August is
the biggest most overwhelming Sunday night on the planet. It’s possible that other academics actually
finish their books, the extra articles, and plan their classes all by mid
August. I always mean to do these things.
I mean to do them while making the hundreds of piles of clutter in our house
disappear and re-connecting with my kids
who, by the end of a season of school wrap up events, I’musually ready to give
away. This summer I did not do about 793 things. To begin with; the Cicada article. On a very loud morning run out in the country
one Sunday in May my mind wandered to Galileo and the fable of sound. I’m not making this up; I really did go to Ridge
Road for a long run. And in the midst of
a crucial conversation about soccer tryout drama a crucial point almost went by
the wayside thanks to the incessant cicadas.
Wow!!!! I know why Plato, Galileo, Darwin and others couldn’t get this
irritating sound out of their heads. I’ve had a thing for the fact that
Galileo’s fable of sound ends with the death of a Cicada for a long time, and
one of the summer’s unfinished task involved finishing a book chapter featuring
said dead cicada. But suddenly it seemed
like the silly interest of a music historian might actually matter to millions
of listeners up and down the East Coast. So it seemed time for the popular
press. The witty article about the
Cicada in a well read national media turned into yet another unfinished summer
project.
For
starters, I mostly deal with events that
happened hundreds of years ago. Even if
they relate to current issues of racial justice, gender imbalance, etc., my
text almost always centers on a person or thing that is long dead. So I dawdled; took care of some
administrative business at UVa, survived fourth grade graduations, signed kids
up for camp, finished an essay for a festschrift, etc... My fabulous research assistant Emily Gale did
her magic with 19th century newspapers and came up with a more
recent stuff than Galileo or Plato. Then
I spent a while thinking about an argument.
I thought about the local paper because I love the reading the Cville Weekly
each week and I’m deeply committed to print media. But somehow I was persuaded
to aim for a larger audience. I finally
sent the piece to an editor of an online newspaper whom I’ve worked with before
and had shown interest. He said it was
great but didn’t quite have the angle he hoped for. The Washington Post loved it but said I’d
missed the boat by a week—the bugs were done and had been journalistically
beaten to death. I got really excited
when a musicology colleague turned me on to a forthcoming Vanity Fair issue on timepieces. I figured I was one of few musicologists who
have actually read that magazine. It turns out they had someone more famous and
much less likely to ever read their magazine in mind. So in the interest of
checking SOMETHING off my summer list here it is the old fashioned way; the
blog!!!!! And the message to academics
who try to send something beyond the ivory tower. If it seems even remotely timely, do it super
quickly. And if you think you will be disappointed by having spent tons of a
time on a piece that never sees the light of day forget the whole idea!
The seventeen-year cicadas last
appeared in 1996, when Dolly became the first cloned mammal, Billboard named
the Macarena its top tune, and clubs resounded with electronica. Once again the noisy sex starved adolescents
are crawling out of the earth. The males
make a racket trying to attract females and if she likes it she clicks her
wings. Shortly after sex they die. This
deciseptennial return has fascinated humans for thousands of years. Their sound, while remaining biologically the
same (at least in cicada terms), sounds different every time. These
little summer bugs remind us that sound has no universal objective truth.
Plato
heard the same sounds that have been blanketing much of the East Coast and that
Charles Darwin heard when he said, “The females are mute; as the Grecian
poet Xenarchus says, 'Happy the Cicadas live, since they all have voiceless
wives.'” In Plato's time writers described the tiny
little drums in the bellies of the male bugs as musical expressions. That would
be the Charles Darwin who was so captivated by his pianist wife that he worked
music into his theory arguing that music emerged for the purpose of charming
the opposite sex. By the late 19th century the terminology centered around
animalistic machines. When thousands of them hang out together, their clicking
sounds amplify and can reach somewhere between one hundred and one hundred
twenty decibels, the volume of a stadium rock concert or an airplane. In the
time before trains, car alarms, and electronic amplification, such decibels hardly
ever resounded in the world, and they seemed mysterious and mythical. For a
sense of what this sonic relativism says about how humans inhabited the earth,
think about lightning: before Ben Franklin flew his kite, educated people
thought that the thunder and lightning were God’s wrath and that the damage
came not from the fiery lightning but from the noise of thunder.
When
Plato, hanging out with his male students in the sun, heard the repetitive noise that seems almost
not to come from nature, he associated it with music and crafted a myth around
it. In Plato’s early dialogue Phaedrus, the cicadas provide a soundtrack for the conversation
between Socrates and Phaedrus. Socrates
manages to tie together cicadas, the birth of the muses, and the invention of
singing: “They were so busy
singing that they didn’t bother with food and drink, so that before they knew
it they were dead. They were granted the origin of the race of cicadas, whom
the Muses granted the gift of never needing any food once they were born; all
they do is sing, from the moment of their births until their deaths, without
eating or drinking.” This musical hearing of cicadas reached its
apex in the story of Euonymus of Locri, who needed a cicada’s help to win the
Pythian games when a string on his cithara broke. The cicada heard the
faltering harmony and jumped onto the string to offer the missing note, singing
himself to death in the process.
We also know that Galileo, of the inclined plane, telescope and heliocentric
solar system, listened to their buzz when on papal lockdown outside of
Florence. Keep in mind that musically this was before Vivaldi, Corelli and
Bach—the kind of baroque music that comes with a repetitive rhythmic bass. The
most famous composer of Galileo’s time, Monteverdi, was only beginning the move
from vocally dominated music. Galileo used the bugs to explore the relationship
between musical instruments and natural sounds and to use this exploration as
an opportunity to subtly criticize his captors.
The son of an important musician, he studied lute as a child, and often-used
music as a springboard for broader philosophical points. The cicada made the
punch line for a story Galileo wrote about a hermit who raised birds and the
search for knowledge.
One
night the hermit heard a song near his house; assuming it was a bird, he set
out to capture it. The sound turned out to be a shepherd boy with a flute. The
hermit then set out on a quest to understand more sounds. The cicada stumped
him: “He failed to diminish its strident noise either by closing its mouth or
stopping its wings, yet he could not see it move the scales that covered its
body, or any other thing. At last he lifted up the armor of its chest and there
he saw some thin hard ligaments beneath; thinking the sound might come from
their vibration, he decided to break them in order to silence it. But nothing
happened until his needle drove too deep, and transfixing the creature he took away
its life with its voice.” The hermit never figured out how the cicada worked,
and from then on he understood that the world contained infinite “unknown and
unimaginable sounds.” The Pope at the time liked this story because it
suggested that humans just can’t understand everything God created, and that the
quest just ruins the pleasure. Galileo, not surprisingly, meant the story to
show that the questions are more important than the answers.
Jumping
ahead two hundred years and across the pond to the United States, we find the cicada
had become an object of science for its own sake. A year before he wrote the
Declaration of Independence and during the time when Mozart was writing piano
sonatas, Thomas Jefferson noted in his garden book that he was expecting their
arrival. As the Industrial Revolution rolled across America, descriptions of
the cicada went from musical to mechanical. Music went towards the mechanical,
too. By then instruments dominated
musical practice; that meant that, instead of vocal music dominating parlors, emergent
concert halls featuring symphonies, pianos, and violins (all of which
celebrated human-made sounds) became the locus of ‘Music.’ In June of 1864 The Wisconsin State Register called the
cicada a musical instrument, observing that “the male Cicada is furnished with
a pair of bellows, one on each side of the body, consisting of two large oval
plates, formed of convex pieces of parchment, and placed just behind the wings
and thorax.” By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the bugs were heard
in machine-terms. Given the quick love-sex-death- cycle it was clear to
everywhere that the cicadas had no use for the newly mass-produced rubber
condums made possible by rubber factories. That was the Industrial Revolution talking.
Factories, railroads, and other machines introduced continuous, repeating
sounds that gave the bugs a whole new sonic context. The Bismarck Daily Tribune reported that “…[t]he sights and sounds of
1885 in Indiana were among the most remarkable I ever witnessed. There was a
continued monotonous roar, or rather a rattle, like many thrashing machines at
a distance.”
It
was only a few hundred years ago that the loudest repeated sounds came from
musical instruments. As we learned to
harness fossil fuels and electrons to make machines and instruments that could
blast repeating sounds that exceeded even the cicada, it is little wonder that
our ears began to hear them as extensions of our mechanical world rather than
our musical one. And because we so
frequently hear sounds that emanate from machines not humans and animals the
cicadas incessant song has lost it’s association with it’s very life. For the
Greeks and for Galileo both the song and the cicada’s strange life cycle
remained mysterious. And the song and efforts to understand it turned murderous
very quickly. Thanks to Darwin’s evolutionary biology and Edison’s recording
technologies we know why they sing and we can push play to hear their love-death
any time we want. But they like so many
sounds don’t have quite the same potency.
