Sounding Stone and Cetacean Energy

11/24/21 • 35 min

This episode is about what happens when sounds and people meet and mix. A lot of what we talk about takes place away from North America and Europe, but we end up circling back to a primary question in this season of the podcast: how did Westerners use the sounds of others to perceive the world, “The West,” and themselves?

Our first example is one of those historical stories that is so, well, weird you have to wonder if it is actually fiction. In the early years of the seventeenth century Chinese officials discovered a thousand year-old stone pillar (or “steele”) near the city of Xi’an in Western China, along the old east-west trade route known as “the Silk Road.” It was inscribed both in Chinese and Syriac, a form of Aramiac in which many early Christian texts are transmitted. Recently arrived Jesuit missionaries were quick to pick up on this find, because it supported their claim that Christianity had a long history in China. They also transmitted the news back to Rome.

Then the fun starts. The great Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, famous among other things for his collection of interesting objects and texts from around the world, used what he read about the stone to speculate about the intonation of the Chinese language (and China’s relationship to ancient Egypt!). A few decades later a minor German clergyman in then very provincial Berlin read Kircher’s account and proposed the idea that in China people sang all the time (as if they were in an opera) instead of speaking. Our point is that conclusions about far-away places don’t have to be true to be interesting.

Our second postcard was inspired by a TikTok meme. At the time we recorded the show, sea shanties were everywhere on the internet, thanks mainly to the music-video sharing app ability to amplify strange (we would say interesting!) sound objects: the app can act as a kind of digital version of Kircher’s collection of curiosities. This got us thinking about where sea shanties, and other seafaring songs come from.

And so we found ourselves talking about whaling ships. As Chris points out, whalers, which were really floating factories, were a kind of Silk Road on the water, thanks to their global routes and diverse crews. They also remind us that music history, economic history, exploration, and extraction often run along the same tracks. The sea shanty meme was good fun (for most listeners!). But sea shanties, and other songs from the riches of maritime history, are more than just curiosities. They offer vital sonic clues about big processes, fascinating moments, and human experience in global history.

Key Takeaways

Historical misunderstandings can be interesting in their own right: take the story of how the discovery of an ancient monument in China led one European to speculate that Chinese people sang all the time as if they were in an opera. Behind this odd idea is a story of someone struggling to make sense of new historical evidence.
Whaling ships and other workhorses of the maritime trade were both “floating factories” and fascinating soundscapes. The music passed down from them (including the recent TikTok sea shanty craze) offer clues about these soundscapes, and the ways that music history and the histories of economics (especially the history of working people) travel on the same tracks.

Resources

Daniel Chua and Alexander Rehding’s Alien Listening: Voyager's Golden Record and Music from Earth got us thinking about how it can be illuminating to speculate about how other people--OK, they’re talking about space aliens--make sense of sound.
Bathsheba Demuth’s Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait is a must read on the entanglements of ecology and economy. The author is a former dog-sled musher.
We’re very inspired by Peter Linbaugh and Markus Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, which profoundly shapes our thinking about labor and maritime trade.
Check out the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs for thought-provoking stories about science, exploration, and “life at the extreme” presented by the historian Michael Robinson.

All of the books mentioned in the episode can be found in our Sounding History Goodreads discussion group. Join the conversation!

Key Takeaways

Historical misunderstandings can be interesting in their own right: take the story of how the discovery of an ancient monument in China led one European to speculate that Chinese people sang all the time as if they were in an opera. Behind this odd idea is a story of someone struggling to make sense of new historical evidence.
Whaling ships and other workhorses of the maritime trade were both “floating factories” and fascinating soundscapes. The music passed down from them (including the recent TikTok sea shanty craze) offer clues about these soundscapes, and the ways that music history and the histories of economics (especially the history of working people) travel on the same tracks.

Resources

Daniel Chua and Alexander Rehding’s Alien Listening: Voyager's Golden Record and Music from Earth got us thinking about how it can be illuminating to speculate about how other people--OK, they’re talking about space aliens--make sense of sound.
Bathsheba Demuth’s Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait is a must read on the entanglements of ecology and economy. The author is a former dog-sled musher.
We’re very inspired by Peter Linbaugh and Markus Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, which profoundly shapes our thinking about labor and maritime trade.
Check out the podcast Time to Eat the Dogs for thought-provoking stories about science, exploration, and “life at the extreme” presented by the historian Michael Robinson.

All of the books mentioned in the episode can be found in our Sounding History Goodreads discussion group. Join the conversation!

Previous Episode

New Soundworlds on Canals & Computers

The machines that make the biggest difference are the ones that make things move and bring people together. This week, our postcards take us to critical moments in the history of technology: the completion of the Erie Canal from the Hudson River to Lake Erie across northern New York state, and the development of the first civilian computers just after the Second World War. In both stories there is a surprising amount at stake for music history.

Just clearing a path for and then digging the Erie Canal (mile by mile, by hand) required an immense and dangerous effort. There were not enough workers available, so migrants, many from Britain and Ireland, but also free and enslaved people of color, were brought in to do the job. When the work was done the canal accelerated travel and communication, connecting the metropolis of New York to an immense hinterland to the west. The canal gave the new nation a vastly different sense of its borders and identity. Those who had given their labor (and in some cases their lives) to make it forged soundworlds for this new space. In the evenings and on rare days off they sang and danced together, making new kinds of music. What they did–a kind of synthesis travelling back and forth on the wonder they had built--would go on to underpin what we recognize as “American music” today.

After 1945 Alan Turing, who had spent the war working in secret developing the electronic computers that helped break “unbreakable” German codes, helped set up a civilian computer lab at the University of Manchester. Turing was by all accounts not a particularly musical man, but there were good ears on his team. One night, for fun (!), one of Turing’s junior colleagues, Christopher Strachey, used an alarm signal already built into a prototype computer to make a basic synthesizer, with hilarious-sounding but in the long run profound results. Thanks to recently discovered archival recordings we can hear its honky efforts, and the sleep-deprived giggles of Turing’s young colleagues when they heard what they had done. The members of Turing’s lab might not have known it, but what they did eventually opened up a wholly new chapter in the datafication of music. Like the workers on the Erie Canal two centuries ago, we suddenly find that our musical borders have shifted dramatically. Unlike them we ask ourselves where music “is” if it now only lives in digital code.

Key Points

The construction of the Erie canal brought labor and technology together to make new kinds of music, and the connections it made forged a new sense of American identity, also in sound.
Alan Turing was involved in efforts to develop the first civilian computers in Britain after World War Two. Although they didn’t set out to do so, members of his team found that they could synthesize musical sound, inadvertently setting the stage for the cultures of digital music we now live in.

Resources

Chris Smith’s The Creolization of American Culture: William Sydney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy explores how working people came together before the Civil War to make a new kind of “American” culture.
In Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music Kyle Devine explores the idea that digital music is just as material music on other media (such as shellac, vinyl, and plastic), and just as bad for the environment.
The IEEE (Institute of Electronic and Electronics Engineers) website has a detailed and engaging description of early computing and music-making in Alan Turing’s postwar Manchester lab.
You can read more about Alan Turing in B. Jack Copeland, Alan Turing: Pioneer of the Information Age.

All of the books mentioned in the episode can be found in our Sounding History Goodreads discussion group. Join the conversation!

Next Episode

Soundtracks of Imperial Power in Europe and Africa

Comparing cultural expressions is a risky enterprise: especially, in our case, because too many still perceive Western “classical” art music to be somehow superior to other musics because of its alleged and “universal” values. But we think the challenge can be worthwhile, especially at a deeper level, because it can help us tease out complementary ways rulers use sound to literally underscore their political power. In today’s episode we investigate music and power in the Black Atlantic, where European and African musics collided in history.

Our first example is that of the Italo-French composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687), who often features as the father of French opera. We focus on his role as composer of lavish multimedia productions known more formally as tragédies en musique, tragedies set to music and celebrating his patron Louis XIV. These fusions of music, drama, and dance were pure political spectacle, and in Louis’s younger years even involved the king himself as a dancer.

The king was dancing because the purpose of a tragédie en musique was to place the king’s body (which itself represented France, to contemporary ways of thinking) at the center of a complex piece of theatre. The point was not so much to entertain the audience, which often consisted of France’s political elite, but to remind them of the king’s absolute power.

Lully made a career of creating works like these. Tom unpacks Lully’s work, his dismissal by Louis after a sexual scandal (with a digression to the composer’s subsequent death of gangrene as the result of a self-inflicted wound sustained while directing music) and turns, finally, to Louis’s global political ambitions. Had those ambitions been fully realized, the cultural world of the Black Atlantic (and thus our music history) would have been much more French.

Chris’s postcard takes us to the soundworlds of the great empires of sub-Saharan West Africa in the pre-colonial era. He starts with the Empire of Mali, whose first emperor, Sundiata Keita (ruling in the thirteenth century CE) is memorialized in magnificent musical-epic poetry that has been passed down by oral and aural tradition. The bearers of this memory are called jeliat in the languages of West Africa (in French: griot). Chris explains how rulers of empires such as Mali depended on the jeliat, whose memorized epics were key sources of historical, genealogical, and legal knowledge, to tell their stories and legitimize their power.

We then attempt one of those challenging cross-cultural comparisons. Did Lully serve as a kind of praise-singerto Louis XIV? On the face of it certainly.

Yet historical comparisons are never simple or neutral. Just look at where we would be likely to encounter Lully’s music today: in “classical” opera houses or in other formats popular with elites in the “global north,” who are often culturally conditioned to value “timeless classics,” not political messages. In contrast the musical aesthetics and outputs of the oral-aural epics of West Africa, which are still performed by musicians who claim direct lineage to their predecessors at the court of Sundiata, are more likely to pop up on playlists of “traditional” or “world” music. Both are “old” music, so why is one “classical” and the other “traditional”?

The answer is the Western colonization of Africa, the flows of labor, energy, and data that made it possible, and--in turn--the influence of the jelat tradition on the vernacular musics of the Black Atlantic, which underpin nearly so many pop music genres today, from the Delta Blues to hip-hop. Music, it seems to us, is never unmoored from political and economic realities.

Key Points

In different ways around the world, political power and music mix.
The prestigious genre of French “tragedy in music” formed in the late seventeenth century in lavish spectacles that told stories about the political power of Louis XIV, the “Sun King”
The great poetic epics of the West African Empires, such as the Sundiata Epic from the court of the Empire of Mali, functioned similarly.
Lully’s operas live on, often stripped of their political meaning, in Western “classical” music. The West African epics live on too, as African “traditional music.” Some of their ethos informs the popular genres today that stem from the collision of European and African cultures in the era of the Black Atlantic, with its trade in goods and enslaved people.

Resources

We are fans of Gérard Corbiau’s 2000 film costume drama Le roi danse (even if it’s somewhat over the top!). Excerpts are available widely on YouTube and other platforms. The soundtrack is available on CD or download from