1877 was the year in which Thomas Edison introduced the phonograph to the world. Its ability to record a sound and play it back, albeit only a few times, was sensational. Edison, in his earliest public recording, recited Mary Had a Little Lamb. It was recorded onto a tin foil medium that, as far as I can tell, is lost to time. A recreation of Edison’s recitation was done later, but playback of the original probably destroyed any chance of preservation. Edison would later develop his wax cylinder technology, but Emile Berliner’s disc format became the favored vessel of sound recreation.
Seventeen years before Edison invented his phonograph, the Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville made a ‘recording’ of himself singing the popular French folksong Au Claire de La Lune. His system, the phonautograph, traced sound waves onto paper that had been blackened by smoke. Playback was not possible at the time, only visual observation. But in 2008, the barrels of the phonautograph were scanned and turned into digital audio files. Edison and Martinville had presented the world with very different technologies. One resulted in a recording that could not be played then but can at present. The other could be played then but cannot now. I use 1860 as my cut-off year for recorded sound as we can listen to Martinville’s original recording, but not Edison’s.
The main point of this series is in imagining the music of societies before the invention of playback. There is something so alluring about music that has been lost to the wind. Sounds that existed before mechanical reproduction, their ‘aura’ confined to one moment of creation. Indeed, most examples will exist in some written form, but we cannot know exactly or even approximately, in some cases, what they sounded like in the time in which they were composed. Take for example the Hurrian Hymn Number Six, the world's oldest known melody discovered in modern day Syria. Its instructions are spelled out in Cuneiform on a clay tablet. Here is one interpretation of the intervals and tuning that are specified on the tablet.
Many of Beethoven’s tempo markings are disregarded by musicians. Sixty-six out of one hundred and thirty-five of his scores have markings that are considered incredibly and undesirably fast. Some have even posited that his metronome was broken. Zachary Goldberger, Steven M. Whitling, and Joel D. Howell, in their essay The Heartfelt Music of Ludwig Van Beethoven, have gone further and posited that Beethoven was himself a broken metronome. The authors suggest that Beethoven's rhythmic idiosyncrasies were a product of putative arryththmia of the heart. Are we trying to make Beethoven's music fit our preferences, or are we correcting a technical issue? Of course, we can never know for sure, which is why examining this history is intoxicating. Alan Pierson and the Brooklyn Philharmonic experimented with playing them at BPMs closest to the original notation in 2013. They play his Third Symphony faster than A Clockwork Orange’s beloved ‘Ludwig Van’ intended, proving it as possible if not exhausting. It is the finale to Rossini’s William Tell Overture, as interpreted through the analog synthesis of Wendy Carlos, that plays during the sped-up threesome sex scene of A Clockwork Orange. It seems like a missed opportunity on the part of Kubrick and Carlos to not indulge the wildly fast tempos of Beethoven’s original manuscripts. Beethoven looks on the whole scene disapprovingly from the printed window shade of Alex's room.
Since almost all of music history existed before the birth of playback, collecting the near-endless examples could be seen as a daunting task. That would be true if I intended to catalog all of it. I do not. I am merely going to fall into the vastness of my options and grab a handful here and there. I will begin with some more esoteric examples, but even the most famous music, I suspect, has another, better, story to tell.
I have been reading a bit about early American utopian societies lately. A few references to their various musical compositions have emerged from the texts. While in Los Angeles recently, I visited the Philosophical Research Society and purchased one of the seemingly endless texts by Manly P. Hall entitled The Rosicrucians and M. Christoph Schlegel. As I read the book on the flight back to Philadelphia, I discovered a character named Johannes Kelpius.
As it turns out, Kelpius and his group of millenarian scholar hermits had settled along the Wissahickon Creek in 1694. The so-called Cave of Kelpius was only a fifteen-minute drive from my home.
Kelpius was born in Transylvania in the same village as Vlad the Impaler. Kelpius and his followers called their society, The Woman in The Wilderness. Their name came from a character in the Book of Revelations. In the scripture, the woman finds her refuge from the apocalypse within the wilderness. The group planned to do the same.
It has been reported that an English convert named Christopher Witt built a pipe organ for the monks, which became the first in America. The actual claim to the first pipe organ built in America cannot be easily proven. This bit of history/mythology seems to come from the historian Julius Sachse who wrote in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He includes an account in his book, The German Pietists of Pennsylvania, that states:
“The service was opened with a voluntary on the little organ in the gallery by Jonas, the organist, supplemented with instrumental music by the Mystics on the viol, hautboy [oboe], trumpets, and kettle drums.”
This account is dated as November 24, 1703.It has been documented elsewhere that the monks or ‘mystics’ were undeniably comprised of musicians and composers. Kelpius himself wrote a collection of hymns called The Lamenting Voice of The Hidden Love. Hymns such as I Love My Jesus Quite Alone have survived and are still sung today in some congregations.
The account of the organ detailed above, however, has not been reproduced elsewhere. Sachse points out that the instrument may have been brought over from England, which was the port of departure for the hermits. Christopher Witt, also the artist behind the oil painting of Kelpius, pictured above, definitely owned an organ. It appears in the inventory of his possessions taken following his death, but when he came to be in its possession or when and whether he built it is unclear. For an meticuously detailed, yet inconclusive, essay on the first pipe organ in America, a journal contains a report on the subject; The Tracker, Vol. 50. Nos. 3 & 4 . The article, Who Built the First Organ in America? A Historiography by Michael D. Friesen should satisfy the curiosities of most.
In 1720, another future utopian leader, Conrad Beissel, headed to the Wissahickon to join the Woman in the Wilderness. What he failed to realize was that the group had already disbanded some years earlier. Biesel would go on to found the Ephrata Cloister. The group is probably best known for sleeping on wooden ‘pillows.’ They also came to be recognized for their heavenly choral music.
Some have claimed Beissel’s treatise on music as the first written in the Americas, though as we have seen with the pipe organ, this can be difficult to prove. His theories used ‘master’ and ‘servant’ notes representative of their religious views. To sing in the choir at the Cloister, participants had to partake in a meager diet (lighter than the already slim rations of the community) and long hours devoted to practice. Visitors spoke of the angelic nature of the voices they heard. One member of the choir suggested that “the angels themselves, when they sang at Christ’s birth, had to make use of our rules.” Needless to say, they were confident in their abilities. Recreations of the hymns have recently been performed under the direction of Musicologist and baritone Christopher Dylan Herbert. However, larger choirs would have most likely been more commonplace than the four-person choir that has been used in his production. Still, the recordings give us a beautiful, studied interpretation. Beissel’s musical ideas are also portrayed in detail in the novel Doktor Faustus by Thomas Mann.
This music brings us into an imaginal space. We can never know what it sounded like in its original form. That is what intrigues me about it. How did the pipe organ of The Woman in The Wilderness sound? What materials were available. Did it exist at all? The strict practice regime of the Ephrata Cloister’s chorus undoubtedly resulted in something awe-inspiring. I doubt even the most prestigious contemporary choirs are held to their standards today. They are certainly allowed to eat regular portioned meals. In both of these instances, the individuals were exalting God. Not in a casual, ‘we go to church on Sunday,’ kind of way. Both were protestant radicals, willing to move to a new world to worship the way they saw fit. Some of them lived in caves; others slept on wood beds. What kind of music does that ultimate devotion produce?
The word utopia is a compound of two Greek words which translate to “nowhere” or “not a place.” It is a haunting reminder of the disappearance of these communities, their choirs and pipe organs “nowhere” to be found in our modern times. The jukebox in the wilderness of early America has long since stopped playing.
We can speculate that the sound of the Dodo was kindred to its name, letting out a ‘dooough-dooough’ sound as it walked around the island of Mauritius. Unfortunately, its species went extinct around 1662, just before the story of Kelpius begins. So, it is unlikely that the sound of its call will ever be known for certain. It doesn't stop me from hearing its distinctive voice whenever I see a photo of one. Maybe the Dodo made no vocalizations, but now in its ultimate death it sings in our imaginations.
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