The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World's Wild Places

by Drew Martin

When I worked in a zoo in the north of the Czech Republic during a mid 1990s I was always impressed by the range of exotic sounds that reached out to me at the crack of dawn as I walked from the nearby trolley bus station to the entrance gate. Some noises were difficult to match to an animal, or even a species. The gibbons in the zoo, for example, had a high-pitched looping call that I first mistook for a tropical bird. 

Recently, I was perusing the arts section of my local library when a book on this subject caught my attention: The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World’s Wild Places by Dr. Bernie Krause. The cover features a few different creatures: a long-legged bird, a monkey, and a couple dragonflies. There is also a bar of music. 

I expected this book to speak to my audio experiences from my zoo days through a journalist-style narrative of the animal kingdom. On this it delivers but it is so much more than what I had imagined. For one thing, unlike a lot of non-fiction books, this masterly written work follows a great arc of thought. When you read something by an author such as Malcolm Gladwell you basically get a thesis upfront followed by supportive case studies to prove the author’s point. It’s that or simply a collection of magazine-type articles. Krause, by contrast, develops an incredibly well-conceived 236-page history of sound on Earth. He outlines this through three general sound categories: Geophony, Biophony, and Anthrophony.

Geophony covers the sounds made by the Earth: wind blowing, water gurgling, ice cracking, storms thundering, volcanoes erupting, wildfires raging, and the ground rumbling. Krause takes the reader back millions of years when the only sounds you would have heard on the planet were that of the Geophony. Even more mind-boggling is the idea that these sounds influenced all the other sounds that came after them. He explains how a bird’s call is fine-tuned to the Geophony soundscape. For example, a bird that lives near a waterfall will have a call that can be heard over the constant rush of water. I could add that this seems in line with the loud call of seagulls who are typically communicating over the crash of waves. 

Most elegant is Krause’s description of waves around the world and how the cadence and strength differs greatly and is even affected by level of salinity, and the rake of the shoreline. He compares the drawn-out thunderous crashes of the surf at Big Sur to the delicate quick patter off the coast of Tanzania. 

One thing I question after reading this book is his inclusion of plant life in the Geophony. For example, he describes how the wind blowing over broken reeds is nature’s first Pan-flute, which presumably could have been an inspiration to music-making humans. In terms of evolution, plants and animals share a common primordial ancestor; the same spark of life. For this reason, there should probably be a Botaphony to speak entirely to plants including their slow growth sounds, and the array of animated noises they can make including that of falling trees and limbs, and the rubbing together of branches. In fact, the sound of wind and fire are often botanical. Think of the rustling of leaves and the crackling of burning wood. 

The Biophony, as described by Krause includes the noises made by creatures great and small. Whale calls can circle the Earth in open water. Shrimp snap their claws so loudly that they create a sonic bubble around them that stuns their prey.

Krause is a professional musician and sound technician but what is expressed most in this book is his skill of being a good listener. This translates to his talent as a writer and makes me realize that reading is simply a form of listening. The most notable takeaway from Krause is to appreciate the sounds of our world and to really understand the connections within the bandwidth of an environment. The most poignant example of this is the common notion that certain creatures vocalize simply for mating and territorial claim but this overlooks the most fascinating element of how they might harmonize and synchronize their calls, which still provides them with a medium for hooking up with mates and staking their turf, but is also a defense from their auditory predators who cannot pinpoint a single source when confronted with their surround-sound. That is, until this sound is disrupted by another noise, which might come from the Geophony, such as a storm; the Biophony, such as a howl or a growl; or more commonly, the Anthrophony, which is the noise we and our creations make. 

Krause breaks the Anthrophony down into Electromechanical noises from that range from pencil sharpeners to pile drivers, and Physiological noises from sneezing to shouting. He also explains Anthrophonic sounds as controlled and incidental.

Krause’s mission with this book seems two-fold. First, it is an educational read about understanding sounds and learning to listen. But it also has a sound-environment protection agenda. He writes about “bioacoustics information” versus “uncorrelated acoustic debris” or less politely, “acoustic garbage.” He explains how our brains labor to filter out harmful noises. Interestingly, while we might feel that we can adjust to invasive sounds, our bodies unconsciously continue to display the same nervous tension, fatigue, and irritation as they did when the noise was first introduced and perceived as stressful. He compares artificial white noise to fluorescent lighting. Not too long ago some employers introduced artificial white noise to their companies in hopes of focusing the attention of their staff. The results were counterproductive and could not compare to natural white noise such as waves and waterfalls, which have unique cadence patterns with subtle signatures that do indeed pacify humans. 

The most upsetting part of Krause’s exposé is the fact that fatal whale beachings, which are sometimes induced by the hemorrhaging of their inner ears, might be due to Navy sonar testing. Aside from the physical pain they experience, they become disoriented and go off course.  Krause’s environmentalism via the natural soundscape makes perfect sense: he illustrates the density of sound with graphs of his recordings that reflect the shocking but expected reduction of life through various activities such as logging. The removal of vegetation is devastating but Anthrophonic noise pollution alone is enough to disrupt a habitat as well. 

While Krause certainly struggles with the fact that our natural environment is rapidly diminishing, with technology fueling this decline, he does offer some hope that a new generation of smart-phone kids would use the recording technology in their hands to rediscover and appreciate natural soundscapes as he himself did on assignment decades ago. 

Artfully Awear at The Stable

by Drew Martin
Here are some pictures from last night's event at The Stable in Ridgewood, NJ. It was the first of an artist talk series I helped kick off through the Ridgewood Arts Council. I am a new member of the arts council and on my first meeting a few months ago I proposed the idea for the series that would have a salon feel. It was great to be able to collaborate with other members of the council to make it happen. With a $0 budget we pulled it together with catered food, a classical guitarist, a beautiful space, and of course a great artist to start it off with a lot of positive energy.

Our first speaker was Ariel Adkins of Artfully Awear. Ariel came out from Brooklyn to talk to an energetic crowd of fifty or so residents including several local artists. We held the presentation in the main room of the building, which is actually a restored stable that was built just after the Civil War for the last working farm in Ridgewood. In the upper-level loft space Ariel hung eight of her dresses on a clothes line we strung between the ceiling beams so that people could take a look at her work up close.

Artist Talk with Ariel Adkins

Chariots of Fire

by Drew Martin

The other night I watched Chariots of Fire, a 1981 British historical (yet horribly inaccurate) drama that won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Screenplay. I first saw it in the movie theater as a tween when it came out but at that time it was for me simply a movie about running and not so much about its greater theme of religious faith. It highlights two runners who represent Great Britain at the 1924 summer Olympics in Paris: Eric Liddell, a Christian Scot, and Harold Abrahams, a Jewish Englishman, who won the 400 and 100 meter events, respectively.

Aside from the numerous fabrications and reversals of events, there are a couple other sticking points of this dramatization beyond what is shown. As a runner, the biggest deletion from this tale of the 1924 Olympics is the overwhelming success of the Finns in all the long distance events. I once worked with the great nephew of Paavo Nurmi, the Flying Finn, who ran in the 1924 Olympics and dominated the 1500 and 5K meter races, and the individual cross-country race, and was on the teams that won the 3K team race and the team cross country race. His teammate Ville Ritola won the 3K steeplechase and the 10K, and his teammate Albin Stenroos won the marathon. The middle image here is a copy of the Paavo Nurmi statue (outside the Olympic stadium in Helsinki). The original is at the Ateneum art museum in Helsinki. 

While the film entertains an interfaith dialogue and addresses class issues, watching it as an adult it is hard to see past the overtly WASPy sentiments. As with the Finns, whose efforts are pretty much dismissed, black athletes are almost entirely ignored except for a few glimpses. Where on this world stage less than a hundred years ago were the Caribbean sprinters, north African middle distance elite, and East African long distance runners who now hold the world records, and what were all the obstacles these modern stars had to overcome to be selected to train and compete?

We all know that Jesse Owens was immensely popular and successful in the Berlin Olympics of 1936. Within 45 minutes he broke five world records, equaled in a sixth. His long jump record stood for another 25 years and his team’s 4x100 meters record remained untouched for two decades. But Jesse was one of 17 African Americans competing and I personally do not know much about their successes.

Even though the Olympics were first recorded in 776 BCE (and probably existed for many years before then) the modern games were not rebooted until 1896. The first black athlete to compete at the Olympics was Constantin Henriquez de Zubiera (pictured top left in the top image square), on the French rugby team in 1900. The first black athlete to win a gold medal was African-American John Baxter Taylor (pictured bottom left in the top image square), as part of the US relay team in 1908.

The big turning point that brought attention to East Africa wasn’t until 1960, when the Ethiopian marathoner Abebe Bikila (pictured right in the top image square) ran barefoot all the way in Rome and won the gold medal with a time of 2:15:16. Bikila was actually trained by the Finnish-born Swede Onni Niskanen who had been hired by the Ethiopian government to find potential athletes. He ran barefoot because the ADIDAS-sponsored shoes he was given were not comfortable and so he decided to run the way he had trained, without shoes. I always thought his barefoot marathon was light years ahead of other marathons but his time only bested the Soviet Sergei Popov’s record set two years earlier by less than a second. And three years later it was beat by Toru Terasawa of Japan, then Leonard Edelen of the United States and then by a couple Brits before Bikila returned to run a 2:12:11.2 in 1964. Tragically a car accident in 1969 left him a quadriplegic. 

A series of sub 2:10 marathon records were set by an Australian then lowered by runners from Japan, Holland, Australia, the UK and Portugal. It wasn’t until 1988 that another Ethiopian broke the standing record by 22 seconds with a 2:06:50. That stood until a Brazilian beat it by almost a minute, followed by the phenomenal Moroccan runner Khalid Khannouchi who ran a 2:05:42. He then broke his record as an American citizen a year later in 2002 by four seconds. Since that time the records have been broken by Kenyan and Ethiopian runners and remains at 2:02:57 by the Kenyan Dennis Kimetto.

The women’s side is a different story with Paula Radcliffe of Great Britain who ran a 2:15:25 in 2003; a breathtaking record that has held off the best female Kenyan and Ethiopian runners by more than three minutes for more than a dozen years.

While it’s assumed that East Africans will continue to dominate long distance events based on early 21 Century results and a multitude of explanations from genetics to body mass index, a Runner’s World article from two years ago took a more open-minded approach through data-crunching of 10,000 top marathon performances for the past half a century in order to answer their title question: What Will It Take to Run a 2-Hour Marathon? which echoes the quest of the 4-minute mile in the early 1950s. 

To run a sub-two would require a pace under 4:35 per mile. My best mile as a mid-40’s male was a 4:34. It hurts to think about it. Runner's World came up with a perfect race for a perfect runner, which may even be run in a part of the world without much race support at present time and by someone from a part of the world not yet tested for elite long distance running. Have faith.

Check out the Runner's World article with great infographics here: http://rw.runnersworld.com/sub-2/

Sibling Revelry

by Drew Martin
The other night I was at the Whitney Museum of American Art for an event and I overheard someone from the museum addressing a young staff member as Calder. A couple minutes later I bumped into him and I asked how he got his name because I named one of my sons Calder too. His parents met at the Whitney where they had worked and also named him after Alexander Calder. Long story short, we talked for an hour about the artist Calder, this young man's artist parents, and his up and coming artist sister, Avery Singer, of whom he spoke very highly and who has a piece at The Whitney and is represented by the Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler gallery in Berlin. I was not familiar with her work so I looked her up on my phone during my commute home and was totally blown away. Avery uses SketchUp to create blocky figures, which she projects onto canvases and then airbrushes in grayscale. This results in oversized 2D paintings with the depth of 3D renderings that nicely pull together Cubism and computer-generated images. I am impressed by the scale, the idea, and the process of her work.

Free the Ripple

by Drew Martin

I just started reading a book about the origins of music and at the first mention of amphitheater I thought about the logo for this blog about the arts and media. The rings represent how, as a kid, I visualized the radio and television waves pulsing out from New York City to my suburban New Jersey town, and they also speak to the cultural periphery around the creative nucleus of Manhattan. So when the author mentions that amphitheaters of the ancient Greeks and Romans were semi-circular, circular and oval, I wondered how the original design came about. 

Were the shapes and ringed seating inspired by watching how water ripples expand and understanding the relationship of air to water, or was it more conceptually and mathematically worked out as a matter of equidistant practicality? Perhaps it was just a progression from the natural world to the built environment by experiencing and then mimicking the vantages of bowled landscape and hillsides overlooking the sea as one witnessed either a battle or a sunset. 

I would like to believe that it was a more personal and intimate evolution, and that it has something to do with how crowds form around the action, and that the tiered seating copies how the observers naturally jockey for position with the shortest people and kids shouldering their way into the front ring so as to be able to see, while the tallest of the tall can stand at the perimeter and still get a full view from where they are. 

The semi-circle formation would favor a performer who could act out into a fan of people and even hide elements of surprise behind him or her. The full circle or oval shaped theater would give the upper hand to the audience with the advantage to see the performers from all angles as those performers would need to rotate to address everyone, or would naturally be in motion during a display of athleticism or a small combat. One would naturally favor theater and the other would be better for sport. You could imagine how the simple difference in design might even influence the future of a culture. 

So what would be the reason for building an oval arena when a circle seems to be a more obvious shape? The problem with a circle is that the bigger you get the farther the very center is from everyone. With an oval you can expand sideways to give more seating and greater field/performance space but then certain “midfield” seats would still be close to the action. In practical terms the available footprint of a city might have influenced the design but the other thing is that with running events, and horse and chariot races you would want to create a space that allows for long straightaways and then a great enough of a curve to not slow down the competitor because of angled running, centripetal force, and a greater discrepancy of lengths between inner and outer lanes. 

If you look at the 6^th century BC marble wonder of Kallimarmaro (the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens) there is much more straightway than turns as we have on today’s tracks, which have a 1:1 straight to turn ratio. Even in the most distorted versions of theaters, arenas, and stadiums it is hard to not see the a manifestation of sound in the shape of the venues, the rippled arrangement of seating, and how they either favor the outward audio projection of the performer verses the inward cheers of the crowd.

The Thin Blue Line

by Drew Martin

I have seen temporary purple lines painted down Christopher Street in Manhattan for the gay pride parade, and temporary green lines down the center of Central Avenue in Pearl River, NY for their St. Patrick’s Day parade. Now there are permanent blue lines being painted in northern New Jersey towns between the double yellow lines in the center of the streets to show an appreciation for the police. Previously, in other parts of the country there have been red lines painted in support of the fire department, and in Rhode Island there are red, white, and blue lines in the streets of some locations for patriotic flair.

The “thin blue line” refers to the mental demarcation that separates law-abiding citizens and criminals. The recent display of the blue line on roads is a reaction to the public outcry towards the few officers who have shot and killed (specifically) unarmed African Americans. For measure, in 2014, the FBI reported that more than 50 law enforcement officers were ‘feloniously’ killed in the line of duty, with about that number who died in accidents. The count may be higher as reported by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund: 126.

I grew up with respect for police because in my experiences they always seemed to be at the right place at the right time in my home town and NYC. For the most part, New York cops were unconcerned with petty offenses, such as jaywalking, so it was a surprise for me when I went to school in Santa Barbara and saw police officers hiding behind bushes on mountain bikes so they could ambush and ticket students who they saw riding their bikes on the sidewalk - a far cry from the swagger of CHiPs, which I liked to watch as a little kid. And after a very recent trip to Berkeley, CA I found a new appreciation for my local police in northern New Jersey. Berkeley’s town parks look like lawless refugee camps for homeless people who defecate in the bushes and heckle passersby. The small-town network of Bergen County, NJ means a police force for every town, which is more expensive in terms of taxes but it also means better paid and better trained officers, and greater stewardship. 

While public road markings are supposed to be uniform, there are no rules about what goes between the lines. It’s up to the state, county or municipality to decide. In the Village of Ridgewood, where I live, the blue line is painted in the center of the road for a couple-hundred-yard stretch in front of our library, town hall, and police station. I was running this morning very early, just after 4am, and took this picture. At that moment two police cars sped off on a medical response while everyone else was sleeping.

Dirty Pictures

by Drew Martin
I just watched an interesting documentary called Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art, which brings one closer to the earthworks of the artists who started the movement including Michael Heizer, Walter De Maria, and Robert Smithson. The film was a treat for me because I have not been out to the desert to experience their grandest works, which I have only seen in photographs. The documentary offers great views of Heizer's Double Negative, De Maria's The Lightning Field, and Smithson's Spiral Jetty, and it surveys the land art movement with interviews and anecdotes about the artists who left the New York gallery scene behind in order to redefine what modern art could be.

Max Beckmann's Manual Labor

by Drew Martin
If you can tell a lot about a person by his or her hands then you can tell even more about an artist by the way he or she depicts them. The hands in Max Beckmann's paintings caught my attention tonight at the preview of his show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In a way, the hands are a summary of the paintings, microcosms unto themselves. They not only capture the style of each specific work, but they are manifestations of how he feels towards the subject. They are typically not the delicate instruments with which we manage our most dexterous tasks but rather: meaty gloves, fleshy pistols, arthritic claws, and sometimes so fine that you want to reach into the painting and hold them.

You Belong to the Universe

by Drew Martin

There is a special place in the heart of our curious culture for outside artists, offbeat thinkers, and genius visionaries because they break us from run-of-the-mill tradition. Dr. Bronner, the cure-all soap prophet, comes to mind as one such character. Similarly, and more famously, there was Buckminster Fuller, the self-professed “comprehensive anticipatory design scientist” who had a six-decade-long mission to “make the world work for 100% of humanity.” He is best known for promoting geodesic domes among his multitude of inventions and insights. 

Fuller has been dead for more than three decades but a recently published book breathes new life into his ideas that challenged the woes of transportation, housing, and warfare. The title of the book, You Belong to the Universe, comes from a ‘voice’ that spoke to him as he was about to take his life. At the age of 32 he felt that he was a failure. He was a new father without career prospects. One of his soulless gigs was as even an asbestos flooring salesman. He figured that his wife and child would benefit more from his life-insurance policy than his existence. So he walked down to Lake Michigan to drown himself but then he heard a voice say “You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe.”

The author, Jonathon Keats, tries to tease fact from fiction that still surrounds Fuller. One thing is tragically true: the death of his daughter at the age of four pushed him farther into his mission to fix the planet. Everything became a solvable problem. Weaponry could become livingry, and almost everything could be worked out through biomimesis, by copying nature. One problem, was that the human mind was not expansive enough to comprehend everything, which is where his notion of something like the Internet would prevail. His “two-way television” would be a “mental prosthetic” for humankind. MOOCs (massive online open courses) would replace schools and decision-making computers would supplant politicians. His ideas were at times far-fetched, and often pure fantasy. They were so design driven that they ruled out other human decisions other than his own. And often, his ideas simply did not work. His geodesic domes leaked. Modern materials such as plastic were toxic. His famous three-wheeled Dymaxion car crashed and burned. Even his 80-hour documentary never got very far.

Fuller was very interested in education. He toured the country giving lectures, which might run eight hours long and were said to have "a raga quality of rich nolinear endless improvisation full of convergent surprises." On learning, he questioned the impact of specialization.

"Society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking."

A concern with comprehensive anticipatory design is understanding all the consequences that emerge from the original approach of a new idea; the whole life cycle. Fuller noted that "the most natural technology can wreak havoc on the habitat that nurtured it." 

At times I wish Keats would have gotten more personal with Fuller's life, but even so I often enjoyed his own input such as this note about design and information.

"People find the simplicity of infographics seductive, a comforting respite from the deluge of data. In the name of convenience, judgement is outsourced to statisticians and designers rather than being taken as the responsibility of each viewer. As a consequence , the increased amount of data is paradoxically making more people less knowledgeable. And it's happening as the complexity of the world around us makes personal engagement more urgent."

Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-Plicit Art by Women

by Drew Martin

Coming to Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-Plicit Art by Women is a show at Maccarone, which closes in a few days. It is a restaging of the show by the same name from 1993 at the David Zwirner Gallery. Typically, at such sexually explicit shows, I find myself objectively taking it all in and then criticizing myself at a level because I know I am not comfortable enough to be so bold. But maybe it’s in that process of creating this kind of art that does the emboldening. But then I wonder why anyone would want to be so blatant. Is it just a kind of power trip? Is it liberating? Or is it just for shock-value? What was different today was that not only did I feel like I did not have to question myself (maybe because the “by women” part precluded me as a creator/contributor) but I also enjoyed a kind of honest truth behind it during this political madhouse of oscillating moral values, repressive half-truths, and carnal energies. Even though the exhibit had blackened doors and walls that hide the show in a down-a-dark-alley adult world, there was a very easy-going, unashamed feeling to it. And while a lot of the artwork is titillating, I was most attracted to the work by Louise Bourgeois (Janus and Janus in Leather Jacket, 1968) and Yoko Ono’s Object in Three Parts – Revolution from 1963: a white diaphragm, condom, and birth control pill on three black pedestals next to the entrance.

Cinemagic: Fish Tank, and Me, Earl and the Dying Girl

by Drew Martin

I saw two films last week that I liked a lot. The first, Fish Tank from 2009, is a gritty look at England through the eyes of a 15-year-old girl, Mia. She and her little sister are raised by a single mom who parties through her problems. The mom’s new boyfriend, played by Michael Fassbender, simultaneously grounds Mia and enrages her. Things fall apart he makes love to Mia, dumps her mom, and sneaks back to his suburban house, wife and daughter.

While I typically can't stand when Europe does hip-hop anything, it works well here. One of my favorite scenes is when Mia says goodbye to her mom, perhaps forever, which ties in so many different elements of the film.

I also liked watching Me and Earl and the Dying Girl from 2015. It’s an atypical high school movie. For one thing, it’s filmed in Pittsburgh, which is a nice change of scenery, and the often trite film-within-a-film theme is differentiated here by references to Werner Herzog and the fact that the main character, Greg, and his “coworker” Earl make a film that literally kills someone. This is the trailer for the film done by the main character:

Mummenschanz

by Drew Martin
As an adult there are things you recall about your childhood that upon revisiting at a later age confirm your life-long remembrances but make a little more sense with your personal experiences. I often think about the other-worldly performances of Mummenschanz so I recently checked out a disc from my local library of the first season of The Muppet Show in 1976 because I noticed that one of the episodes featured Mummenschanz. I watched that show when I was seven years old, and seeing their performance forty years later still weirdly disturbed me but knowing now that they are a Swiss group helped me rethink their art form. Not only because they have a European sensibility, which favors mimes, but because Switzerland is the birthplace of Dada art.

The name Mummenschanz is a German concoction for mummery,  a play involving mummers - an Early Modern English term for a mime artist. The group formed in Altstätten, Switzerland in 1972. The 1976 Muppets performance opened them up to a wider American audience and in the following year, they started a three-year gig on Broadway.