearms is in opposition to this. The cannon was first effectively employed by Edward III of England at Crecy in 1346 and again during the siege of Calais in 1347; but the first full-fledged musical treatment of firearms seems to have been Janequin’s vocal exhibition piece
La Bataille de Marignan
of 1545.

Frerelelelan fan farirarirarirariri—
went the trumpets

Von von von patipatos pon pon pon—
went the cannons.

The effect must always have been comical, with the result that instrumental versions of battle scenes quickly took precedence over vocal in examples too numerous to mention, until we arrive at Beethoven’s Battle Symphony, where the imitative gunfire is replaced by the real thing—another sign of Beethoven’s evident pugilism.

The devices of program music transform the real space of the concert hall into a garden, a pasture, a forest or a battlefield. These metaphorical spaces gain and lose in popularity over the years, and a study of this subject would give us a good idea of the changing attitudes of urban man to the landscape. To illustrate I will take just one theme, one I have already introduced: the hunting horn. We can now follow its symbolic transformations over a critical period, from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth.

The Hunting Horn Explodes the Walls of the Concert Hall to Reintroduce the Countryside
      Hunting horn motifs were employed for colorful effects in numerous symphonic works during the eighteenth century. Haydn’s
La Chasse
symphony (No. 73) is a good example. The robust tones of the horns at once cut through the other instruments to suggest the spirit of outdoor life. “Hark!” sings the chorus in Haydn’s
Creation
, as the horns are sounded,

The clamorous noise that through the wood is ringing!

How clear the shrilling of horns resounds!

How eager the hounds are all baying!

Now speeds the fear-rous’d stag: they

follow, the pack and the hunters too.

The famous huntsmen’s chorus from Weber’s
Freischütz
expresses the same passion for outdoor life and the high, free spirits of the hunt.

Once the horn has taken on a clear symbolic function, ironic transformations can be played over it. Thus, in Weber’s
Oberon
, the opening three notes on the solo horn—one of the most evocative effects in all music—transport us to the wonderful, perfumed gardens of the Orient. The hunting horn has become a magic horn, capable of moving the audience beyond local fields to distant
pays de chimères
.

In the symphonies of Brahms and Bruckner there is, if I am not suffering from a distended imagination, a perceptible transformation of the hunting horn into what we might call the horn of authority, for a certain hectoring quality, almost a stubbornness, is evident here which is absent from the spirited treatment given it by earlier composers.

We have another example of irony in Schubert’s“Die Post” from
Die Winterreise
, where the distant post horn dances across the acoustic horizon in the piano accompaniment, while the singer’s joy of anticipation turns to melancholy when he realizes that he will receive no letter from his beloved.

More than any instrument, the horn symbolizes freedom and love of the outdoors. When sounded in the concert hall, it collapses the walls and transports us again to the unrestricted spaces of the country. For those who were accustomed to hearing horns regularly, just beyond the city wall, this effect must have been immediately appealing. The horn of freedom achieves heroic proportions in Wagner’s
Siegfried
, where it becomes the acoustic symbol of the hero who will one day bring about the collapse of a moribund civilization.

But the most interesting transformation of the horn for our purposes is the last, the one we might call the horn of memory. The most eloquent examples of this transformation are to be found in the symphonies of Gustav Mahler. Already we have it clearly indicated in the opening movement of Mahler’s first symphony of 1888. Here hunting horn motifs are suggested first, distantly, on the clarinets, then by offstage trumpets, and finally, very slowly, very nostalgically, on the horns themselves. As the movement gathers impetuously toward its climax, the horns in glissando rips break away in a very rage for freedom. But it is the floating and sentimental quality of Mahler’s distant horns that are most memorable, for they prefigured the transmogrification of the landscape itself. Today there is no open countryside left in Europe; there are only fences and parks.

The Orchestra and the Factory
      If the solo flute and the hunting horn reflected the pastoral soundscape, the orchestra reflects the thicker densities of city life. From the earliest days the orchestra had shown a tendency to grow in size, but it was not until the nineteenth century that its forces were co-ordinated and its instruments strengthened and scientifically calibrated to give it the complex and powerful sound-producing capabilities which, in terms of intensity alone, made it a competitor with the polynoise of the industrial factory. But there were even greater parallels between the orchestra and the factory, as Lewis Mumford explains:

… with the increase in the number of instruments, the division of labor within the orchestra corresponded to that of the factory: the division of the process itself became noticeable in the newer symphonies. The leader was the superintendent and production manager, in charge of the manufacture and assembly of the product, namely the piece of music, while the composer corresponded to the inventor, engineer, and designer, who had to calculate on paper, with the aid of such minor instruments as the piano, the nature of the ultimate product—working out its last detail before a single step was made in the factory. For difficult compositions, new instruments were sometimes invented or old ones resurrected; but in the orchestra the collective efficiency, the collective harmony, the functional division of labor, the loyal cooperative interplay between the leaders and the led, produced a collective unison greater than that which was achieved, in all probability, within any single factory. For one thing, the rhythm was more subtle; and the timing of the successive operations was perfected in the symphony orchestra long before anything like the same efficient routine came about in the factory.