The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World (21 page)

Here, then, in the constitution of the orchestra, was the ideal pattern of the new society. It was achieved in art before it was approached in technics. … Tempo, rhythm, tone, harmony, melody, polyphony, counterpoint, even dissonance and atonality, were all utilized freely to create a new ideal world, where the tragic destiny, the dim longings, the heroic destinies of men could be entertained once more. Cramped by its new pragmatic routines, driven from the marketplace and the factory, the human spirit rose to a new supremacy in the concert hall. Its greatest structures were built of sound and vanished in the act of being produced. If only a small part of the population listened to these works of art or had any insight into their meaning, they nevertheless had at least a glimpse of another heaven than Coke town’s. The music gave more solid nourishment and warmth than Coketown’s spoiled and adulterated foods, its shoddy clothes, its jerry built houses.

The orchestra was then an idealization of the aspirations of the nineteenth century, a model which the industrialist-kings tried to emulate in their factory routines.

Even the musical forms cultivated by the nineteenth century seem to have an imperialistic bias: thus, in the first-movement form of the symphony, home base is established (exposition), colonies are developed
(Durchführung)
and the empire is consolidated (recapitulation and coda). It was during this period, too, that the bass bars of all stringed instruments were carefully replaced to produce greater volume of sound; also new brass and percussion instruments were added and the piano replaced the harpsichord, which was no longer strong enough to be heard in the new instrumental consort. The substitution of the punched-string piano for the plucked-string harpsichord typifies the greater aggressiveness of a time in which objects were punched and beaten into existence by means of new industrial processes. Material had once been stroked, carved or kneaded into shape; now it was slugged. The strengthening of the piano, which exchanged sound quality for sound quantity, disturbed the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, who realized that amplified music would lead to increased community disturbance.

Complaints of annoyance caused by neighbourhood pianos are by no means as old as the piano itself. In Mozart’s and Haydn’s day the piano was a weak, thin box with a soft tone, scarcely audible as far as the front room. The complaints began with the introduction of the piano’s stronger tone and extended range, and became a painful outcry only thirty or forty years ago, after the piano manufacturers began in earnest to increase the sound output of the instrument. … The full tone and carrying power of the modern piano arise from its great size, its colossal weight and the tensions of its metal-strengthened frame. … The instrument has gained this offensive power and offensive character for the first time in our day.

The power these new technical developments permitted was first seized by Beethoven. It would be wrong to think of Beethoven as a product of the Industrial Revolution, which, after all, hardly touched Vienna during his lifetime, but he was certainly an urban composer and his pugilistic temperament made the “offensive” character of the new instruments specially appealing for him, as can immediately be sensed in touching or hearing the opening notes of a work like the
Hammerklavier Sonata
, Op. 106. In principle there is little difference between Beethoven’s attempts to
épater les bourgeois
with full-fisted sforzando effects and that of the modern teenager with his motorcycle. The one is an embryo of the other.

The Meeting of Music and Environment
      The imperialism of nineteenth-century music reached its apex in the orchestras of Wagner and Berlioz, which were specially expanded to make possible a grandiloquent rhetoric, designed alternately to thrill, exalt and crush swelling metropolitan audiences. Berlioz’s ideal orchestra was to include 120 violins, 16 French horns, 30 harps, 30 pianos, and 53 percussion parts. Wagner had similar ambitions and ended up with an orchestra that constantly threatened to drown the singers—a problem which caused him much anxiety. It is in this light that one can appreciate Spengler’s criticism of Wagner’s art as a sort which “signifies a concession to the barbarism of the Megalopolis, the beginning of dissolution sensibly manifested in a mixture of brutality and refinement.”

When the orchestra continued to expand into the twentieth century it was primarily percussion instruments that were added, that is, non-pitched noisemakers capable of sharp attack and rhythmic vitality. The pastorale and the nocturne then ceased to exist and were replaced by the machine music of Honegger’s
Pacific 231
(1924), an imitation of a locomotive, Antheil’s
Ballet Méchanique
(1926), which employed a number of airplane propellers, Prokofiev’s
Pas d’Acier(Dance of Steel)
, Mossolov’s
Iron Foundry
and Carlos Chávez’s
HP (Horsepower)
, all dating from 1929. Poets like Ezra Pound and F. T. Marinetti were also going through machine periods, as were painters like Léger and the artisans of the Bauhaus. In 1924 Pound had written: “I take it that music is the art most fit to express the fine quality of machines. Machines are now a part of life, it is proper that men should feel something about them; there would be something weak about art if it couldn’t deal with this new content.”

The anomie of modern city life had already been effectively described in Satie’s deadpan
musique d’ameublement—
the original Moozak. When Satie designed this entertainment for the intermission of a play at a Paris art gallery in 1920, he intended that the spectators should move about and ignore the music, which was to be regarded merely as so much upholstery. Unfortunately, everyone stopped to listen. Music was then still something to be prized; it had not yet flipped over to its new function as background drool; and Satie had to rush about crying, “Parlez! Parlez!”

From our point of view the real revolutionary of the new era was the Futurist experimenter Luigi Russolo, who invented an orchestra of noise-makers, consisting of buzzers, howlers and other gadgets, calculated to introduce modern man to the musical potential of the new world about him. In 1913 Russolo proclaimed the event in his manifesto
The Art of Noises (L’ Arte dei Rumori):

In antiquity, life was nothing but silence. Noise was really not born before the 19th century, with the advent of machinery. Today noise reigns supreme over human sensibility. … In the pounding atmo-sphere of great cities as well as in the formerly silent countryside, machines create today such a large number of varied noises that pure sound, with its littleness and its monotony, now fails to arouse any emotion. … Let’s walk together through a great modern capital, with the ear more attentive than the eye, and we will vary the pleasures of our sensibilities by distinguishing among the gurglings of water, air and gas inside metallic pipes, the rumbling and rattlings of engines breathing with obvious animal spirits, the rising and falling of pistons, the stridency of mechanical saws, the loud jumping of trolleys on their rails, the snapping of whips, the whipping of flags. We will have fun imagining our orchestration of department stores’ sliding doors, the hubbub of the crowds, the different roars of railroad stations, iron foundries, textile mills, printing houses, power plants and subways. And we must not forget the very new noises of Modern Warfare.

Russolo’s experiments mark a flash-point in the history of aural perception, a reversal of figure and ground, a substitution of garbage for beauty. Marcel Duchamp did the same thing about the same time for the visual arts by exhibiting a urinal. It was outrageous because, instead of perpetuating the picture-window mythology of the traditional art gallery, the public was confronted with a doorframe back to the place they had just left.

When John Cage opened the doors of the concert hall to let the traffic noise mix with his own, he was paying an unacknowledged debt to Rus-solo. An acknowledged debt was paid him by Pierre Schaeffer during the formative years of the
musique concrète
group in Paris. In the practices of
musique concrète
it became possible to insert any sound from the environment into a composition with tape, while in electronic music the hard-edge sound of the tone generator may be indistinguishable from the police siren or the electric egg-beater.

This blurring of the edges between music and environmental sounds may eventually prove to be the most striking feature of all twentieth-century music. In any case, these developments have inescapable consequences for music education. A musician used to be one who listened with seismographic delicacy in the music room, but who put on ear flaps when he left. If there is a noise pollution problem in the world today it is certainly partly and maybe largely owing to the fact that music educators have failed to give the public a total schooling in soundscape awareness, which has, since 1913, ceased to be divisible into musical and nonmusical kingdoms.

Reactions
      Marshall McLuhan somewhere says that man only discovered nature after he had wrecked it. So it was at the very time when the natural soundscape was being overrun, it stimulated a whole wave of sensitive reactions in the music of composers as different as Debussy, Ives or Messiaen. There are moments, too, when Bartók’s music steams and rustles with all kinds of primordial buzzings suggesting a microcosmic life as close to the grass as was Goethe’s ear when he wrote poetry or is the entomologist’s microphone when he records the grasshopper’s clicking. Just as the microscope revealed a whole new landscape beyond the human eye, so the microphone in a sense revealed new delights missed by the average ear. As a skilled recordist of folk songs Bartok knew this and the evidence is in his quartets and concertos.

Charles Ives, who “glorified America at the same time as he saw it going to hell” (Henry Brant), also reflected a great deal on the dilemma of disappearing nature. Note his songs on the phonograph and the railroad: very ugly sounds. His song about the Indians goes, “Alas, for them their day is o’er … the pale man’s axe rings through their woods.” Ives’s heart was with the landscape and in the village, and his uncompleted Universe Symphony was designed to be performed outdoors on the hills and in the valleys.

Olivier Messiaen, like Ives, is an ecological composer. In his music, man is not the supreme triumph of nature but rather an element in a supreme activity called
life
. How different is the impact of even his large orchestral works, like the Turangalila Symphony—so full of birds and the respirating forest—from other orchestral efforts, typified by Strauss’s
Ein Heldenleben
(
The Life of a Hero)
. How very different, too, is this music from Respighi’s
Pines of Rome
, where, for the first time, recorded music (bird-song) was coupled with the symphony orchestra. That was in 1924. Two years earlier Paul Klee had celebrated the mechanical bird in his satirical painting
The Twittering Machine
.

Perhaps the retreat from the commotion of city life had already begun in the nineteenth century (remember that Mahler composed in the country) so that the physical separation of the artist from his public had much to do with his eventual social alienation; but we must turn at this point and give some examples of the interaction between art and the new technology.

Interactions
      Throughout the history of soundmaking, music and the environment have bequeathed numerous effects to one another, and the modern era provides striking examples. For instance, while the internal combustion engine gave music the long line of low-information sound, music gave the automobile industry the pitched horn, tuned (in North America) to the major or minor third.
^h

The development of the Alberti bass of the eighteenth century from galloping horses is another example of environmental influence on art. Consider, for instance, two composers, one living in that century and one living in our own. The former travels everywhere in a carriage. He can’t get horses’ hooves off his brain and his tunes all go clippety-clop to the opera shop. The latter travels everywhere in his sports car. His music is remarkable for its drones, clusters and whirring effects. Penderecki’s music, for example, leaves the impression that it was conceived somewhere between the airstrip and the Autobahn—I am not criticizing, just pinning down a fact.
ⁱ

It ought to be obvious also that one of the latest enthusiasms in modern music, phase shifting, has its origin in the machine, or more especially in the machine that employs belts as well as cogs. The cogged machine produces an unvarying clatter, but wherever belts are employed there is slippage giving rise to gradual rhythmic transformations or phase shifts. Such types of machines have been around for some time (the prairie combine is a good example) and they have no doubt infected the minds of numerous young composers who are now engaged in transposing the effect into music. One might argue that the technique was first suggested by the tape recorder rather than the combine, for the first pieces exploiting the effect were composed on tape recorders. No matter, they are both belted machines.

My colleague, Howard Broomfield, also believes that railroads had an important influence on the development of jazz. He claims blue notes (slides from major to minor thirds and sevenths) can be heard in the wail of the old steam whistles. Also the similarity between the clickety-clack of wheels over track ends and the drumbeats (particularly the flam, the ruff and the paradiddle) of jazz and rock music is too obvious to go unnoticed, at least in the clever tape mixes Broomfield has made to prove the point. Since the wheel trucks of different coaches are mounted in different positions (see drawing below), the rhythm of their passage over track ends will vary. By calculating these distances one could notate the precise rhythms produced, and these could be compared with those of different popular bands.