![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
Abstract
What does it mean to say that a whale has a voice, that a whale sings? Why is it important to human beings to say that whales sing? On the one hand, the use of musical terms to describe cetacean vocalisation is a matter of convenience. On the other hand, the history of human reception of these sounds shows that the usage is a trace of a determination and a desire: a determination to portray cetaceans as intelligent, articulate creatures; a desire to know of what they sing, and perhaps to sing with them. In this paper, I interpret George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae as both a response to the voices of whales and as an elegy of sorts that acknowledges the incommensurability of cetacean and human voices. My interpretation is both historical and music-analytical, and begins by exploring the subtle and occasionally not-so-subtle campaign in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Scott McVay, Roger Payne, and others to marshal public support for a whaling ban and conservation, an effort that included supplying composers, Crumb among them, with tapes of humpback whale vocalizations. With this context in place, I show how—as in much of Crumb’s music—shifting referential pitch-class collections articulate the gulf between the cetacean song we hear but cannot sing, and human music to which we do not—and likely never will—know if whales are listening.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Told in suitably Melvillean fashion by Burnett (Citation2012), an historian of science.
2 Letter from Charles Forbes to George Crumb, 3 December 1969 (Folder 5, Box 13, George Crumb Papers, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC).
3 According to interviews conducted by Burnett (Citation2012, 547, n. 42), a paper at the Symposium on Marine Bio-Acoustics, Bimini, Bahamas, April 1963, could not state openly that William E. Schevill and colleagues had identified the finback whale as the source of mysterious 20Hz sound known as BLIPs.
4 Katharine Payne studied music as an undergraduate at Cornell University, and Roger Payne played the cello. Together and separately, the Paynes made numerous contributions that remain foundations of research into whale phonation.
5 Burnett offers a detailed account of Lilly’s career (Citation2012, 565–619).
6 Burnett (Citation2012, 622–42) traces Lilly’s enduring influence on the place of cetaceans in popular culture.
7 Burnett (Citation2012), again, is an excellent source for this history. See especially Ch. 2 (23–189), which elucidates early attempts at whale conservation, often hopelessly intertwined with efforts to maintain whale ‘fisheries’.
8 Letter from Charles Forbes to George Crumb, 10 July 1971 (Folder 10, Box 13, George Crumb Papers, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC).
9 Evidently McVay had not, as we have above, reviewed his copy of Moby-Dick!
10 Curiously, of the first New York City performance, on 10 April 1972 by the Aeolian Chamber Players, critic Donal Henahan of the New York Times claimed that the piece ‘often imitated the originals with eerie precision’ (Henahan Citation1972, 57; emphasis mine). One wonders whether Henahan had ever heard Songs of the Humpback Whale, or was paying attention to Vox Balaenae, or both, or if by ‘often’ he meant ‘three times in one short movement’.
11 One might also interpret the ‘seagull effect’, especially given the references to the sea and the Archean Eon (formerly known as the Archaeozoic, roughly 4 to 2.5 billion years ago, when the first continents are thought to have been formed), as an allusion to Genesis 1:2, in which ‘the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters’; or perhaps to the raven, followed by the dove, flying over the sea-covered Earth from Noah’s ark (Genesis 8:7–12). Such an interpretation is consonant with the one I advance here because it says the piece enacts the utterly non-human, the human-absent Earth, embodied by the oceans which we can never properly inhabit or understand as the whales can.
12 Sheet 1, recto, Folder 4, Box 5, George Crumb Papers, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
13 Female flutists are directed to sing in unison with the flute. In the spring of 1971, the flutist of the New York Camerata was Anthony Pagano. See, for example, Davis (Citation1971), which reviews the Camerata’s 27 March concert that was to have included Harbison’s Bermuda Triangle, likely the composition to which Forbes refers in his letters to Crumb. By the time of the premier of Vox Balanae on 17 March 1972, the Camerata’s flutist was Paula Hatcher.
14 Clifton Callender (Citation1998) defines the split and fuse relations.
15 Steinberg (Citation2005, 213) names B the ‘“hidden” tonic’ of Vox Balaenae. The punctuation of ‘Vocalise’ by the first singing of B, the B-centric Strauss parody, and the B-acoustic settings of ‘Sea Theme’, and ‘Sea-Nocturne’ are hardly ‘hidden’.
16 omits phrase-ending grace-note flourishes in the flute and cello melody. G actually appears in the first of these, closing the first phrase of the A′ section (11/3, middle), earlier than the example shows. Both C and G appear in the second of these, closing the last phrase of the movement (12/1, middle). The omissions do not change my interpretation.
17 Crumb’s sketch for the passage (Sheet 4, verso, Folder 4, Box 5, George Crumb Papers, Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC) describes the piano figuration ‘a la Chopin’, but it reminds me of Debussy’s ‘Pagodes’.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Robert C. Cook
Robert Cook studies intersections of music and nature. Since 2012 he has published on the compositions of George Crumb. Earlier work concerned transformational approaches to chromatic harmony. He lives in Boulder County, Colorado, USA.