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Semionauts of Tradition Music Culture and Identity in Contemporary Singapore Juliette Yu-Ming Lizeray
The worlds of new music and historically informed performance might seem quite distant from one another. Yet, upon closer consideration, clear points of convergence emerge. Not only do many contemporary performers move easily between these two worlds, but they often do so using a shared ethos of flexibility, improvisation, curiosity, and collaboration—collaboration with composers past and present, with other performers, and with audiences.
Bringing together expert scholars and performers considering a wide range of issues and case studies, Historical Performance and New Music—the first book of its kind—addresses the synergies in aesthetics and practices in historical performance and new music. The essays treat matters including technologies and media such as laptops, printing presses, and graphic notation; new music written for period instruments from natural horns to the clavichord; personalities such as the pioneering singer Cathy Berberian; the musically “omnivorous” ensembles A Far Cry and Roomful of Teeth; and composers Luciano Berio, David Lang, Molly Herron, Caroline Shaw, and many others.
Historical Performance and New Music presents pathbreaking ideas in an accessible style that speaks to performers, composers, scholars, and music lovers alike. Richly documented and diverse in its methods and subject matter, this book will open new conversations about contemporary musical life.
Rebecca Cypess, musicologist and historical keyboardist, is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Her publications include Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment (2022) and Curious and Modern Inventions: Instrumental Music as Discovery in Galileo’s Italy (2016).
Estelí Gomez is Assistant Professor of Voice at Lawrence University. Praised for her “clear, bright voice” (New York Times), she is a founding member of the Grammy-award-winning vocal octet Roomful of Teeth and a specialist in both early and new repertoires. Gomez holds degrees from Yale and McGill.
Rachael Lansang serves as Assistant Director of Academic Affairs at the Mannes School of Music. She holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Rutgers University, and her research interests include vocal pedagogy, music and gender studies, and contemporary opera and musical theater.
Studies in Contemporary Music and Culture series
The early music revival and the new music scene have been inspiring each other and cross-pollinating for several decades. Historical Performance and New Music: Aesthetics and Practices presents a groundbreaking and comprehensive exploration of the dynamic relationship between these two domains by bringing together firsthand testimonies from some of the most authoritative, experienced, and original voices in both scholarship and practice. This pioneering work delves into the intertwining threads that connect early and new music, shedding new light on performance practice, instrumentarium, and notation. It is a must-read for composers and performers immersed in both realms, encouraging a reevaluation of the historical context of the early music revival and a broader outlook on contemporary repertoire, to the extent of redefining the boundaries of historical performance.
—Alon Schab, author of A Performer’s Guide to Transcribing, Editing and Arranging Early Music
Historical Performance and New Music
Aesthetics and Practices
Edited by Rebecca Cypess, Estelí Gomez, and Rachael Lansang
First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge
The right of Rebecca Cypess, Estelí Gomez, Rachael Lansang to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Title: Historical performance and new music : aesthetics and practices / edited by Rebecca Cypess, Estelí Gomez, and Rachael Lansang. Description: [1.] | Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Studies in contemporary music and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2023027230 (print) | LCCN 2023027231 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032291420 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032291437 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003300229 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Music–Performance–History–21st century. | Music–Performance–History–20th century. | Historically informed performance (Music) Classification: LCC ML457 .H48 2023 (print) | LCC ML457 (ebook) | DDC 781.46–dc23/eng/20230614 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023027230 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023027231
ISBN: 9781032291420 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781032291437 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003300229 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003300229
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To Don Irving, who gave me the gift of early music.
For collaborators who’ve shared wholeheartedly and for mentors (Lalli, Simon, Sarah W, and Mr. Sylvan) who’ve listened and made space: thank you.
—R. C.
—E. G.
To Cecilia and Honor, who give me confidence and purpose.
—R. L.
3.1 In C by Terry Riley, In C 44
3.2 Diego Ortiz, Trattado de glosas (Rome: Dorico, 1553), 5 45
4.1 Georg Philipp Telemann, “Lilliputsche chaconne,” from Die getreue Music-Meister welcher so wol für Sänger als Instrumentalisten allerhand Gattungen musicalischer Stück (Hamburg: Telemann, 1728), 32 69
4.2 Mark Applebaum, instructions for performing one type of trill in Control Freak (2015) 72
4.3 Mark Applebaum, instructions for performing another type of trill in Control Freak (2015) 72
6.1 Hans-Martin Linde, Anspielungen, bars 3–7 96
7.1 Max Beerbohm, Drawing of Lord Berners, titled “Lord Berners, Making More Sweetness than Violence” 109
7.2 Mátyás Seiber, Pezzo per il Clavicordo, bars 1–5 112
7.3 Julia Usher, Clavicle, bars 1–11 113
8.1 Harmonic series with out-of-tune pitches shaded 119
11.1 Cover of Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Concentus Musicus Wien, Monteverdi, 9-CD set, disc 9, Cathy Berberian Sings Monteverdi 167
11.2 Luciano Berio, Epiphanies, VI (text by James Joyce), bars 440–442 172
12.1 David Lang, “I lost a sock,” bars 10–16. From Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, composers, and Deborah Artman, librettist, Lost Objects (2000). Reproduced by permission of Universal Music Publishing. 199
12.2 David Lang, “When any man,” bars 1–4. From Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, composers, and Deborah Artman, librettist, Lost Objects (2000). Reproduced by permission of Universal Music Publishing. 204
8.1 Chronological List of Modern Works for Natural Horn
8.2 A Comparison of the Natural Tuning of the Harmonic Series to Other Standard Systems of Tuning
8.3 Selected Works for Valve Horn Using Natural Horn Tunings
Contributors
Drake Andersen is Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Vassar College. His research examines the forces that shape musicians’ choices in performance. His article “Hearing Epistemic Sound in Experimental (Music) Systems, 1958–73” recently appeared in the Journal of the Society for American Music (2022).
Victoria Aschheim is a visiting assistant professor of music at Carleton College. Previously, she was a lecturer in music at Dartmouth College and a postdoctoral fellow in the Dartmouth Society of Fellows. She studies American music and its relations to civic life.
Rebecca Cypess, musicologist and historical keyboardist, is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Her publications include Women and Musical Salons in the Enlightenment (2022) and Curious and Modern Inventions: Instrumental Music as Discovery in Galileo’s Italy (2016).
Sarah Darling enjoys a varied musical career as a performer and educator on viola and Baroque violin. She is a member of A Far Cry and Boston Baroque, serves on the faculty of the Longy School of Music, and co-directs the Harvard Baroque Chamber Orchestra.
Jason Fick is Coordinator of Music Technology and Production at Oregon State University. His research explores relationships between commercial and experimental media and has been published by Audio Engineering Society, Organised Sound, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, Journal of General Music Education, and College Music Society
Kimary Fick, Instructor of Music History at Oregon State University, is a musicologist and historical flutist. Her research examines the intersection of music and aesthetics in the eighteenth century and has been published in Women and Music, Early Modern Women, and the Journal of Music History Pedagogy.
Matteo Gemolo, a flutist and author, holds a doctorate in music performance from Cardiff University. He regularly performs with internationally renowned early music ensembles. As a soloist, he has recorded several CDs for Arcana (Outhere Music). He is the music curator of Coudenberg Sound Box Fest (Brussels).
Contributors xv
Estelí Gomez is Assistant Professor of Voice at Lawrence University. Praised for her “clear, bright voice” (New York Times), she is a founding member of the Grammy-award-winning vocal octet Roomful of Teeth and a specialist in both early and new repertoires. Gomez holds degrees from Yale and McGill.
David Hyun-su Kim is regarded as “a performer of artistry, integrity, and interest who rivals Golden Age pianists” (Early Music America) and “among the finest pianists of his generation” (WholeNote). He holds degrees from Harvard, Yale, and Cornell Universities and recently released a much-acclaimed disc of Robert Schumann performed on a nineteenth-century piano.
Francis Knights is a Fellow and Tutor of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, with research interests in manuscript studies, performance practice, and organology. He has recently performed complete cycles of Bach’s clavier works and the virginalists and is currently completing books on music analysis and modern clavichord music.
Rachael Lansang serves as Assistant Director of Academic Affairs at the Mannes School of Music. She holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Rutgers University, and her research interests include vocal pedagogy, music and gender studies, and contemporary opera and musical theater.
Loren Ludwig is a music historian and performer based in Baltimore, MD, and a co-founder of LeStrange Viols, ACRONYM, and Science Ficta. His work, which has appeared in BACH and EMAg, among others, explores forgotten moments in the history of instruments, practices, and ideas.
Eric Rice is Head of the Music Department at the University of Connecticut, where he teaches music history and directs the Collegium. His recent recording with Ensemble Origo, Le nozze in Baviera, explores the performance practices and contexts of moresche, sixteenth-century representations of Black Africans.
Kailan R. Rubinoff is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Recent publications appear in the Journal of Musicology, Early Music, and Music and Protest in 1968 (2013). She is currently writing a book on historical performance in the Netherlands.
J. Drew Stephen is an Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His articles on natural horn practices have appeared in The Historic Brass Society Journal, the Journal of the Haydn Society of Great Britain, and The Horn Call.
Elly Toyoda is Visiting Assistant Professor of Violin at Sunderman Conservatory of Music, Gettysburg College. She holds degrees from Oberlin, Yale, and Rutgers, where her doctoral thesis was titled “Musical Paradoxes in the Violin Works of Olivier Messiaen.” She regularly premieres works by Martin Bresnick and others.
Introduction
Rebecca Cypess
Resonances between the worlds of historically informed performance (HIP) and new music are widely acknowledged, at least anecdotally. Most obviously, many performers move easily between these two seemingly disparate worlds, applying their musical ideals and habits of performance in both settings. But the overlapping aesthetics and practices do not stop at personnel; indeed, lists of performers are often only the clearest manifestation of common principles that underlie the HIP world and that of new music. Of course, neither world is monolithic, and it would be impossible and undesirable to reduce either to a single set of ideals and performance practices. Yet, as this volume demonstrates, consideration of these two musical worlds alongside one another leads to an understanding of a constellation of shared values and approaches.
Why do some performers move so easily between historical performance and new music? In many cases, these two worlds call for similar skills and practices. One such practice is a flexible approach to the musical score—a flexibility required for the interpretation of both the skeletal, “thin” notation of early music and the indeterminate music of composers such as John Cage, Terry Riley, and their successors. To be sure, many avant-garde composers rejected such indeterminate aspects of sound (Cage himself was equivocal on this matter, and some of his music removes the autonomy of the performer entirely), but a significant strain of new music since the 1960s places considerable value on performerly flexibility. Notwithstanding the accusations of an excessive text-fidelity leveled at HIP practitioners in the 1980s by Richard Taruskin, among others (more on this below and in the chapter in this volume by Kimary Fick and Jason Fick),1 HIP today often requires performers to elaborate and ornament on thinly notated music to a high degree, which in turn leads many performers to leave a unique stamp on a given piece of music. Similarly, many composers today have continued to build on the precedent of Cage and his twentieth-century contemporaries by engaging performers in a partnership—whether at the stage of composition or after the composition has already been finished—thereby inviting a level of personalization on the part of the performer.2
Another musical value shared by some of the worlds of HIP and new music is that of variation in sound production. While many mainstream classical performers seek to cultivate consistency—and consistent beauty—in their tone production and vibrato, practitioners of HIP and new music often eschew such consistency.
DOI: 10.4324/9781003300229-1
Period instruments are often inconsistent as a function of their construction. A possible negative effect of this circumstance is that they often go out of tune easily; an advantage, however, is the multiplicity of sounds that they produce. The timbre of a historical keyboard instrument, for example, may change radically from one register to another; the natural horn displays such inconsistency from one chromatic pitch to the next. (See J. Drew Stephen’s chapter in this volume for more on the natural horn and its revival among twentieth- and twenty-first-century composers.) While the technologies of modern pianos and horns were developed in part to iron out these inconsistencies, there is reason to think that composers who worked with pre-Industrial Age pianos and those who wrote for the natural horn through the nineteenth century appreciated this timbral variety and sought to leverage it in their compositions. Another instance is in vocal technique: descriptions of vocal vibrato from the Renaissance through the Romantic age indicate that it was not a consistent feature of sound, but one that was deployed in certain contexts and for certain effects; by definition, this means that the tone and timbre of voices were also highly changeable. (See the contribution to this volume by Rachael Lansang and Eric Rice.) In all these cases, instruments serve as objects to be explored and understood, with all their advantages and apparent imperfections.
The same pursuit of variety in tone and timbre can be seen in the work of many avant-garde composers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.3 When Cage and his contemporaries championed both silence and noise as components of music, they rejected consistency as requirements of musical performance.4 Whether they were aware of the historical precedent or not, these members of the twentiethcentury avant garde were picking up on an approach to sound that had a long history. When contemporary composers started writing music for period instruments, their use of those instruments declared an affiliation with this alternative, historical approach to sound. The noises and inconsistencies that period instruments invariably display—the scratchiness that comes from the use of gut strings, the timbral variety afforded by the wooden transverse flute—become sources of sound to be explored and exploited in new compositions. (See my chapter in this volume on the viol music of Molly Herron as well as the chapter by Matteo Gemolo on new compositions for historical flutes.) Through their presence in both the world of new music and that of historical performance, period instruments become objets trouvés, “found objects,” or semiotic signifiers that convey meaning even when separated from their original context.5 Indeed, many composers who write for period instruments are also practitioners of period instruments, meaning that they have developed familiarity with both the instruments and the performance practices that go along with them. Their music often explores what virtuosity might mean for their particular instrument, and they sometimes develop new and extended techniques to mine the depths of those instruments more fully.
Performers who specialize in HIP, new music, or both are often used to performing without a central director or conductor.6 Although the HIP world has its superstar directors, just like the mainstream classical world, some of these conductors lead from the harpsichord, the first-violin chair, or another spot in the ensemble; this position places them within the group, rather than above it. Moreover,
many HIP ensembles have learned to operate without a conductor or director at all, and they cultivate a purposefully collaborative approach to music making. This is true, too, of some ensembles that play in a mainstream style, such as Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, but it is far more common in ensembles such as the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, which sometimes performs with guest conductors but often performs under the leadership of one of their concertmasters. (On the flexibility and collaborative leadership models of the string ensemble A Far Cry and the vocal band Roomful of Teeth, see the chapter by Estelí Gomez and Sarah Darling in this volume.) This collaborative, non-hierarchical approach to music making is both informed by and reflected in the championing of music by little-known composers, including music by women and others underrepresented in the world of mainstream classical music.7 Musical democratization is evident, too, in some aspects of contemporary electronic music, as discussed in the chapter in this volume by Drake Andersen as well as the one by Kimary Fick and Jason Fick.
Lines between mainstream performance and HIP have, to some extent, blurred in recent years. For example, the New York Philharmonic now regularly brings in guest conductors who specialize in HIP to direct its annual performance of Messiah. Bruce Haynes observed this tendency to blend mainstream and HIP approaches in his 2007 volume The End of Early Music. Indeed, this blending represented one aspect of “the end” of early music; in Haynes’s view, HIP was no longer the underdog but a widely accepted approach that had achieved both artistic and commercial success.
Yet Haynes was also reacting to accusations put forth by Richard Taruskin in his essays of the 1980s and ’90s, in which Taruskin observed with satisfaction that the HIP world was gradually losing its counterculture approach and starting to perform music with greater consistency.8 While Taruskin may have intended this observation as a compliment, Haynes rejected the notion that the HIP world was becoming standardized—or that it should strive to do so. Instead, he insisted instead on a “perpetual revolution”—a constant reinventing of performing style in which “authenticity” was not an end, but a means to open new frontiers and possibilities in musical performance. In keeping with Haynes’s ideas, increasingly, many performers of early music have come to reject the text-fidelity that (according to Taruskin) characterized the HIP culture of the 1980s, instead understanding the score as a starting point—a vestige of a largely oral tradition—that opens itself to many different interpretations. More and more performers today are using historical sources to teach themselves how to improvise in a historical style—flexibly, fluidly, and richly. One example of this changing approach can be seen in divergent methods by which players of chordal instruments realize figured bass. Ton Koopman is representative of a conservative stance in this respect: addressing the music of J. S. Bach, Koopman acknowledges the many sources that suggest that Bach’s own approach to harmonic realization involved substantial elaboration, including melodic as well as harmonic elaborations on the framework of a given piece. Yet Koopman discourages modern performers from attempting such an elaborate approach, doubting that they are up to the task. The fear, it seems, is that modern players will somehow do damage to Bach’s music, tarnishing his
otherwise pristine compositions.9 Other scholar-performers—I am among them— have disagreed with such a conservative stance, encouraging the “free play” with scores of early music.10 The highly flexible approach to the realization of figured bass by ensembles such as ACRONYM—a group that has experienced widespread success in recent years—suggests that the more flexible approach is becoming increasingly accepted and valued.11
Another reason why Haynes considered the moniker “early music” spurious was that it foreclosed the possibility that principles of HIP could serve to revolutionize the playing of music from the nineteenth century and beyond. Today, some of the most exciting work being done in the field of HIP is happening in nineteenthand twentieth-century European concert music, as well as in approaches that destabilize the relationship between concert music and popular music, and in those that decenter the European tradition entirely. While the phrase “early music” is still often used to denote music written before 1800, HIP methodologies are upending the way that music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is being performed and heard. Thus, scholars and scholar-performers such as Clive Brown, Kate Bennett Wadsworth, Yi-heng Yang, Neal Peres da Costa, and David Hyun-su Kim have, in the past two decades, presented new research on Brahms and other Romantics that seeks to unsettle the purportedly “geometric” (to use Taruskin’s term) performance practice that characterized some of the HIP movement in the 1980s by delving deep into the implications of nineteenth-century notation and by using historical recordings as important sources of information.12 (In fact, the examples of “geometric” performance practice that Taruskin identified were carefully selected and did not represent the full story of HIP in this period.) An expansive project by Nicholas Cook on the Piano Variations by Anton Webern has demonstrated how historical recordings reveal fault lines in performance styles, with some recordings reflecting Webern’s own flexible, Romanticist tendencies, and others adopting a more detached, “pointillistic” approach.13 While this latter approach ran counter to Webern’s own ideas of his Piano Variations, it reflects some of the anxieties about expression and emotional excess at the start of the modern HIP movement that spread across Europe and the United States. Recent work by Roger Freitas on Adelina Patti also uses historical recordings to elucidate the cultural meanings of performance practices, including their constructions of gender; for example, Freitas shows that Patti’s extensive use of portamento was a crucial factor in her projection of a “natural,” feminine aesthetic, but portamento is now seen as highly artificial, even saccharine, and is eschewed by almost all performers, whether from the HIP or mainstream worlds.14 To revive the lost performance practices of the largely enslaved African diaspora in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Early Music Access Project and others have called for the treatment of “slave songs as early music,” by which they mean deploying the research, experimentation, and creative methodologies now in force in the HIP world.15
As Haynes’s study shows, Taruskin has loomed large over the aesthetics of HIP almost since its modern inception. His insistence that HIP was not a historical movement but an inherently modern one may be correct insofar as all performance is modern: it takes place in the present, is made by living performers, and is heard
by living audiences. But, as John Butt shows, Taruskin’s claim that HIP is not just a modern movement but a modernist movement is deeply problematic, because it glosses over the nuances of modernism and its relationship to history. In fact, Butt locates the motivations of HIP in a dialectic between modernism and postmodernism. He cites Charles Jencks, an architectural historian who identifies postmodernism as a “double-coding,” “which in its simplest sense refers to the combining of some historical allusion with something from the present.”16 Butt suggests that this double-coding is clearest when HIP ensembles perform new music; another instance might be when modern composers write music for period instruments in a modern style. Moreover, Butt argues that the use of recording technology that brings the sounds of period instruments to mass media constitutes another form of double-coding: for Butt, this is “an attempt to add something historical to the all-pervading presence of technology, a way of giving depth and difference to a lifestyle that threatens to become all too standardised.”17
The notion of double-coding is one that can be fruitfully applied to the consideration of the resonances between HIP and new music. HIP ensembles that perform new music and composers who write for period instruments are just two instances in which this double-coding can be observed. The dialogue between past and present that is a hallmark of postmodernism can also be seen in the tendency toward collaboration and democratization, the championing of understudied repertoire and composers, and the constant reinterpretation and personalization of musical works, ideas, and topoi. Indeed, even at the beginning of the HIP movement, when Taruskin claimed that HIP interpretations were (like other manifestations of modernism) alienated and depersonalized, performers who crossed the boundaries of HIP and new music were leaving an intensely personal mark on both worlds. (The chapters in this volume by Loren Ludwig and Kailan R. Rubinoff, among others, demonstrate this point deftly.) Since the 1960s, HIP and new music have both been experimental, avant-garde, and counterculture; yet both worlds were shaped intensely by the personal interests, passions, and talents of the people involved in them.18
To summarize, the aesthetics of HIP and new music often converge in their media of notation; their approaches to improvisation, notation, and text-(in)fidelity; their cultivation of collaboration between performers and composers; their approaches to ornamentation and elaboration; their idiomatic use of instruments and voices, no matter how inconsistent the sounds they produce; the cultivation of new or extended techniques; the democratization of ensembles and the absence or downplaying of the conductor; and the use of period instruments for new compositions. These points of overlap existed from the beginnings of the modern HIP movement, which emerged at the same time—and often in the same circles—as avant-garde concert music. The two worlds share much in common that goes beyond the level of theory and generalization. Their shared histories, aesthetics, and practices demand closer, more detailed consideration.
This volume seeks to provide such a closer consideration. It features essays by scholars and scholar-performers involved in the worlds of HIP and new music. While acknowledging the debates about the broad, theoretical relationship between HIP and movements such as modernism and postmodernism, we seek to explore the specific parameters of the relationship between the aesthetics and practices of HIP and new music. The book does not pretend to be comprehensive; rather, the chapters consider a series of issues and cases that situate aspects of HIP and new music in relation to one another. The authors discuss shared aesthetic values such as democratized music making and democratizing technologies; “minimalist” approaches to performance and composition; approaches to instruments and voices including the decentering of operatic/bel canto singing and the aesthetics and techniques of composing new music for historical instruments; and cases of collaboration between participants in both worlds. We seek to open conversations about the aesthetics, performance practices, and broader cultures of HIP and new music today.
The volume is divided into three parts, titled “Aesthetics and Media,” “Old Instruments for New Music,” and “Case Studies.” “Aesthetics and Media” opens with two chapters that explore the relationship between HIP and computer-based music. In Chapter 1, “Unfixed Media: On the Aesthetics of HIP and Interactive Computer Music,” Kimary Fick and Jason Fick explore contemporary collaborations between HIP practitioners and composers of interactive computer music, arguing that, through such collaborations, the composer, performer, and computer have the potential to exchange roles to develop new performance practices. Chapter 2, Drake Andersen’s “Open-Source Performance Practice: The Laptop as an Instrument of Musical Democracy,” compares the effects of the laptop in the twenty-first century and the printing press in the sixteenth. He argues that the development of open-source music software—often a collective venture—contributes to the shaping of performance practices in the world of contemporary electronic art music.
In Chapter 3, “Minimalism and the Post-War Early Music Revival,” Loren Ludwig argues for a broad definition of minimalism that encompasses both aspects of the HIP movement and techniques of minimalist compositions as adopted by Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and other avant-garde composers in the years following World War II. He notes that such composers drew extensively on the techniques of early music such as cantus firmus, canon, and diminution, reflecting “an equality of musical parts and performers” that was mirrored in the values of early music revivalists. Ludwig identifies the people and record labels who supported both musical movements, apparently motivated to disseminate the values that these worlds espoused. In Chapter 4, “Historical Performance and the Ethos of Graphic Notation,” I collaborate with David Hyun-su Kim and Elly Toyoda to explore the medium of graphic notation as a new lens through which to understand musical sources from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. While it might seem incongruous to use graphic notation—a decidedly modern term and concept—in relation to earlier music, we argue that this perspective illustrates how musical notation has long served as a visual metaphor for sounding performance.
Part II of the book, “Old Instruments for New Music,” examines new compositions for period instruments, excavating the aesthetic values and motivations that undergird them. We offer one chapter on each of five instrument types—voices, woodwinds, keyboards, brass, and strings—not in an effort to be comprehensive, but as a means of opening pathways for further consideration in all these areas. In Chapter 5, “Parallel and Contemporary Vocal Practices,” Rachael Lansang and Eric Rice revisit the fraught issue of vocal vibrato, arguing for a more nuanced understanding of what constitutes vibrato than has been adopted by many writers in the past. They explore cases from the past and present in which vibrato is deployed as a means of creating timbral and expressive variety, including in the work of present-day artists such as Pamela Z and Caroline Shaw. In Chapter 6, “A Contemporary Lesson from an Ancient Flute,” Matteo Gemolo explores new compositions for the traverso, positing “tradition as the key to innovation” in these works. In Chapter 7, “The Evolution of Modern Clavichord Music,” Francis Knights explains how a modern clavichord repertoire emerged, surveying composers and institutions that have supported the growth of this now-extensive body of music. In Chapter 8, “A Natural Horn Revival in Contemporary Composition and Performance,” J. Drew Stephen shows how twentieth- and twenty-first-century composers have approached the natural horn, revisiting an instrument that had been all but abandoned due to its supposed imperfections. As Stephen notes, these composers have learned to exploit the instrument’s unique qualities for expressive purposes. And, in Chapter 9, “Technology and/as Community in Molly Herron’s Through Lines (2021),” I show how composer Molly Herron’s intimate knowledge of the viola da gamba led her to create music that links her with other viol players both diachronically and synchronically.
Part III, “Case Studies,” consists of three chapters that delve into personalities and collaborations that exemplify the convergence of HIP and new music. In Chapter 10, Estelí Gomez, a member of the vocal octet Roomful of Teeth, and Sarah Darling, a member of the conductorless string ensemble A Far Cry, draw on their own experience as well as extensive interviews with their collaborators to show how their democratic approach to music making facilitates their “omnivorous” interests in repertoire, including their championing of both HIP and new music. Chapter 11, Kailan R. Rubinoff’s “The Early Music Vocality of Cathy Berberian,” presents a new understanding of the performance practices and musical values of soprano Cathy Berberian. Widely known as a pioneer of avant-garde music in the 1960s and ’70s, Berberian was also instrumental in shaping the HIP movement, and she brought her distinctive, flexible approach to singing to bear on early music. Finally, in Chapter 12, “The Confrontation of Old and New in Lost Objects,” Victoria Aschheim explores the collaboration between Bang on a Can and Concerto Köln to create an oratorio, Lost Objects, that encapsulated the confrontation between old and new, between objects lost and objects found.
Objects lost and found—this, indeed, may be understood as the theme of this volume as a whole. By exploring the aesthetics and practices of historical performance and new music, the authors in this volume seek to uncover aspects of musical culture that have remained implicit, hidden, and unspoken until now. Moving
beyond general, theoretical categories, we explore specific issues and case studies that highlight shared musical values and that illuminate significant aspects of modern musical culture.
Notes
1 Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 129 and passim.
2 Of the many studies of performerly flexibility and agency in avant-garde music of the 1960s and ’70s, see, for example, Benjamin Piekut, “Indeterminacy, Free Improvisation, and the Mixed Avant-Garde: Experimental Music in London, 1965–1975,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 67, no. 3 (2014): 769–824. On the notion of indeterminacy as a decentered phenomenon located in the acts of composition, performance, and archival discovery, see James Mooney, Owen Green, and Sean Williams, “Instrumental, Hermeneutic, and Ontological Indeterminacy in Hugh Davies’s Live Electronic Music,” Contemporary Music Review 41, nos. 2–3 (2022): 193–215.
3 As Emily I. Dolan and Alexander Rehding have observed, a preoccupation with timbre often reflects a value system outside that generally espoused by the field of musicology, especially as applied to Western classical music. See Emily I. Dolan and Alexander Rehding, “Timbre: Alternative Histories and Possible Futures for the Study of Music,” in The Oxford Handbook of Timbre, ed. Emily I. Dolan and Alexander Rehding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 4.
4 See the essays in John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961).
5 John Butt, Playing with History: The Historical Approach to Musical Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 160.
6 One recent study of music direction before the conductor is Peter Holman, Before the Baton: Musical Direction and Conducting in Stuart and Georgian Britain (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2020). On conducting vs. “leading” in the performance of new music, see, for example, Maria Puusaari, “‘Leading’ as a Mode of Interaction and Communication in Contemporary Music Performance-Practice,” Trio 10, no. 1 (2021): 40–64. On the role of the violinist-leader in contemporary performances of eighteenthand nineteenth-century music, see Fabio Biondi, “Editorial,” Eighteenth-Century Music 15, no. 1 (2018): 5–8.
7 Butt, Playing with History, 128.
8 Taruskin, Text and Act, 194.
9 Ton Koopman, “Notes on J. S. Bach and Basso continuo Realization,” in About Bach, ed. Gregory G. Butler, George B. Stauffer, and Mary Dalton Greer (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 125–134.
10 Rebecca Cypess, “How Thorough Was Bach’s Thoroughbass? A Reconsideration of the Trio Texture,” Early Music 47, no. 1 (2019): 83–97.
11 See, for example, ACRONYM, Oddities & Trifles: The Very Peculiar Instrumental Music of Giovanni Valentini (Olde Focus Records FCR904, 2015).
12 See, for example, Clive Brown, Neal Peres da Costa, and Kate Bennett Wadsworth, Performing Practices in Johannes Brahms’ Chamber Music (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2016); Clive Brown, “In Quest of the Distinctive Language of Classical and Romantic Performance,” Early Music 42, no. 1 (2014): 113 (recording review); Clive Brown, Classical and Romantic Performing Practice, 1750–1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Neal Peres da Costa, Off the Record: Performing Practices in Romantic Piano Playing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); and David Hyun-su Kim, “The Brahmsian Hairpin,” Nineteenth-Century Music 36, no. 1 (Summer 2012): 46–57.
13 Nicholas Cook, “Inventing Tradition: Webern’s Piano Variations in Early Recordings,” Music Analysis 36, no. 2 (2017): 163–215.
14 Roger Freitas, “The Art of Artlessness, or, Adelina Patti Teaches Us How to Be Natural,” in Word, Image, and Song, Volume 2: Essays on Musical Voices, ed. Rebecca Cypess, Beth L. Glixon, and Nathan Link (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2013), 213–242; and Roger Freitas, “Singing Herself: Adelina Patti and the Performance of Femininity,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 71, no. 2 (Summer 2018): 287–369.
15 Early Music Access Project, “Expanding the Narrative: Slave Songs and Spirituals as Early Music,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF4w1So8_M8 (accessed November 28, 2022).
16 Butt, Playing With History, 148.
17 Butt, Playing With History, 149.
18 See Kailan R. Rubinoff, “A Revolution in Sheep’s Wool Stockings: Early Music and ‘1968,’” in Music and Protest in 1968, ed. Beate Kutschke and Barley Norton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 237–254.
Part I Aesthetics and Media
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head, and a spider that has lost half its legs, are not worth a place in a cabinet.
To get together even a small cabinet of objects in natural history, takes time, care, and patience. I knew a girl who was carefully collecting and mounting beetles. In a whole summer she got only twenty-five. But each one was perfect, different from the rest, nicely fastened in place, and had its name written beside it. So her collection was of real value.
After you have secured a nice little cabinet, the trouble will be to keep it safe, and in order Specimens must be taken care of. All specimens of plants, and insects, are very liable to be destroyed by little bugs. Only the things kept in alcohol are really safe from being eaten.
Camphor and red pepper are of some use to keep out these enemies. Your teachers will know, or can easily learn, how to prepare the specimens with poisons, which will kill the mites and not harm you or the specimens. You must leave it to them.
It is nice to have a case with glass doors. If you cannot have that, arrange as many of the objects as you can in boxes with panes of glass laid over them. For open cabinets it is well to have a piece of fine gauze to lay over each shelf, or over the whole set of shelves, when the cabinet is not in immediate use.
Dust makes a cabinet look very ugly. But you cannot clean off beetles and butterflies with a dusting cloth or brush. It would ruin such delicate things.
You can gently move the boxes and specimens, and wipe off the shelves, and the sides of the boxes. Then blow, or fan, the dust from the specimens. Even minerals should have the dust blown from them, not wiped off. It is easy to rub the bloom and the little fine points, and edges, from a mineral specimen.
When you have made up your minds to have a cabinet in your school, look about and see what your friends have to give you for it. Many people have a few natural history curiosities, for which they do not really care. Such persons would gladly give their treasures to a
school cabinet But there should be some bright little lad or lass to say: “Oh, we have a cabinet at our school. Would you not be willing to send these things there?”
Correct pictures of birds, fish, insects, and flowers, are useful in a cabinet, but you must be sure that they are correct before you give them a place. You must not put the pictures into your cabinet merely because they are pretty. If they are wrong they will give you false ideas. I have seen colored pictures of insects with some of the legs set upon the hinder part of the body instead of all upon the chest part. Such a picture is of no use.
Keen eyes to see what comes in your own way, and keen wits to suggest to other people what they can do for you, will steadily help to build up the school cabinet.
LESSON XVI.
THE OLD MAN OF THE MEADOW.
THE OLD MAN AND HIS FAMILY.
When I was about seven years old, I caught a grasshopper and put him into a bottle.
Then I sat down outside the bottle, and looked at the grasshopper. He sat inside the bottle, and looked at me.
It began to grow upon my mind that the grasshopper looked much like an old man. His face, with the big, solemn eyes, and straight mouth, was like an old man’s face.
He wore a gray coat, like a loose duster He had a wrinkled greenish vest. He wore knee-breeches and long red stockings.
The more I looked at him, the more he looked like a little, grave, oldtime man who came to visit my aged grandfather.
I had a cousin who at dusk would sit with me in a corner of the big sofa, and repeat to me a poem, called the “Prisoner of Chillon.” That sad poem had made me feel very sorry for all prisoners. I thought my grasshopper in the bottle felt like a prisoner. I said, “Now you may go, my Old Man of the Meadow.”
I took the cork out of the bottle. The grasshopper at once leaped up, and sat on the rim of the bottle. Then a strange thing happened! The Old Man of the Meadow spread out two wide brown wings. They had a broad, lemon-colored band on them. They were gay as the wings of a butterfly! On them he sailed away!
I could hardly believe my eyes. I ran after him to a tall stalk of golden-rod. There he sat a plain, gray-green old man. But again he spread out the wide wings, and was gone!
My Old Man of the Meadow had then this splendid dress-coat under his sober overcoat! Seated at rest, he looked plain and quiet,—a creature of the earth. Lifted into the air, he was nearly as fine as a butterfly.
Do you not wish to know something more of this Old Man of the Meadow, the grasshopper? The name of this insect at once tells you something about him. He lives much in the grass, and his chief motion is in hops, or long jumps. He has another name, “the murmurer.” This is given because of the noise or song he makes. He sings to Mrs. Grasshopper. His song is loud and shrill. It is made by rubbing his wings one upon the other.
He has a little piece of skin like a tight drum-head set in each wing. As he moves his wings, this tiny drum vibrates, or trembles, and makes the shrill sound.
Mrs. Grasshopper does not have this drum in her wings. She has, however, at the end of her body, a nice little sword. The French call her “the jumper with the sword.” Is her sword to fight with? No. This
little sword opens into several blades. She uses it to place her eggs snugly in the ground. The sword blades open, and the eggs slide safely down between them, into the little earth-bed. There they lie until the young grasshoppers hatch out.
You will find as we study about grasshoppers, that they do not all live in the grass. Some spend most of their time in trees.
Let us take a closer look at the grasshopper. As he is an insect,[13] he should have a body made in rings, in three parts, with four wings and six legs set on the second, or chest part.
Just here let us say, that if you will look closely you will see that the head of an insect is made of four rings, and its chest is made of three rings. They are rings grown wider than the rest.
Our Old Man of the Meadow does not lack any of the parts which a proper insect should have.
The order which he belongs to is called the straight-wings, because the insects belonging to it do not fold their wings crosswise.
The grasshopper family is called the family of “the murmurers,” from their music.
There are six families of the straight-wings. In this book we shall study a little about three of them,—the grasshoppers, the crickets, and the locusts. If you wish, also, to learn about their cousin, the cockroach, suppose you, who live in city houses, go down to the kitchen, and catch him about the water pipes, and study him for yourselves!
The order of straight-wings is often divided in this way: The runners, —as the cockroach; the snatchers, a kind which have their fore-feet something like hands, to snatch with; the walkers, who seldom fly or jump; and the jumpers. The grasshopper is one of the jumpers.
If you look well at the grasshopper, you will see that his front pair of legs is shorter than the others. This hinders him in walking over a level surface. But it helps him in walking up a tree, or small plant, or a wall.
See the hind legs! They are more than twice as long as the others. The thigh, or upper part, is very long and strong. By means of these big legs, the grasshopper is a famous jumper.
Now, if you have a grasshopper to look at, you will see that the feet have four parts. The part of the leg between the foot and the thigh has sharp points like the teeth of a comb.
The hind part of the body is long and slender, and, being made of rings, can bend easily. In the great, green grasshopper all the body is of a fine green tint.
Let us look at the wings. The upper pair, or wing-covers, are large and long. Notice two things about the wings; they lap at the tips, and are high in the middle. When they are shut, they have a shape like a slanting roof. The upper ones are longer than the lower ones.
These wing-cases have large veins. Lift up a wing-case and pull out a lower wing. It is folded very closely, in lengthwise plaits. Where these wings join Mr. Grasshopper’s body, you will find his drum-plate for making music. One kind of grasshopper has very short wingcovers. In that kind, both Mr. and Mrs. Grasshopper make music. There is also one grasshopper, a little, green fellow, that has no drum; he is silent.
The upper side of the grasshopper’s chest is shaped like a large, horny collar. The head is large, and has two big, glossy eyes. There is, also, a knob on the forehead. Between the eyes, are set the feelers. They are very long; even longer than all the body.
The mouth of the grasshopper is wide, and it has strong jaws. But they are not so strong as those of his cousin, the cricket.
Grasshoppers prefer vegetable food. They will sometimes eat animal food. When shut up in a box, they will fight, and the one which gets killed will be eaten by the victor.
A grasshopper which lost its leg while being put into a box, ate its leg. Like the other winged creatures, grasshoppers lose their legs easily, and do not seem to mind it.
If you could look inside the grasshopper’s body, you would see that he has a gizzard, much like that of a chicken. It is made of little bands set with fine teeth. These teeth chew up into a pulp the leaves which the grasshopper has eaten.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] See Nature Reader, No. 2, Lessons 1-4.
LESSON XVII.
THE LIFE OF THE OLD MAN OF THE MEADOW.
Many years ago, a great poet wrote a song to the grasshopper. The poet said the grasshopper was the happiest of living things. It did nothing but dance and sing. It ate fresh leaves, and drank cool dew When the glad summer of its life was done, it died. It did not live to be sick, or hungry, or cold.
This poet called the grasshopper “the earth-born,” and said that it was man’s little brother.
Yes, the grasshopper is earth-born. The mother grasshopper makes, with the sword of which I told you, a hole in the ground. In that she lays her eggs, in a case made of something like glue. Then she closes up the hole, and the eggs lie all winter, safe in the ground.
In the spring, the larvæ hatch from the egg, and creep out of the ground. They are very small, but shaped much like the parent, only they have no wings. They molt, or change their skins several times.
At first, the little ones are all alike, but after several changes of skin, the larvæ become pupæ. Then you can see the coming wings under a little sheath. You can also see Mrs. Grasshopper’s sword growing.
About six or eight weeks, after hatching, the final change is made. The perfect insect comes out of its last-shed skin. It has now two pairs of wings. Mr. Grasshopper plays on his new drum, and Mrs. Grasshopper marches about with her new sword.
The young grasshoppers are very greedy while larvæ and pupæ. They eat all the time. When they are grown, they do not give all their time to eating. Mr. Grasshopper must sing, and he does not do this while either flying or eating.
He stands quite still, fixes himself firmly by his fore-feet, and presses his body downward. There is a little quiver through all his body as long as the sound lasts.
The people of Italy call him “the screamer,” or “the squealer,” from his shrill noise.
The grasshopper has a very odd habit. After he has eaten for a long time, he sits quite still. He looks as if he were doing some serious thinking. Sometimes when he sits in this way, he moves his mouth as if chewing. From this action, people used to think that he chewed the cud, as cows and sheep do.
But he does not chew the cud. If you watch him well, in these silent times, you will see him gravely licking his long feelers, and his lips. He seems to be cleaning them.
To do this, he runs out a long, limber tongue, shaped much like yours. You remember that the ants have this habit of cleaning and dressing themselves, after eating.[14]
The great, green grasshopper, which lives on the trees, has wings of a gray-green. He has a little bronze, or russet color, on his feet, and on the under part of his body. The rest of his body is a fine leafgreen.
The color in the grasshopper does not seem to be laid on the surface of his coat, as on that of the beetle. It is not put on in plumes and scales, as the butterfly has it. But it is dyed through and through the wings and body.
The wing-cases of the grasshopper, and the rings of the body, are not hard, and like horn or shell, as in the beetle tribe. They are of a tough skin, and are dyed with the color.
Let us have a look at some of these fine fellows. Although the color of the great, green grasshopper is so gay, it will be hard to find him. His coat is just the tint of the leaves he likes to live among. You can scarcely see him even if you look straight at him.
You will find in the grass a smaller, lighter-green hopper that is very easily caught, because in his hurry to get away he flies right up in
your face, when he hears you coming.
The grasshoppers are a very timid family, and are very sensitive to sound. Some say that their long feelers serve them for ears. But that is not true.
The garden grasshopper has very small wings. Its color is brownish gray. It likes to live in the garden walls or under the leaves in the borders. Both Mr. and Mrs. Grasshopper sing in this garden family. They keep up fine music for those who like to hear them, as one answers the song of the other.
I think we most of us like the cry of the grasshopper. It brings to our mind the warm, dry, sunny days, the time of flowers.
Out in the meadow you will find our Old Man, the common great, gray hopper. As the great, green one in the trees is hidden by his color, so is the great, gray one hidden in the grass. His coat is the hue of the half-dry grass, with little tinges of green along it.
He seems a very plain insect at first. But watch him and notice the light red and yellowish bands on his legs. He has spots of soot color on his wing cases. When he spreads his wide wings, note the brown and yellow stripes. He is fine enough after all.
In the woods, among the pine and fir trees, you will find a light-green, small, slim grasshopper a deal like the garden singer.
There is a very handsome, large grasshopper called the wart-biter. The boys in Sweden give him this name, because they think he can cure warts. They think that if he bites a wart, and puts some dark brown juice on it, the wart will go away
The wart-biter is nearly two inches long. It is a green-gray with reddish legs and feet. It lays its eggs in little balls in the earth.
In South America there are very large and splendid grasshoppers. Their wings are so gay that when they fly they look much like butterflies. The wings, in flight, cover most of the body.
But when you see the large, long legs stretched out behind, and the very long feelers waving to the tips of the wings, you will know that
this is a grasshopper All this brown and black and crimson splendor is the Old Man of the Meadow, with a very fine coat.
The grasshopper is not migratory It does not change its home. It dies near where it was born. Frost and cold kill it. It does not outlive the winter, as butterflies, bees, and wasps do.
Grasshoppers appear in great numbers, but they do not go in swarms as locusts do.
Each grasshopper lives alone. He does nothing for his neighbor, and his neighbor does nothing for him.
When grasshoppers are numerous they damage the grass and the young crops.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] See Nature Reader, No. 2. Lessons on Ants.
LESSON XVIII.
THE ROBBER COUSIN.
The Old Man of the Meadow is, in his way, like a quiet country gentleman. He roams about the fields, and likes to sing, and is fond of moonlight. He likes the shade, and the cool, still places under the green herbs.
He has a fierce cousin, who is a great robber, a kind of land pirate. His name is locust.
I asked a class of boys, “What is a locust?” One said: “It is a great, big grasshopper.”
Another said: “It is a greedy grasshopper that eats everything.”
A third said: “A locust is a grasshopper that travels in swarms.”
Now these were pretty good answers. Each had some truth in it. A locust is not a grasshopper. But it is much like a grasshopper. It is his very near relative.
The locust is not always larger than the grasshopper. The great green, or the wart-biter grasshopper, is larger than the Rocky Mountain locust. That locust is called “the hateful,” because he does so much harm.
The locust is generally larger than the grasshopper, and one very big locust is much larger than any grasshopper that ever was known. And, too, the locust is much more greedy.
The locust destroys all plants that come in its way. It will eat the bark off the trees.
Locusts live and move in swarms. Instead of living and dying in the places where they were born, they are given to travel. They migrate like the birds you will read of in this book.
It is not quite surely known what is the motive for their journeys. Probably it is to get food. The locust is the child of hot lands. His first home was, no doubt, in the great sandy plains of Asia. He is very common in Africa. In Europe and the eastern part of the United States he is not very common. In the Western States he has done much damage.
If you take up a locust to examine, you will at once notice that his feelers are much shorter than those of the grasshopper. Mrs. Locust also is without the sword for placing her eggs. She lays them in the earth in long tubes.
The front of the locust’s head is harder and thicker than the grasshoppers. The hind legs are also much thicker and stronger than even the big strong ones of the grasshopper.
The locust’s coat is of light brown or sand color. There is a delicate green tinge on the wings. The breast has a soft vest of down. The legs are often striped in bands of brown and yellow.
The locust does not make his music as the grasshopper does. When he wishes to sing, Mr. Locust stands on his two front pairs of legs. Then he lifts his hind legs, and draws them one by one, or both together, over his wings.
The inner side of the hind legs has rough file-like edges. The wings have thick veins, which stand like cords above the wing surface.
The file parts of the legs rub on these cords, and produce the sound. The sound takes different tones, as one or both legs are used at a time in making it. Sometimes the sound is very loud, sometimes it is very low.
In the latter part of the summer, Mrs. Locust lays her eggs, fifty or one hundred together, in a tube hidden in the earth. In places where locusts do much harm, rewards are given for baskets full of these tubes. Many boys make a living by digging them from the earth, and selling them to be destroyed.
For you must know that locusts being very greedy, and very numerous, do much harm. They move quickly, and in great swarms.
Though they live in swarms they have no queen as the bees have, and they do no work as bees and ants do.
Probably there is no living thing seen in such numbers as the locusts. We can scarcely believe or understand what we are told about the multitudes of these insects which appear in the East.
They fill the sky like a great cloud, so that the day is darkened. When they see a green place, they settle to feed. In a few minutes the green is all gone. The place is as brown and bare as if a fire had swept over it.
People hear with terror that the locusts are coming. They know the crops will be eaten up. Then food will be scarce, and the people will be poor.
If by chance a swarm is destroyed by other means than by fire, all the air for miles will be filled with the bad smell of the decaying bodies.
The only good that poor people can get from the locusts is by eating them. They pull off the wings, and legs, and dry the bodies. They eat them fried in oil and salt, or ground into meal, after roasting.
The locusts cannot fly against the wind. They go with the wind. It brings them, and if it changes, it sweeps them away. Sometimes the wind drives them out to sea. If they become too weary to fly, they drop into the waves and are drowned. This often happens. Then the water washes their bodies ashore. The coast of Africa has been found covered thick with them, for the space of fifty miles.
But they do not always drop into the sea. They are very strong on the wing. A great swarm of locusts was met by a ship, twelve hundred miles from shore. They surrounded the ship, and hid the sun.
As their flight is so strong, locusts can go from one country to another. They pass from Africa to the south of Europe. They go from the mainland to the islands.
Usually the locusts fly during the day, while the air is hot and dry. Late in the day they settle to feed, and where they stop they stay
until all green things are eaten up. Of course they do not feed when on the wing. They run along the ground to eat.
People try many ways of killing locusts. Sometimes deep trenches are cut, and filled with water, so that the young unwinged locusts, as they run along the ground, will fall in and be drowned. But the locusts are in such numbers that the drowned ones soon fill the trenches. The others run safely over the dead bodies.
Sometimes great fires are lit across their path. Then the hordes of locusts crowd on, and at last, the fires are put out by the burned bodies. After that, the others pass on unhurt.
You must know that the young locust is quite as greedy, and as great a terror as his parents. In the larval and pupal states, they migrate as well as when they have wings. They seem born to eat and to travel. At this stage they go by walking. They march in a solid column like soldiers. They move straight on, nothing turning them aside. Is a house in the way? Over it and into it they go. You know some ants move in swarms in this way.[15]
The locust, being larger, more numerous, and more greedy than the ants, do much harm. If they find a town in their path, through it they go. Countless numbers may be killed, but there are countless numbers to follow. Is a river in the way? Into it they tumble, and when enough dead bodies lie on the water to make a raft, the other locusts pass safely over.
One great trouble about the locust is, that when a full-grown swarm passes through a place the ground is left full of eggs. The next year these hatch, and the larvæ and pupæ eat up all that has grown since their parents ravaged the land.
Famines of two or three years duration have been caused in this way. You will not wonder at the strength of locusts and the amount of food they need, when I tell you that one kind is quite a foot broad from tip to tip of the wings.
The great foreign locusts are very splendid to look at. They are dressed like soldiers in crimson and blue. Their fierce eyes shine,
and the rush of their wings makes a sound like the coming of an army.
Did I not give this locust a good name, when I called him the robber cousin?
FOOTNOTES:
[15] See Nature Reader, No 2 Lessons on Ants
LESSON XIX.
THE MERRY COUSINS.
You have heard about the robber cousin of the Old Man of the Meadow. Now you shall hear about a very happy and harmless little cousin. Here he is!
Did you ever meet him in your walks? Did he ever come creeping out of a hole in the wall, or from a chink in the bricks in the hearth, and sit down by you before the fire?
Did you notice how he waved his long feelers gently in the heat, and seemed to bask in the glow as pussy does? If you were very still, perhaps all at once he burst into a shrill, gay little song.
Did you notice what a shining, dark-brown coat he had? Did you see that his tail had two long, stiff hairs, or bristles, spread out from each other? Did you think that they were like the long tail hairs of the bright and dainty May-fly?[16]
When you saw all this did you know your little friend well? Did you call him by his name, “How are you, Mr. Cricket”?
Ah, the cricket is a right-jolly little fellow; let us take a good look at him.
There are three kinds of crickets which we shall talk about. The house cricket, the field cricket, the mole cricket.
The body of the cricket is not so slender as that of the grasshopper, it is short and thick. It is much the shape of the first joint of your thumb. The color is a dark, glossy brown, sometimes almost black.
The feelers are very long, longer than the whole body The eyes are large and round. The under wings are very large, much larger than the wing-cases. When they are folded up, they reach out beyond the
covers and the body, in a long needle-like roll. It looks as if Mr Cricket were carrying home something under his arm.
Near where the wing cover joins his body, Mr Cricket has a little, thin drum-head for his music. He is very fond of making a noise. The French call him “Cri-cri”[17] from the sound he makes. We call him “cricket” for the same reason.
The cricket has strong jaws, sharp teeth, and a thick round tongue. His feet are not broad and thick, like the grasshopper’s. He does not run up plants as the grasshopper does. The cricket runs about the ground. He has sharp, thin feet. Sometimes they have stiff hairs on them.
As he runs about the ground, his long feelers warn him of any danger in front. What do you think he has to tell him of danger behind? He has that pair of long, stiff tail hairs, which look so much like feelers.
Mrs. Cricket does not sing. It is Mr. Cricket that makes all the noise. How does he make it? He has three strong veins under his left wing cover. The largest of these is rough, like a file. This vein he uses as a man uses the bow of a violin.
When the rough vein is drawn across the right wing cover, all the cover trembles, or quivers, and gives out a sound, as when the bow is drawn over the strings of a violin.
The field cricket will sing all day. The house and mole crickets sing only at night.
Field crickets and house crickets are very much alike. The field cricket is darker than the house cricket. He is also noisy by day. In the winter he creeps into the earth and is torpid, unless the early cold kills him.
I think house crickets are field crickets that have taken to living in doors. So, in course of time, they have changed a little. But they were all field crickets once.
Crickets are fond of moisture. They are thirsty creatures. They will drink any liquid left in their way. They drink water, milk, soup, tea,
beer, vinegar, yeast. I have known them to come to my ink bottle to try to drink the ink! But that killed them!
Crickets eat vegetables. They like potato. They are greedy, and will eat whatever is in their way. They eat bread crumbs, soft grease, and are very fond of meat. They catch and eat small insects. They eat leather. Also they will eat woollen cloth, stockings, clothes.
Once our cook laid upon the grass a large piece of woollen blanket, on which she had spilled some bread sponge. She left it there thirtysix hours. When she went for it, the crickets had eaten nearly all of it. It was so full of holes it was like a net. There were more holes than there was blanket.
Crickets do not like to change their homes. They prefer to stay near where they were born. If you carry them away they will use their big wings to get home. Unless they fly to move from home to home, they do not use their big wings very much. They walk, or hop.
The poets and story-tellers are very fond of crickets. Many people think it is lucky to have them sing in the hearth. But there is no luck about it. It is very pleasant and cheery to hear them sing.
In hot weather the house cricket sometimes goes into the garden to live. In October he comes in, and finds a home in the house-wall. He likes new houses where the mortar is not too hard for him to pull some of it out and make his little home. He chooses the kitchen and other well-warmed rooms to live in.
If the house is shut up and without fires for some days the cricket becomes torpid. What do you suppose these little fellows did before they found men to build houses for them?
In houses they keep quiet all day. They are timid things. Perhaps they sleep. At night they come out. One wise old man who wrote about crickets said that the tiny, new crickets came out on the hearth-stone by hundreds. They were about the size of fleas. He found all sizes at the same time. So he thought that they hatch at any time if they live in a warm place.
The field cricket makes his house in the earth. He seeks a hot, sunny spot. Then he digs out a hole with his strong jaws. This hole is often
from six to twelve inches deep.
The cricket is very timid and runs into his hole if any one comes by. But if he is not afraid, he sits in the door of his house to catch insects that come near. He also eats leaves and grass, that grow about his door.
Little French children fish for crickets by tying an ant to a thread and dropping it into the hole. You can also make Mr. Cricket come out, by poking a blade of grass into his hole. He runs up to see what is the matter.
Down in the bottom of the hole, Mrs. Cricket lays her eggs. They are fastened to each other, and to the ground by a kind of glue. She lays about three hundred eggs each year. She does not put them all in one place.
As soon as the larvæ come out of the eggs, they run up to the top of the ground. Each one then begins to dig a new burrow. Now and then they get tired of a burrow, and go off to make a new one.
The little crickets in the larva and pupa state look much like the grown ones, only they have no wings. When they are about halfgrown, they hop about, and look, and act, much like tiny toads. If the crickets come out of the egg in July, they will reach the perfect state the next May.
When they are full grown, they have wings, and can play a tune. They like that. They sit in their doors and sing.
In Spain, the people like the cricket’s song so much that they keep crickets in little cages, to sing for them. If they have plenty to eat and drink, they will sing and be happy.
Each cricket will need a cage all for himself. Two crickets shut up together will fight, until one is killed. Crickets always live alone.
