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Beginning of a Great Career

2011-04-17T00:00:00Z

Walt Whitman sent one of the 795 copies of the first, self-financed, run (1855) of his book of poetry Leaves of Grass to Ralph Waldo Emerson—who, a decade previous, had publicly cried out for a great American poet by way of his essay, “The Poet”. Emerson responded to Leaves of Grass with the following five-page appreciation of Whitman‘s work. Whitman subsequently used it to promote future editions.

Image: Library of Congress

Concord, Massachusetts

21 July, 1855

Dear Sir,

I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass”. I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile and stingy nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making our Western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of your free and brave hought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment, which so delights us, and which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely of fortifying and encouraging.

I did not know until I, last night, saw the book advertised in a newspaper, that I could trust the name as real and available for a Post-Office. I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt much like striking my tasks, and visiting New York to pay you my respects.

R.W. Emerson.

Walt Whitman at age 28, Feb–Mar 1848, near New Orleans. Walt Whitman Historic Site, Camden, New Jersey

Image of American philosopher/poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, dated 1859. Scanned from Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Lothrop Motley: Two Memoirs by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Published by Houghton Mifflin, 1904. Source: Google Books

Bird Songs Notated

2011-03-29T00:00:00Z

Some of the many works inspired by bird’s songs include The Goldfinch by Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741), The Hen by Jean-Philippe Rameau (1683–1764), The Cuckoo and the Nightingale by George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) and Catalogue d'oiseaux by Olivier Messiaen (1908–92).

Bird’s songs have been documented and transcribed by a number of scholars over the past 350 years.

Athanasius Kircher

German Jesuit Scholar and polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602–80) published some forty major works in fields as diverse as geology, medicine, magnetism, Egyptology and Oriental studies. His two-volume work Musurgia Universalis (1650) is considered a seminal work of musicology and was thought to be a major influence on Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827). The book was very popular in its time with some 1,500 copies produced in 1650 alone.

Vol. 1 (Af-x.9): plate between pages 30 & 31 from Fr. Kircher’s Musurgia Universalis (1650)

Liam Devlin (Director of Music, St. Aloysius College) in Glasgow, Scotland says of it:: “Its most famous image is probably that of the birds with their songs written out in musical notation beside their pictures. Rameau and Beethoven may well have been influenced by this picture which still appears in musical textbooks used in the United Kingdom for 8–9 year-olds. The nightingale's song is given first, followed by those of the cock, the hen laying eggs and calling her chicks, the cuckoo, quail and parrot; the latter says ‘Hello’ in Greek. The cockerel's music has the familiar portamento at the end of each phrase; as usual the cuckoo's call is notated as a falling minor third.”

F. Schuyler Mathews

F. Schuyler Mathews was an early 20th-century naturalist and birder whose book Field Book of Wild Birds & Their Music (1904)—republished by Applewood books in 2001 but also available at the Internet Archive—contains, as Publisher’s Weekly notes, “lighthearted and poetic mini-essays” on birds as well as music scores of their songs. Written excerpts and musical scores from Mathews’s book have been incorporated into illustrator Judy Pelikan’s book The Music of Wild Birds (2004).

The Robin from F. Schuyler Mathews’s Field Book of Wild Birds and Their Music (1921)

Publisher’s Weekly notes some of Mathews’s descriptions:: “The Ruffed Grouse is ‘the kettledrum,’ the Warbling Vireo is a ‘rambling soprano’ and the Hermit Thrush is ‘a bird of genius…the last to sing the vesper hymn, and the earliest to open the matutinal chorus at the break of day.’ The Common Grackle—by and large an unpopular bird—makes noises rather than music: he can sound like ‘rattling shutters, watchman's rattles, ungreased cart wheels and vibrating wire springs.’ And what of the Purple Finch? Its songs make ‘first-rate motives for Spanish tarantelles.’”

The Carolina Wren from F. Schuyler Mathews’s Field Book of Wild Birds and Their Music (1921)

Mathews theorized that “birds sing first for love of music, and second for love of the lady.”

Tony Phillips

Tony Phillips is Professor of Mathematics at SUNY Stony Brook. He brings modern technology as a tool to supplement Kircher’s and Schuyler’s attempts.

From his web site he considers the history of bird songs:: “A glance at the history of species tells us that, in fact, our feathered cousins must have sung their tunes for many hundreds of millennia [sic] before the first human spoke or sang. How much of human music had its first roots in imitation of bird song we will never know. But it is probably not a coincidence that some of today's birds sing ‘music’ in the sense that their songs can be quite faithfully transcribed in our standard musical notation of staves and printed notes… Among Mathews' [sic] favorites are the Veery and the Hermit Thrush, two birds who use a discrete set of pitch classes, constant during the song in question, and systematically organized into patterns. Furthermore the intervals between the various pitches are often close enough to those on our chromatic scale for their songs to be recognizably approximated on a piano. Nevertheless these birds sing rapid torrents of notes; only with modern recording and analyzing devices is it possible to attempt an accurate transcription.”

Phillips uses computers to analyze bird songs and produce a transcription.

Spectrograph of a Swainson’s Thrush by Tony Phillips

Computer transciption of a Swainson’s Thrush by Tony Phillips

It is all well and good to try and force bird’s songs into our well-tempered musical scales but their songs predate our quantification of music. As well, birds sing micro-tonally and build their songs on a very different foundation than we build ours.

Katzenklavier

2011-03-27T00:00:00Z

A millennium before the time of Christ the Egyptians decorated their sistra [*] with figures of cats. Reports from as early as the 16th-century in Europe tell of instruments not decorated with images cats and not even with cats as willing vocalists but as parts of the instrument.

From Gaspar Schott, Magia Naturalis (1657).

The French writer Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin (1821–1910) in his book Musiciana, extraits d’ouvrages rare ou bizarre (1877) writes that:

“When the King of Spain, Felipe II was in Brussels in 1549 visiting his brother the Emperor Charles V, each saw the other rejoicing at the sight of a completely singular procession. At the head marched an enormous bull whose horns were burning, between which there was also a small devil. Behind the bull a young boy sewn into a bear skin rode on a horse whose ears and tail were cut off. Then came the arch-angel Saint Michael in bright clothing, and carrying a balance in his hand.

“The most curious was on a chariot that carried the most singular music that can be imagined. It held a bear that played the organ; instead of pipes, there were sixteen cat heads each with its body confined; the tails were sticking out and were held to be played as the strings on a piano, if a key was pressed on the keyboard, the corresponding tail would be pulled hard, and it would produce each time a lamentable meow. The historian Juan Christoval Calvete, noted the cats were arranged properly to produce a succession of notes from the octave.

“This abominable orchestra arranged itself inside a theatre where monkeys, wolves, deer and other animals danced to the sounds of this infernal music”.

From Jean-Baptiste Weckerlin, Musiciana (1877)

It seems that Calvete might be lacking in critical judgement as cats do not limit themselves to one note only. Champfleury, pen name of Jules Husson (1821–89), counted as many as sixty-three notes in the mewing of cats that one with acute hearing and much practice might be able to distinguish.

As displeasing as an instrument that pulls cat’s tails to elicit tones may be, the instrument described by German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (1602–80) was far less humane.

Father Kircher first described a cat piano in his work Musurgia Universalis (1650):: “In order to raise the spirits of an Italian prince burdened by the cares of his position, a musician created for him a cat piano. The musician selected cats whose natural voices were at different pitches and arranged them in cages side by side, so that when a key on the piano was depressed, a mechanism drove a sharp spike into the appropriate cat's tail. The result was a melody of meows that became more vigorous as the cats became more desperate. Who could not help but laugh at such music? Thus was the prince raised from his melancholy.”

From Father Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia Universalis (1650)

If there had been any extant Katzenklavier they were not limited to the 16th and 17th-centuries. Weckerlin says that records had been found indicating the existence of the instrument at Saint-Germain in 1753 and at Prague in 1773.

The German physician Johann Christian Reil (1759–1813) supposed the use of a Cat Piano to aid in the treatment of patients who could no longer maintain their attention on external objects being in a state of constant reverie. He believed that a cure be effected by forcing patients to see and listen to the instrument.

He writes in Rhapsodieen über die Anwendung der psychishen Curmethode auf Geisteszerrüttungen (1803) that a “fugue played on this instrument—when the ill person is so placed that he cannot miss the expression on their faces and the play of these animals—must bring Lot's wife herself from her fixed state into conscious awareness.”

Thankfully a Katzenklavier, as far as can be determined, was only a hypothetical musical instrument—although various 17th-century posters imply that charlatans gave concerts of cats at fairs.

It is interesting to note that the proposal of these Katzenklavier happened during the development of the “Age of Reason”. Had scholars instead concentrated on the welfare of the cats then perhaps the S.P.C.A. might have been founded before 1824.

If the urge to hear ‘cat music’ is too much, one can always listen to Lubano and Lubanara’s duet “Nun, liebes Weibchen, ziehst mit mir” from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s (1756–91) Philosopher’s Stone (Der Stein der Weisen, 1790) or “Duetto buffo di due gatti” often attributed to Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868).

[*]	A sistrum consisted of a metal frame with loose metal bars and occasionally rings that jingled when shaken.