Last week at Juniper Moon Farm I was trying to sleep in the yurt out in the pasture after a long day pitching manure, scouring a chicken coop, mending fences, gathering eggs, and a plethora of other truly wonderful farm chores that invigorate the heart and spirit as well as muscles you did not know you had.
Overhead the moon was full. Outside the temperature had dropped to a frosty 40+. Somewhere in the woods an owl hooted, a whippoorwill "sang", and a mocking bird made a mockery of the still country night.
Unbeknownst to me, this was "Earth Music" as celebrated in Bernie Krause's book, "The Great Animal Orchestra."
Click here to read a thoughtful review of Krause's book as written for the NYTimes Book Review by Jeremy Denk, who seems to love the music of the outdoor wild places nearly as much as Krause. Excerpt.
"Bernie Krause’s new book, “The Great Animal Orchestra,” is not about this beastly symphony; it is about the symphony of beasts that surrounds us, a vast orchestra in the process of being silenced, perhaps even more endangered than our human animal orchestras.
Krause’s term for this symphony is “biophony”: the sound of all living organisms except us. He is a man with a calling. After a stint with the Weavers (he replaced Pete Seeger), a foray into electronic music and some not-too-surprising drug use, by “Hardyesque chance” he ended up in the Muir Woods recording nature sounds for an album. Now he is high on hippo grunts and insect drones, having spent decades recording and archiving wild soundscapes. He chronicles his life choices and epiphanies, guides us through nature’s sonic treasures, makes interesting assertions about the musicianship of animals (human and nonhuman), and begs us to pay attention.
In Krause’s world, everything is seen through the lens of sound. He even maps by ear. In one fascinating passage, he surveys a Costa Rican jungle, dispensing with the “100-meter square grids,” which anyway “nonhuman animals don’t understand.” He ends up with “amoebalike shapes, each an acoustic region that, while mutable, would tend to remain stable within a limited area over time.” Yes, I thought, as irritable honks floated up Broadway and through the window of my apartment: we all live on mutating maps, in the land of the audible, whether we like it or not. Krause offers endless odes to sonic nuances: the timbres of waves crashing on the world’s beaches, the echo effects brought on by dew, the acoustics of night and day, the dry, hot rattles of deserts, the way baboons bounce their voices off granite outcroppings, to send them deep into the forest. But at the same time that he wants us to feel sound’s sensual pleasure, he wants us to respect it as an indispensable tool of knowledge. Krause records a forest, before and after environmentally sensitive, “selective” logging. Though the forest appears mostly unchanged to the eye, the soundscape is devastated; the true damage can only be heard.
Krause spends many pages challenging the human monopoly on musicianship. He asserts that in the wild, animals vocalize with a musicianly ear to the full score of the ecosystem — a mix of competition and cooperation. Since animals depend on being heard for various reasons (mating, predation, warning, play), they are forced to seek distinct niches: “Each resident species acquires its own preferred sonic bandwidth — to blend or contrast — much in the way that violins, woodwinds, trumpets and percussion instruments stake out acoustic territory in an orchestral arrangement.”
I did sleep well that night and every night thereafter - even the one where I was on a two-hour watch: roll out from under the woolen blankets, pull on my BOGS, trek across the pasture flashlight in hand, and squint out across the darkened fields to make sure none of the pregnant ewes were in labor. It's all a matter of listening to the music of the earth.
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