Tags
A Subversive history of music, Nature's God, Sun Ra, Ted Gioia, The Wind From the Plain, To Nature's God, Yashar kemal
When you spend enough time observing nature, I mean really looking at it, suddenly, you begin to hear it too. The visible is apparent immediately, the audible comes second.
We love watching the sun rise or fall and love hearing the birds sing. Even inanimate aspects of nature keep us in awe, things like mountains, maybe because they’re so immovable and permanent.
I’ve been thinking lately about the secret music found in nature, and while it sounds a little kooky I’ve seen the notion echoed in two very different books. The first is A Subversive History of Music, by Ted Gioia. It’s wonderful and very wide-ranging! The second is a novel called The Wind From the Plain by the great Turkish writer, Yashar Kemal.
To what extent does nature have a secret life that can produce sounds, or music?
We’ve heard of the sounds of wind rustling through the trees, but that’s not only what I mean. The trees themselves vibrate! Let’s look at what two very different books say.
From Ted Gioia’s A Subversive History of Music: “From the start, waves of sound came not just from a primal explosion, but from the smallest particles of matter. In the heart of the atom we find vibrations of extraordinary speed—up to one hundred trillion times per second—creating a tone some twenty octaves above the range of our hearing” (page 11).
It’s not that a force like wind produces a sound by blowing through something else; that second thing itself contains its own innate sound. It doesn’t need to interact with, say, wind, water, or fire to produce a sound. Although, the sounds of the breeze through nature is indeed a common music. Many instruments people play rely on wind, too: recorders, saxophones, trumpets, etc.
It may seem less surprising, then, that later in the chapter Gioia describe Australian researcher Lynne Kelly learning to hear the wind through different types of trees, bushes, and even grasses while embedded with the Warlpiri tribe in Australia: “…when she began listening to vegetation, she found that the passing breeze imparted a distinctive aural soundscape to the trees around her. ‘The eucalypt to my left, the acacias in front, and the grasses to the right all made distinctly different sounds. I could not accurately convey these sounds in writing. In subsequent sessions, I’ve been able to distinguish between different species of eucalypt, the experience convinced me that the sound of plants, animals, moving water, rock types when struck and many other aspects of the environment can be taught through song in a way that is impossible in writing.’”
Cool! This makes me want to watch a documentar film I’ve been meaning to see but haven’t yet, The Secret Life of Plants, for which Stevie Wonder did the instrumental, atmospheric soundtrack. That documentary looks at plant consciousness, ecology, environmentalism. Leave it to a blind man to hear into this secret life. Maybe when what’s visible doesn’t jump out at you, your ear gets to work sooner.
But before getting sidetracked by my love Stevie Wonder, let’s get back to Yashar Kemal’s novel, The Wind from the Plain.
It’s about a remote mountain tribe’s arduous trek from the hills to the Anatolian plain, to pick cotton to make enough money to survive the harsh highland winter. Every year, Old Halil tells the village when the cotton is ripe for picking by using his keen senses to hear the wind. I was struck by some beautiful descriptions of nature that echoed this secret musical life of plants and even inanimate parts of the environment.
Here’s a great early passage that’s explicitly about how nature is a secret conduit for sound:
“Rustling sounds come from the steppes. Old Halil puts his ear down to the ground and listens to the murmur rising from deep deep down. The soil of the steppe is a good conductor. One can hear the creeping of ants in their heaps, the scurrying of birds in their holes. There is a bird of pure lustrous blue that makes its nest be delving deep into the cliff walls. One can hear it digging away in its tunnel. One can know when the roots of the whirling thistles are on the point of breaking by the special creaking noise they make. ‘There’s nothing like the earth of the steppe,’ says Old Halil. ‘Why, it’s better than the telegraph. Put your ear to it and you will hear all kinds of wonderful sounds. You will hear a shepherd piping at the other end of the world, you will hear a song that has never been sung before, laden with all the beauty of strange flowers. Yes, put your ear to the ground and hear the beat of horses’ hoofs a day’s journey off. But it’s not everyone who can hear the voice of the earth. It needs a good ear, a discerning ear like mine, you ignoramuses!’” (Page 18-19).
In Gioia’s book, researchers hear the music of the wind through the trees, bushes, and grass. In this Kemal passage, the vibrations travel through the earth itself and Halil hears the wind from the distant shepherd piping his song. The wind travels a longer distance. More than that, the songs are “laden with the beauty of strange flowers” in it, as if the wild flowers physically rooted between this shepherd and Old Halil are somehow converted into sound and become a part of the wind’s song. Something to hear, not just see–the flowers have a sound to them that fuses with the wind’s tune.
There’s a really cool kind of synesthesia going on! If you listen correctly, you can hear nature’s physical, inanimate parts, things normally only visible. Who knew!? This reminds me of the first Gioia excerpt, where the smallest particles of matter, in the heart of the atom, vibrate at speeds so extraordinary, the tone they create is twenty octaves beyond our range of our hearing.
There’s a mystical, spirutual quality to this music, to these sounds. We know about third-eye psychedelic, spiritual truths. I’m not sure if this secret aural world of nature sounds is a type of third-ear music, or merely what you can hear by listening carefully with your regular ol’ two ears.
There are many other extremely beautiful passages in Kemal that anthropomorphize nature. Mountains are awake and alive, the rocks themselves, not just the animals and plants on the mountains and in them. The soughing of the trees makes music. For all the beautiful lyrical nature passages, there’s also a lot of wonderful cursing and shit talking! It’s quite down to earth. In Old Halil’s case, literally.
Neither of these books are about nature, but nature and music come up together in both, almost accidentally, even if in distinctly different ways.
The “music” here is vibrations ringing through the natural world, but then again, that’s all music ever is. If you placed a chromatic guitar tuner on the soil to detect the rumbling of the shepherd’s piping song, or placed the tuner touching rustling grass, it would measure the frequency of the sound waves and on its screen would read a note, or a pitch: C#, Bb, or whatever. We tend to associate notes with the physical properties of musical instruments, like strings, frets, or keys on a keyboard. But that’s all music is: sounds, vibrations, notes…they’re all the same thing.
This all brings to mind the lyrics in one of my favourite Sun Ra songs, To Nature’s God. “Sometimes we do appreciate the work of nature’s god…lightening, sunshine, wind…the leaves on the trees.” Truly, everything comes back to Sun Ra eventually.
Ra, who titles his poetry collection “My Words Are Music,” and whose poems provide the lyrics to many of his songs. He also believed his clothing was music. Synesthesia is everywhere! Everything is music! Clothing, flowers, wind. You just need to know how to hear.
I get how this sounds a little kooky. I want to believe in it and train my ear to hear nature better. Tune up my hearing and be like Old Halil and listen with a good ear. “It’s not everyone can hear the voice of the earth. It needs a discerning ear like mine, you ignoramuses!”
Jeff Halperin 