Today, dissonance, elephants, and the holiday
season. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
My wife I and were playing a
CD of medieval, Renaissance, and Appalachian
Christmas music in the car when we heard a
completely unexpected dissonance in the Coventry
Carol arrangement. Two voices clashed in a
minor second, in the "by by lully" line. It was a
delicious sound amid all the lovely consonance of
the piece.
We both reached for the rewind button. We wanted to
hear it again. And, even as my finger moved, I
remembered an article from that morning's New
York Times. It was about an Asian elephant who
did exactly the same thing we were doing. It told
about Richard Lair, who works with elephants in
Thailand. Lair realized that elephants have
extraordinarily good hearing and that they use a
much larger range of vocalizations than other
animals. He also knew that elephants have been
reported to respond to musical cues.
So Lair joined forces with David Sulzer, who heads
a neurology lab at Columbia University and composes
music on the side. They've just made a CD of
elephant music. Unlike the songs of the humpback
whale, this is largely instrumental music.
Lair and Sulzer created scaled-up versions of
several Thai instruments -- some percussion, and
the Thai version of the xylophone. Then they showed
each elephant how to create sounds with a mallet
held in its trunk.
Right from the start, the elephants began
improvising rhythms and melodies. The results, says
the article, were
"meditative and deliberate, delicate and insistently thrumming."
They "strike some Western listeners as haunting, others as monotonous."
Then Sulzer made an experiment. He inserted a wrong
note in one elephant's xylophone. She was Prathida,
the best of the elephant musicians. At first, she
avoided the note -- simply played around it. Then
she started going back to it, over and over.
Prathida had, it seems, discovered
dissonance. She was doing just what my wife
and I had done in the car.
The fact that elephants will make music can't be
entirely surprising. They're wonderfully
intelligent and expressive creatures. But, as I
reached for that replay button, a much different
dimension of my kinship with Prathida struck me.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that all
our seasonal talk about the consonance of peace and
good will has to play against a backdrop of
clashing notes. What I crave is not peace in its
own right, but to see strife resolved. I
want to hit the replay button and be rescued from
that glaring combination of notes, too close to
harmonize and too far apart to be at unity.
In this dark Christmas season, Prathida the
elephant reminds us that harmony has to emerge out
of dissonance. Any good designer knows that. A
harmonious machine is a problem solved, but it
exists only because the problem gave birth to it;
cacophony is always there. So my hope for this New
Year is that you and I, like Prathida, might find
the same sudden joy of dissonance resolved.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
Scigliano, E., A Band With a Lot More to Offer Than
Talented Trumpeters. The New York Times, Arts
& Ideas, Saturday, Dec. 16, 2000, p. A19.
The recording with the dissonance was: The Pro Arte
Singers and the Indiana University Children's
Chamber Choir, Paul Hillier, Director. Carols
from the Old & New Worlds, Vol. II.
Harmonia Mundi, USA, HMU 907233. Band 7.
Versions that use the dissonance are rare. But here is another version of the where you can where you can both hear and see it dissonance very clearly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jIYyPOoEc8
The Coventry Carol with the dissonance word
underlined in each verse:
Lullay, Thou little tiny Child,
By, by, lully, lullay.
Lullay, Thou little tiny Child,
By, by, lully, lullay.
O sisters too, how may we do,
For to preserve this day.
This poor youngling for whom we sing
By, by, lully, lullay.
Herod the king, in his raging,
Charged he hath this day.
His men of might, in his own sight,
All young children to slay.
That woe is me, poor Child for Thee!
And ever morn and day,
For thy parting neither say nor sing,
By, by, lully, lullay.
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-2000 by John H.
Lienhard.
