Tectonic Microphonics

“Tectonic Microphonics” explores the politics of seismologists’ use of the microphone to listen to the deep, elusive sounds of the Earth in the years around 1900. It argues that seismological representatives of three emerging nation-states and empires—Italy, Japan, and Britain—used the microphone to lay claim to elusive geophysical data, encrypted in fleeting, earthly sounds. It suggests that seismologists’ enhanced knowledge of the subterranean movements of the Earth, a purported consequence of their microphonic aurality, represented a form of geopolitical currency. Such powers of prediction were viewed as an important index of national security and scientific development: the microphone thus represented an opportunity for occupants of seismic geographies (like Italy and Japan) to overcome what Deborah Coen has referred to as the “deterministic geography of security and risk” that, for some geologists, reduced them to the status of “barbarians.” At the same time, this article demonstrates that valorizing the civilizing consequences of this form of technologically mediated aurality relied upon extractive ecologies of capitalism and exploitative human labor that were often obscured by scientific users and their global networks of collaborators and enablers. As the article's concluding section shows, these activities came on the heels of the birth of one of the earliest ideas of the Anthropocene, circulated in the writings of an Italian geologist as a term for the agency of white, European, “steam-powered” men (a circumscribed Anthropos) over the Earth, its fossil resources, and its less-than-human laborers. This article concludes by arguing that the microphone established a standard of anthropogenic aurality fit for the birth of the age of the Anthropocene.

In Memoriam Indoor Fountains: Promenade Concerts and the Built Environment

Discussions of promenade concerts, at least in the United Kingdom, tend to run along one of two lines: either the format is emblematic of attempts to popularize classical music or (in the famous case of the Last Night of the BBC Proms) it is symptomatic of a contested cultural nationalism. An alternative line of inquiry is to consider promenade concerts as part of the built environment. Until 2010 the fountain at the Royal Albert Hall was a mainstay of musical promenading; it had been so for over a century and a half. Such fountains, often accompanied by potted plants and Arcadian décor, were said to cool the concert hall and freshen the air, especially when their sprinkles were supplemented with blocks of imported ice. They occupied a prominent place in a concert architecture that encouraged mobility and informality, drawing on a long tradition of outdoor promenading that had gradually moved indoors. The history of concert hall suggests that the promenade phenomenon constituted not only a site of social and political negotiation (as it has typically been described), but also a staging post in the enclosure of hitherto open spaces and an example of the Victorian desire to control the climate of public assembly.

Transcribing Greece, Arranging France: Bourgault-Ducoudray’s Performances of Authenticity and Innovation

Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray (1840–1910), composer, folklorist, and long-time professor of music history at the Paris Conservatoire, dedicated intense energies to the propagation of ancient Greek modes as a modern resource for French composition. Instigated by his 1875 folk-song collection mission in Greece and Anatolia, Bourgault-Ducoudray’s attraction to Greek modes was bolstered by ideological commitments to Aryanism (nourished by his relationship and correspondence with philologist Émile Burnouf), and further reinforced by his observation of “Greek modes” in Russian and Breton folk song. This article examines how Bourgault-Ducoudray translated his quasi-philological analyses into an artistic agenda through techniques of transcription, arrangement, and composition. Beginning with a close reading of his important collection, Trente mélodies populaires de Grèce et d’Orient (1876), a continuity is established between his transcriptive and compositional practices, with particular attention paid to Bourgault-Ducoudray’s performances of authenticity through calibrated scientific and artistic rhetoric. I then turn to the reception of Bourgault-Ducoudray’s collection by two composers—Alfred Bruneau and Camille Saint-Saëns—who rearranged his Greek songs in different contexts. Treating the songs with remarkable plasticity, they appropriated Bourgault-Ducoudray’s authority to enhance representations of “oriental” and “ancient” worlds, negotiating a balance between scholarly research and artistic integrity. The article concludes by returning to Bourgault-Ducoudray’s work in the 1880s—a period during which the musical and ideological ambitions of his song arrangements were magnified to an operatic scale—culminating in a rereading of his Thamara (1891) in light of his ethnic nationalism.

The Exotic in Nineteenth-Century French Opera, Part 1: Locales and Peoples

Nineteenth-century French opera is renowned for its obsession with “the exotic”—that is, with lands and peoples either located far away from “us” Western Europeans or understood as being very different from us. One example: hyper-passionate Spaniards and “Gypsies” in Bizet’s Carmen. Most discussions of the role that the exotic plays in nineteenth-century French opera focus on a few standard-repertory works (mainly serious in nature), rather than looking at a wider range of significant works performed at the time in various theaters, including the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique, and Offenbach’s Bouffes-Parisiens. The present article attempts to survey the repertory broadly. Part 1 examines various “different” (or Other) lands and peoples frequently represented on stage in French operas. Part 2 discusses typical plots and character types found in these operas (sometimes regardless of the particular exotic land that was chosen) and concludes by exploring the musical means that were often employed to impel the drama and to convey the specific qualities of the people or ethnic group being represented. These musical means could include special or unusual traits: either all-purpose style markers of the exotic generally or more specific style markers associated with identifiable peoples or regions. But the musical means could also include any of the rich fund of devices that opera composers normally used when creating drama and defining character: melodic, harmonic, structural, and so on. This last point is often neglected or misunderstood in discussions of “the exotic in music,” which tend instead to focus primarily on elements that indisputably “point to” (as if semiotically) the specific land or people that the work is seeking to evoke or represent. In both Parts 1 and 2, instances are chosen from works that were often quite successfully performed at the time in French-speaking regions and that, even if little known today, can at least be consulted through recordings or videos. The works come from the standard recognized operatic genres: five-act grands opéras, three-act opéras-comiques, and short works in bouffe style. The composers involved include (among others) Adam, Auber, Berlioz, Bizet, Chabrier, Cherubini, Clapisson, Félicien David, Delibes, Flotow, Gomis, Gounod, Halévy, Messager, Meyerbeer, Hippolyte Monpou, Offenbach, Ernest Reyer, Saint-Saëns, Ambroise Thomas, and Verdi (Les vêpres siciliennes, Don Carlos). Examining certain lesser-known works reveals merits that have gone relatively unheralded. As for the better-known works, approaching them in this wide-angled way grants us a richer appreciation of their strengths and their often-enlivening internal contradictions.

Music Theory's Other Nature: Reflections on Gaia, Humans, and Music in the Anthropocene

The new historical paradigm ushered in by the Anthropocene offers a timely and urgent opportunity to rethink the relationship of humans and nature. Bruno Latour's take on the Gaia hypothesis, which rejects the traditional subject/object divide, shows how the human can be inscribed into the work of music theory. This turn toward Latour's Actor-Network Theory, which erases the categorical difference between human and nonhuman agents, now dressed up in cosmic garb under the banner of the Gaia hypothesis, appears to be distant from traditional music-theoretical concerns, but the connection is in fact less far-fetched than it seems. J. G. Kastner's music theory, taking its cue from the sound of the Aeolian harp, serves as a test case here: the Aeolian harp, played by wind directly, had long served as a Romantic image of the superhuman forces of nature, but Kastner argues that the Aeolian network only becomes complete in human ears. By unraveling the various instances and agencies of Kastner's theory, this article charts a novel approach to music and sound that sidesteps the conceptual problems in which the nineteenth-century mainstream habitually gets entangled. Kastner's work is based on a fundamental crisis in the conception of sound, after the invention of the mechanical siren (1819) tore down any certainties about the categorical distinction between noise and musical sound. Seeking to rebuild the understanding of sound from the ground up, Kastner leaves no stone unturned, from the obsolete Pythagorean tradition of musica mundana to travelers’ reports about curious sonic environmental phenomena from distant parts of the world. Where the old mechanistic paradigm was built on a “physical music” (and a static “sound of nature” based on the harmonic series), Kastner proposes a new “chemical music” that is based on the dynamic, ever-changing sonority of the Aeolian harp. This chemical music does not (yet) exist, but Kastner gives us some clues about its features, especially in his transcription/simulation of the sound of the Aeolian harp scored for double symphony orchestra. Kastner's “chemical music” finally closes the music-theoretical network that he builds around his new conception of the supernatural sound of the Aeolian harp and its human and nonhuman agents.

Chez Paul Niquet: Sound, Spatiality, and Sociability in the Paris Cabaret

Years before Montmartre’s cabarets artistiques took Europe by storm, the Cabaret Paul Niquet thrived as a Right-Bank tavern popular among Paris’s laborers, vendors, and criminals during the early nineteenth century. It became notorious not only for its clientele, but also for its vivid representations in travel literature, fiction, popular song, and vaudeville. Even after its demolition by Baron Haussmann during the Second Empire, the cabaret remained a fixation among Paris’s musical and literary class. The interest in this lowly tavern reveals a sustained middle-class preoccupation with the spatial and sonic practices of the most destitute of Parisian citizens. Yet this preoccupation was not merely a condescending fascination with the poor. Niquet’s cabaret serves as a lens through which to examine social and sensory changes brought on by urbanization. Bringing urban geography into conversation with the historiography of French theater, this article contends that the city’s proletarian leisure spaces offered a relational form of sociability that was at odds with the spectacular aesthetic of Haussmannization. The sounds emanating from Niquet’s cabaret, from clanging glasses to spontaneous songs, defined the cabaret institution spatially: not merely in acoustic terms, but also as a democratized site of leisure for workers and literati alike.

Hear My Desire: Rachmaninov’s Orphic Voice and Musicology’s Trouble with Eurydice

Stigmatized as kitsch, the music of Rachmaninov has largely been neglected by scholars. A reassessment has been made possible by recent historiography on late imperial Russia documenting the intelligentsia’s search for a messianic musician-bard, a role that several of Rachmaninov’s pre-revolutionary works take up, but not in the terms expected of them. Heard in relation to the Orpheus myth often invoked at the time, to the contemporaneous prevalence of psychoanalysis, and to the formal affinities between early modernist orchestral music and the unconscious, the music both assumes unforeseen significance and offers the possibility of a counterstatement to current musicological concerns with embodiment and presence. Amid these debates, Rachmaninov’s symphonic poem, Isle of the Dead (1909), emerges as an unexpectedly subversive work that sounds the futility of fin-de-siècle Russian utopianism while giving voice to an alternative, anti-metaphysical ethics. Meanwhile, the music points to a clandestine violence governing much of musicology’s ongoing fascination with the “drastic.” The resulting critique leads to the proposal of a reparative musicology capable of giving a sympathetic account of the cultural work of public mourning that Rachmaninov’s music performs in the concert hall today.