CUCKOOS, GUNS AND DRUMS
AN ESSAY ABOUT SOUND
A balmy midsummer’s day, 1916. Hidden in the trenches beyond Ypres, Ivor Gurney, composer and poet, is writing to Marion Scott, fellow student at the Royal College of Music: “High up in the air,” he observes, “like gnats British aeroplanes are sailing – but No Germans – and ever and again as they come round in their circles lovely little balls of white fleece…gather in their tracks. They go round and come back to the accompaniment of thumps like a soft tap on the bass drum when distant, or a hard tap on the timpani when near.” Then a cuckoo starts up in the distance, answered by a gun emplacement. He notes, “Trench mortar starts, but does not stop the Cuckoo, which cannot be far off from the battery”. The cuckoo’s refrain is a repeated quaver motif across a descending minor third from E natural down to C sharp. And when a shell lands behind the lines, it wails like a slow glissando across an octave and a semitone, “down the chromatic scale”, as Gurney carefully inscribes it, from a high D flat to C.
Gurney was not alone in hearing gunfire as music. On New Year’s Day, 1918, in the correspondence columns of The Musical Times, Cecil Barber evoked the fighting around Amiens. It is a sort of tone poem. “Everything has been peaceful up to now, “ Barber reports. “Then, without warning, the storm bursts, ffff. The pentecostal calamity is at hand, with its mighty rushing wind and tongues of riotous fire, above the strident blast of the batteries. For the guns, with their weary gleams of gold, supply a pedal to the frantic exordium; and superimposed on this, as the text- books have it, move notes of lighter calibres, all vociferous however and deadly in their utterance. The various timbres stand out clearly - the melancholy passage of great shells, the whizz and bang of smaller ones, the long swishing strides of the gas shells, and the constant spurt of snipers' fire, molto staccato, in stupendous counterpoint.”
Thus metal against metal makes frantic music. In descriptions such as these, there is no sub-category of noise. The cacophony enters the blood-stream of twentieth-century music, where it emerges in Edgar Varèse. A whole generation learns to listen to noise as music. From Brooklyn Heights, one November night in 1951, David Gascoyne, visiting British poet and one-time surrealist, hears the thumping of the New Jersey steel mills as if they are the thirteen strong percussive ensemble from Varèse’s “Ionisation”. The sirens from the nearby naval dockyard are the wind machine.
Varèse’s squally piece crosses the Atlantic in more than one sense. In Baltimore in the fifties a recording of it by the Juilliard Ensemble is the first LP to be acquired by the ambitious Frank Zappa. “In order to listen to The Album,” he later recalled, “I had to stay in my room. I would sit there every night and play it two or three times and read the liner notes over and over. I didn't understand them at all. I didn't know what timbre was. I never heard of polyphony. I just liked the music because it sounded good to me. I would force anybody who came over to listen to it. (I had heard someplace that in radio stations the guys would make chalk marks on records so they could find an exact spot, so I did the same thing. . . marked all the hot items so my friends wouldn't get bored in the quiet parts.) “At the winter solstice of 1954, his fifteenth birthday, Zappa ‘phones Varèse up. He was out.
These witnesses represent a new kind of audience; their listening, and their descriptions of it, are revolutionary acts. A wide gap separates Gurney’s cuckoo from Haydn’s or Leopold Mozart’s in the toy symphony; one is a pocket instrument imitating bird call; the other is a flesh and blood bird. An equally wide gulf separates Barber’s booming guns or Varèse’s percussive eruptions from Tchaikovsky’s in the 1812 Overture: the one is celebratory stylisation, the other a din heard as sound. In every case, the high realm of art has dissolved to be replaced by the auditorium of the world. The shindy has evolved into a score.
This affects the music; it also transforms the listening activity itself, and the ways in which it is theorised and perceived. Nineteenth century aesthetics had assumed a hierarchy of appreciation. In his essay On the Beautiful in Music Eduard Hanslick, a defender of the austerity of Brahms against the histrionics of Wagner, separated out those capable of discerning intrinsic form from those who dragged into their listening experience associations from the Everyday World. The former were musicians in a specialised, albeit in a passive, sense. The latter were pathological audiences incapable of taking in the thing itself, the musical object free from subjective projection. Hanslick would have had a hard time with ‘Desert Island Disks’. In 1933 the novelist Vernon Lee, a keen exponent of musical and painterly aesthetics, identified the two camps as “hearers” and “listeners”. In her long essay Music and Its Lovers, the product of a questionnaire sent to 105 of her musical friends, she provides examples of both. Among the hearers she features her friend Maia. Witnessing to her response to Parsifal, she writes of “extreme exhaustion, mental and physical, followed by a strange sense of elation and calm…a calm of understanding not of indifference.” The listeners by contrast attend to details of form. Personal memories or feelings seem a distraction or a nuisance. A respondent named Edward insists, “I have not attention enough to translate the music into emotional terms”, and another called Leonard declares “The music is something one watches, it has its own action and business. I become entirely absorbed. The music is too much music.”
Superficially in the twentieth century, with the rise of the severe formalism of the Second Viennese School on the one hand, and the surge in popular culture on the other, these two constituencies appear to drift further apart. Take a range of instances from the archive: a courting couple and a psychiatric patient on the one hand, and a musically inclined mathematician and a jazz buff on the other. On the evening of Sunday 14th August, 1955, during the eighth Ediburgh Festival, Gill Caldwell, an eighteen-year-old stenographer, and her boyfriend Ronald, attended a concert at the Usher Hall by the Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Thomas Matthews. The Russian virtuouso Sura Cherkassky was performing works by Rachmaninoff: the third piano concerto and the Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini. As his playing rises and falls, so Gill informs us in her diary, “Cherkasski was exceptionally brilliant I thought, and when we came to ‘straight from the film’ in Variations on A Theme from Paganini, Ronald and I could only smile at one another.” The smile is one of romantic complicity, and the film David Lean’s Brief Encounter, which both these young people have seen. As Cherkasski’s playing grips them, they are transported to a suburban railway station, where they holding hands. She is Celia Johnson, and he is Trevor Howard. The diary entry is a poignant example of what might be called the mid-twentieith century habit of fantasy hearing. The lovers have become figures in a film, the score their aphrodisiac.
Unsurprisingly the therapeutic potential of such image-begetting hearing was soon tapped. In the 1960s the pioneering therapist Helen Bonny evolved Guided Imagery in Music as a way of treating emotional disturbed adults. The technique was widely adopted both in the States and in Europe, including Britain. To take but one instance, in 1999 the Irish music therapist Catherine O’Leary played to a female patient of hers a CD of the allegro con brio from Brahms’ third symphony. “As she listened, O’Leary reports, “she was in a little village in Cornwall.” During her difficult childhood, “this little village had been a paradise for her; it was the most restful place she had been in her whole life.” The next time they met, O’Leary played her a recording of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, on hearing which “she came through a black world with sharp black rocks and thorny bushes tearing the skin. There were images of war, death and destruction all around in that world...The music changed to Gounod’s ‘St Cecilia Mass’, the Offertoire and the Sanctus, and she ended up on a bridge, a suspension bridge, not very stable, over a huge gorge. Way way below was the river...”
At the opposite extreme to the subjectivity of such accounts stands Douglas R. Hofstader, College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Comparative Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. In his book of 1979, Godel, Escher, Bach, Hofstader describes himself listening to the Crab Canon from Bach’s Musical Offering. In his account he divides himself into two: Achilles, who appreciates the maths of msuic, and the Tortoise, who prefers the music of maths. These two articulate individuals disagree about their preferences, but both love Bach, and both kindle to pure form. Listening to the canon, both seem to watching a performative shape: two lines proceeding from opposite directions towards one another and meeting in the middle, two crabs. The image, let it be noted, is not as in my earlier examples a personal association conjured up by the music. It is an image of the music itself, enacted on a virtual plain. In Vernon Lee’s terms, Hodstader is listening, and his listening has become a mode of watching. Hanslick would have been proud of him.
Mathematical analogies occur over and over in testimonies by twentieth-century listeners for whom the primary attraction of different musical genres is that of form. They are especially common among enthusiastic followers of jazz. Take the pianist and record producer Ted Goia evoking his experience of the harmonic sophistication of Be-pop as illustrated by “Donna Lee”, Charlie Parker’s re-working of the standard “Indiana” :
almost every bar features one or more altered tones – an augmented fifh, a major seventh played against a minor chord, a flattened ninth leading to a sharpened ninth, and the like...One recalls Parker’s alleged statement that that an improvizer should be able to use any note against any chord – it was simply a matter of placing it in the right context. All in all, the thirty-two bars of “Donna Lee” serve as a compact proof, almost Euclidian in its elegance, of his daring proposal.
With the help of such cases we can perhaps re-state Vernon Lee’s distinction. What they suggest is a gulf set between those who experience mental pictures stirred up by a piece of music, and those who devise images of the music in itself. This paradigm consorts very well with nineteenth-century post-Romantic theories of listening. Twentieth-century cognitive science by and large complicated this picture. In all reports of the listening act, it now appears, three stages are involved: cognition, perception and description. On the descriptive level, the “hearers” and the “listeners” - the Rachmnainiff-obsessed lovers and the music therapy patient on the one hand, the Bach-absorbed duo of musical mathematician and mathematical musician and the zazz buff on the other – would seem to have little in common. On the cognitive level, it is probably more accurate to state all who perceive a piece of music at all must in some sense follow and understand it. The interaction operates along several parameters: pitch, rhythm and timbre. Rhythm is the easiest to illustrate. In an article published in 1982, Christopher Longuet-Higgins, the one-time theoretical chemist who named the field of cognitive science as well as being the first to apply it to music, explained why this should be so. Rhythms in his view, are generative rather than cumulative. Almost nobody who is exposed to a rhythic sequence hears a mere succession of sounds that they then group metrically: what they hear is a sequence of musical cells that their minds break down into beats. Unless you grasp the outline of the rhythm, therefore, you cannot hear the piece, still less listen to it.
Insofar as cognition is a pre-condition of appreciation, all experience of music thus involves a basic unarticulated comprehension. It is, for example, entirely possible to enjoy the crab canon from Bach’s Musical Offering across repeated performances without recognizing it as a canon, or indeed as a crab. At a subliminal level, the canonic structure may nonetheless contribute to the delight. The lovers at the Edinburgh Festivval, who apparently had eyes only for one another, would not have been so moved had their ears not discerned dissonances and modulations, ignorant as they probably were of the meaning of those terms.
Fairly late in the century, the implications of this recognition were boulstered by a complementary development: the emergence of types of music in which the listener creates the form. Two examples are repetitive structures where the assembly of repeated elements is partially left to the discretion of the listener, and sustained silence where the onus of its interpretation is on the audience.
As an illustration of the first I’ll take a range of reactions to two of Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano, one to a live performance, others to a recording taken from Nancarrow’s original piano roll. At the Proms concert of 31st July 2013, the innovative Aurora ensemble performed an arrangement for mixed emsemble of Study No. 7 by the late Yvar Mikhashoff . In the arena that night stood an Italian visitor to London who declated “The rhythms are manifold, superimposed, endlessly self-refreshing and exciting. The result is music that dazzles in its versatily and changefulness. Listening to to it is like watching lights cavorting across water.” A recording of No. 37 on Youtube converted one listener into “a lover of canons and polyrhythms”, a second heard a Blues Rhythm surging beneath the counterpoint, a third heard the shadow of “I’ve got rhythm.” What all of these accounts suggest is that, in this new firmament of listening, a subjective response to a piece has become inseparable from a perception of its form. You must hear and listen at the same time, if you are to be present to the music at all.
The ultimate illustration of the uses of silence is John Cage, for whom, according to his acolyte Thomas Delio, “the act of composition became an act of presentation to the listener, who is then left with a vivid realization of the possibility of form, the possibility that materials may at some point be shaped in some way and become a reflection of one of many possible, equally significant, moments of coherence. ...Ultimately, he became less interested in creating specific forms than instantiating the possibility of form”.
Cage’s 4’33 of Silence, in which a pianist sits at a keyboard and plays nothing, was performed at the Barbican on October 1st, 2010. In the auditorium that evening sat a graphic designer from Turkey, Cenk Basbolat. The performance caused him to “think a bit more about what ‘space’ means. Being a visual designer, when we design graphics, we focus more on the negative space. Most of the design elements such as harmony, rhythm, proximity... are all related to the organization of the negative space. Similarly, I think also in music, the space between the notes is crucial. I think we feel a note within this space. In the case of John Cage's 4'33", space is everything. However, what takes place in this space is "the audience". Also when I think of architecture, I think an architect doesn't design the walls but design the space, the walls just come after. And what takes place in this space is "life".
Experiences like these mark a minor revolution in musical aesthetics. An emancipation of the audience has brought them closer to active participation in the achievement of composer and performer. All of the hearers become listeners, co-creating shapes out of absence, or from the clutter and noise of the world: from the jiggling of a piano roll, from the steel mills of New Jersey, from coughing breaking the silence of a hall or, like homesick Ivor Gurney a century ago, from shrapnel fire bursting beyond Ypres.