“What Is Music?”: The Historical Roots of Soundscape Composition
In terms of the Western classical tradition, a definition for music is often traced back to Pythagoras’s musica universalis, or “music of the spheres.” In this scheme, the celestial bodies (the sun, moon, and planets), orbit around the earth in spheres related by the whole-number ratios of pure musical intervals, as expressed by the harmonics of the monochord.[2] Much later, Johannes Kepler expanded Pythagoras’s music of the spheres in his Harmonices Mundi of 1619, positing a relationship of “sacred geometry” between the (now elliptical) planetary orbits and an inaudible musical “harmony.”[3] Scholar Frances Dyson suggests that Pythagoreas’s musica universalis framed a Western conception of music where sound became unitized as form of abstract mathematics. Music was a means by which to quantify sound, to transcend noise by revealing the underlying rationality and harmony of the cosmos.[4] We see evidence of this model in the medieval quadrivium, which places music among the “mathematical sciences” of arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Daniel Heller-Roazen suggests that this quantification of music was further solidified with the transition from an oral tradition to written notation systems for Western music in the eleventh century. Written notation allowed for the standardization of musical practice across space and time and the development of polyphony. However, Heller-Roazen suggests that it also enabled an objectification of music into five fundamental parameters (the interval, tone, pitch, note, and scale). With written notation, music was solidified as an “empirical reality” made up of sounds that were inherently discrete, intelligible, and measurable.[5]
How has this quantitative conception of music shaped the way composers relate to nature? While a complete analysis of this question is beyond the scope of this paper, I will turn to a general scheme outlined by the musicologist Stefan Helmreich. Helmreich chronicles three periods that describe how composers’ use of water in their music has changed over time, which I will extend to nature as a whole: evoking, invoking, and soaking.[6] In evoking, music acts as a mathematical tool, representing nature symbolically, metaphorically, or timbrally through compositional techniques employed in traditional ensembles and instrumentations. Helmreich attributes this strategy to Romantic composers like Berlioz, Debussy, and Ravel, as well as modernists such as Satie and Schoenberg, who evoke via changing the arrangements of notes, the organization of rhythms, or the choice of instrument.[7] In Debussy’s waves of La Mer, Wagner’s raging storm in Die Walkuire, and even Bach’s earthquake in the Saint Matthew Passion, conventional instruments employ specific techniques to imitate nature.[8] The practice of symbolically evoking nature suggests a humanistic philosophy of nature as “the opposition, the force to be controlled and eventually mastered in the name of human survival.”[9] If we view "evoking" instruments as a type of “technology” under a humanistic scheme, they become the tools of humans working as the “master controllers” of nature, “convinced that what they create is always beneficial, and more easily controlled than nature itself.”[10] At the same time, Romanticism in music, as well as the broader Romantic-Transcendentalist ethic of the mid-1800s emphasized a spiritual connection to nature, and it was valued for the aesthetic gains it brought humans.[11] Both the humanistic and romantic conception of nature ultimately create a sharp division between humans and nature. Nature is either at the bottom of the hierarchy as a force to be controlled by humans, or at the top as a source of sublime awe and reverence. The Industrial and Electrical revolutions of the mid-19th and early-20th centuries, however, began to introduce new sounds that challenged conceptions of both music and nature itself, composers turned away from indirect representation and began to let the new noises speak for themselves.
[1] Allen, Aaron S. "Ecomusicology: Ecocriticism and musicology." Journal of the American Musicological Society 64, no. 2 (2011): 391-394.
[2] Dyson, Frances. The Tone of Our Times: Sound, Sense, Economy, and Ecology. Cambridge (MA): Leonardo, The MIT Press, 2014. Print.
[3] Grond, Florian, and Thomas Hermann. "Aesthetic strategies in sonification." AI & society 27, no. 2 (2012): 213-222.
[4] Dyson, Ibid.
[5] Kruth, Patricia, and Stobart, Henry. Sound. Darwin College Lectures, Cambridge University Press, 2000. Print.
[6] Helmreich, Stefan. “Underwater music: tuning composition to the sounds of science.” In The Oxford handbook of sound studies. Pinch, Trevor, and Karin Bijsterveld, eds. Oxford University Press, 2011.
[7] Helmreich, Ibid.
[8] Brush, Leif, and Gloria DeFilipps Brush. "Monitoring Nature's Sounds with Terrain-Based Constructions." Leonardo (1984): 4-7.
[9] Faulhaber, Edwin F. “Communicator Between Worlds: Björk Reaches Beyond the Binaries.” Doctoral Thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2008.
[10] Faulhaber, Ibid.
[11] Groom, Martha J., Gary K. Meffe, and Carl Ronald Carroll. Principles of Conservation Biology. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2006. Print.
