Free The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World by R. Murray Schafer

the shepherd’s pipes, and pastoral poets have been copying him ever since.
     
… Practice country songs on a light shepherd’s pipe …
teaching the woods to echo back the charms of Amaryllis
     
    says Virgil. For a recurrence of this miraculous power in music, we must wait until the nineteenth-century romanticists.
    The pastoral soundscape our poets have been describing continued on into the nineteenth century. Alain-Fournier describes it in France: “Now and then the distant voice of a shepherdess, or of a boy calling to a companion from one clump of firs to another, had risen in the great calm of the frozen afternoon.” The juncture between town and pasture is attractively captured in this description by Thomas Hardy:
     
The shepherd on the east hill could shout out lambing intelligence to the shepherd on the west hill, over the intervening town chimneys, without great inconvenience to his voice, so nearly did the steep pastures encroach upon the burghers’ backyards. And at night it was possible to stand in the very midst of the town and hear from their native paddocks on the lower levels of greensward the mild lowing of the farmer’s heifers, and the profound, warm blowings of breath in which those creatures indulge.
     
    Sounds of the Hunt       A quite different type of sonic archetype has come down to us from the hunt, for the horn transpierces the gloom of the forest wilderness with heroic and bellicose tones. Almost all cultures seem to have employed some type of horn in association with warfare and the hunt. The Romans used a hooped horn of conical tube as a signaling instrument for their armies and there are numerous references to it in Dion, Ovid and Juvenal; but when Rome declined, the art of smelting brass seems to have disappeared and with it went a special sound. When “Sigmund blew the horn that had been his father’s, and urged on his men,” it was an animal’s horn that he blew. The same type appears in the pages of the Chanson de Roland . But by the fourteenth century, the skill of smelting brass had been recovered and brilliant metallic tones began to echo across Europe.
    By the sixteenth century the cor de chasse had taken on something like a definitive character and it is this instrument that gained special significance in the European soundscape, a significance that has lasted until recent times. In the days when hunting was popular, the countryside can scarcely have ever been free of horn calls, and the elaborate code of signals must have been widely known and understood.
    As the cor de chasse was an open horn possessing only a few natural harmonics, its various signals possessed more distinctive rhythmic than melodic character. The various codes that have been preserved are of considerable complexity and, of course, vary greatly from country to country. They may be classified as follows:
     
     
brief calls intended to cheer on the hounds, to give warning, to call for aid or to indicate the circumstances of the hunt;
a special fanfare for each animal (several for the stag, depending on his size and antlers);
fancy tunes to begin or close a hunt, or sounded as special signs of joy.
     
    Tolstoy has given us a good account of the festive nature of the hunt in Russia.
     
The hounds’ cry was followed by the bass note of the hunting cry for a wolf sounded on Danilo’s horn. The pack joined the first three dogs, and the voices of the hounds could be heard in full cry with the peculiar note which serves to betoken that they are after a wolf. The whippers-in were not now hallooing, but urging on the hounds with cries of “Loo! loo! loo!” and above all the voices rose the voice of Danilo, passing from a deep note to piercing shrillness. Danilo’s voice seemed to fill the whole forest, to pierce beyond it, and echo far away in the open country.
     
    A contemporary recollection by a young woman shows how strong the heritage of the hunt still is in northern Germany.
     
It was still