A ‘Meteorology of Sound’: Composing Nature in the 20th and 21st Centuries
Bernd Herzogenrath · REAL- YEARBOOK OF RESEARCH IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE · 2010
Is there a ‘meteorology of sound’? What is the ‘weather of music?’ In seminal works of Classical music which refer to the seasons [Schumann’s Symphony No 1 (“Fruhling”|“Spring”), Gershwin’s “Summertime,” or Vivialdi’s The Four Seasons], and|or to the weather, such as Beethoven’s Symphony No 6 (“Pastorale”|”The Pastoral Symphony”), with its fourth movement ‘Thunderstorm,’ composers were primarily concerned with an acoustic|musical translation of subjective sense perceptions, i.e., with a representation of nature and natural forces. In this article, however, I am more interested in the question if there is a connection between nature, weather and music beyond representation, if weather phenomena themselves can be music, and if music itself can be ‘meteorological.’ My first thesis is the following: whereas the composers of the 18th and 19th centuries were mainly interested in the representation of the subjective effects of weather phenomena, modern avant-garde composers more and more focus on the reproduction of the processes and dynamics of the weather as a system ‘on the edge of chaos.’ My second thesis is related to the first, but more specific in terms of space and time: a particular American modernist tradition in music from Charles Ives via John Cage to John Luther Adams not only starts with the writings of Henry David Thoreau – Thoreau already provides an aesthetics of music, the radicalism of which is only being followed up today.1 Let me first point out the particularity of Thoreau's musical aesthetics and ‘musical ecology.’ In 1851, Thoreau notes an acoustic experience in his journals that reveals his particular sensibility to the sonic environment: