Sigma Alpha Iota

PAN PIPES Winter 2019 19 THOREAU'S SYMPHONIES When I play my flute tonight, earnest as if to leap the bounds of the narrow field where human life is penned, and range the surrounding plain, I hear echo from a neighboring wood, a stolen pleasure, occasionally not rightfully hears, much more for other ears than ours, for it is the reverse of sound. It is not our own melody that comes back to us, but an amended strain. And I would only hear myself as I would hear myself as I would hear my echo, corrected and re- pronounced for me. It is as when my friend reads my verse. (August 6, 1845) Starting in June 1851, oreau's journal entries began to attend more frequently and in more detail to the musical sounds around him. He wrote that the reader should "listen to music religiously, as if it were the last strain you might hear" (June 12, 1851) and he did exactly this during his June, July, and early August entries. ese entries became pre-compositional exercises for the larger piece he would write in 1852. Just as Beethoven had sketch books for putting down preliminary fragments of ideas for themes that he would later develop into larger works, the entries of the summer of 1851 were beginning gestures and sketched out themes that would be more fully developed in 1852 and 1853. He was beginning to see that the sounds of nature around him were beautiful musical sounds and that "one will lose no music by not attending the oratorios and operas…My neighbors have gone to the vestry to hear 'Ned Kendal' the bugler, tonight, but I am come forth to the hills to hear my bugler in the horizon." (August 8, 1851) On hearing a church bell he began to sense the connection of all sounds in nature and a universal music. He wrote that the: …sound of the bell acquires a certain vibratory hum, as it were from the air through which it passes, like a harp. All music is harp music at length, as if the atmosphere were full of strings vibrating to this music. It is not the mere sound of the bell, but the humming in the air that enchants me…All sound heard at great distance thus tends to produce the same music, vibrating the strings of the universal lyre. ere comes to me a melody which the air has strained, which has conversed with every leaf and needle of the woods. (October 12, 1851) To create a musical composition of symphonic scope requires an expansive view. I have written three symphonies and to write a symphony requires an ability to create, develop, and sustain larger ideas and views with regard to instrumentation, themes, and structures. One must work simultaneously on the immediate note level while continually attending to the more abstract larger vision of the entire piece that is unfolding incrementally, not as yet being completed but in a state of gradually becoming. It seemed that oreau was indeed creating a Symphony 1 in 1852 because he was able to balance his writing about his immediate interaction with his sound environment with the overarching purpose of putting these selected sound perceptions into the span of the yearly calendar. He seemed to develop an arch form composition moving from a sparse sound environment dominated by the telegraph harp during the winter months at the beginning of the year and bringing that telegraph harp back at the end of the year as winter approached once again. In the middle of his "composition" during the spring and summer months he gradually enlarged the sound landscape, in the spring first, by attending to the incredible awakening of the myriad of bird songs he heard, then reaching a sonorous climax in the summer months, when bird sound were joined by frog, toad, cricket, and other insect and animal sounds. He continued to sustain a complex and expansive musical sound environment throughout most of the summer months until the bird songs began to fade as summer waned and the fall began, keeping the cricket and frog sounds strong until the fall season approached and the bird songs began to fade entirely until winter finally settled in. At the end of the year, silence and the telegraph harp re-emerged to create a sparse and silent sound landscape ending to his musical composition. It might seem that he was not really "composing" the sounds as a composer of classical music might, but it was precisely what he was doing by attending to and writing down in his journal what he had selected to remember about his sound environment. One can reasonably suppose that oreau could not write down everything he had heard, that would be impossible for anyone, but, he could write down what he purposely attended to and wanted to remember. He stated that he usually wrote down his memory of a day or two aerwards, when he had time to reflect on what he had heard or seen but yet when it was still fresh in his mind to recall with great vividness. So, what he remembered from his sound environment was a selected memory and so in that way he would be similar to a composer who does not choose any sound to put into his symphony but makes specific selections based on the parameters he has set for his piece on many different levels. ere are some clues that oreau had a symphonic scope of a calendar year for his sound memories. In a sense he was writing a transcendental symphony of seasons, like Antonio Vivaldi's work, e Seasons. At various points in his Symphony 1 (1852), he remarked that he was hearing a bird song or creature sound for "the first time in the year." By referencing these "first times" to the first of the year he was suggesting that there was a conscious ongoing unfolding of the sound landscape that was rooted in a reference to the beginning of the year. ere were also many references to changes in the quality and quantity of the sounds emitted by bird, insect, and animal depending on the season. e birds sang stronger and more frequently in spring and summer than in the fall when their sounds were fainter and there were fewer birds present. At first, the crickets were heard quietly under the cacophony and singing of the many birds in the spring, but in the fall the musical counterpoint was reversed, the crickets and frogs became louder than the quieter birds. In addition, there were certain dates when oreau suggested a change of season depending on what sounds were heard: winter to spring to summer to fall to winter again. Certain sounds announced seasonal and musical transitions. His "Unfinished" Symphony 2 (1853) only spans a half a year but the sounds of this musical composition are quite different than in Symphony 1. e "sounds of silence" open the work, and there are many more poignant sounds appearing in his second symphony: sounds of bells, deep crackling of ice, an explosion at the Powder Mill, and more percussive and lower sounds. ere are more extended lyrical "solos" by his favorite birds, the robins and wood thrush. In addition, he abruptly ends his composition around June 22, then almost sound silence for two months, ending with a coda on August 22, as if he wanted to end his second symphony differently than his first symphony (which was an arch form), by ending the second at the highpoint of summer sound. His reason for ending his second symphony "unfinished" is that he moved on to other primary observations aer June 22, as if the "musical muse" ceased inspiring and other thoughts and concerns took over his attention. While the general

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