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

Each of the animals has its own rhythm of sound and silence, of arousal and repose. The cock is the eternal alarm clock, and the dog’s bark is the original telegraph—for one learns when acreage has been invaded by a stranger from the dog’s barking, passed from farm to farm.
    Many of the sounds of the farm are heavyweight, like the slow, tramping hooves of cattle and draft horses. The farmer’s feet, too, move slowly. Virgil tells us of “ponderous-moving wagons,” of threshers and “the immoderate weight of the harrow.” He also gives us an interesting acoustic picture of the Italian farmhouse after dark.
     
One farmer stays awake and splits up wood
For torches with his knife. And all the while
His wife relieves her lengthy task with song,
And runs the squeaky shuttle through the warp,
Or boils down sweetened wine-must over flame,
And skims with leaves the bubbling cauldron’s wave.
     
    Some of the sounds of the farm have changed little over the centuries, particularly those suggesting the commotion of heavy work; and the voices of animals too have given a consistency of tone to the farm soundscape. But there are also vernaculars. From my own youth I recall a few. The first that comes to mind is the churning of butter. As the churn was pumped for half an hour or more, an almost imperceptible change in tone and texture occurred as the slopping cream gradually turned to butter. The hand-operated pump, also on the decline, now snaps into memory as a soundmark of my youth, though at the time I listened to it carelessly. There were others too, like the ubiquitous cackling of geese, or the swoosh and bang of the screen door. In the winter there was the heavy stamping of snow boots in the front hall, or the scream of sleigh runners over hard-packed country roads. In the silence of the winter night there might be a sudden crack as a nail sprang from a board in the intense cold. And there were the deep pedal tones that came again and again in the chimney flue during night winds. Then there were the regular rhythms like the gong which brought us in for dinner, or the whirring of the windmill, which the women put in motion at four o’clock each day to pump water for the returning cattle.
    I have defined keynote as a regular sound underpinning other more fugitive or novel sound events. The keynotes of the farm were numerous, for farming is a life with little variation. Keynotes may influence the behavior of the people or set up rhythms that are carried over into other aspects of life. One example will have to suffice. In the Russia of Tolstoy, the peasants kept whetstones in little tin boxes strapped to their waists, and the rhythmic rattling of these boxes formed a vernacular keynote during the haying months.
     
The grass cut with a juicy sound, and was at once laid in high, fragrant rows. The mowers from all sides, brought closer together in the short row, kept urging one another on to the sound of rattling tin boxes and clanging scythes, and the hiss of the whetstones sharpening them, and happy shouts.
     
    Returning from the fields, the rhythms of the day’s work were extended into song.
     
The peasant women, with their rakes on their shoulders, gay with bright flowers, and chattering with ringing, merry voices, walked behind the cart. One wild untrained female voice broke into a song, and sang it alone through a verse, and then the same verse was taken up and repeated by half a hundred strong, healthy voices of all sorts, coarse and fine, singing in unison … the whole meadow and distant fields all seemed to be shaking and singing to the measures of this wild, merry song with its shouts and whistles and clapping.
     
    Russia is, of course, not the only place where the rhythms of work have been carved into folk song, but folk song suggested by work always carries a heavy stress. This becomes clear if we compare the music of the farm laborer with the levity of the shepherd’s pipes. I do not think it would be going