In Truth, the Hears Each Sound: Sounding and Ideology in New York’s Hudson

JOSHUA GROFFMAN

Abstract

This paper seeks an account of how sound participates in the embodied experience of a beautiful place: New York’s Hudson Valley, the region lying along the banks of the between and Albany. Opening our ears to the way currents of history have shaped our hearing in a specific geographic locale clarifies aspects of how we inhabit and value natural spaces and offers an opportunity to move past a wholly anthropocentric understanding of the environment. This paper focuses on the cognitive soundscape—the blend of sounds that come in at the ear and are then understood through cultural layouts—to analyze Hudson-Fulton March, a musical relic of the 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebrations; soundings of the Valley in and prose by nineteenth-century artists; and how the Hudson Valley’s original inhabitants, the Munsee and Mahican Indian tribes, heard place in ways fundamentally different from colonizers’ hearings. Particularly at a time of rising politicization of environmental values, unpacking the American “ ideology” is an important avenue for creating commonality in addressing the environmental problems we face.

Introduction: Pastoral Ideology in an Age of Ecological Crisis

This article seeks an account of how sound participates in the embodied experience of New York’s Hudson River Valley: by many accounts the prototypical pastoral and a beautiful place. How we hear the environment, and “sound” it ourselves in cultural discourse, reflects more than simple appreciation of the natural world. Rather, accounting for the workings of the American “pastoral ideology” is an avenue for accessing some of this country’s most critical debates.1 Discourse around nature often reflects a long-running trend to locate “the essential America as exurban, green, pastoral, even wild.” It therefore frequently hinges on notions of what, and who, constitutes the “essential America,” along with contested understandings of community, politics, class, and race.2 I argue that sound—experienced as the aural dimension of place, the cultural product known as music, and conceptions between—is an ideal medium for unpacking pastoral ideology and understanding its relation to broader political currents. Such investigation is currently more urgent than ever. Even as ecological problems increasingly demand our attention, they are made more intractable by the politicization of environmental values along the “red- blue” axis. My aim is to make explicit some of the values underlying the hearing and sounding of the natural world, and by doing so, to further the project of building a common understanding of a more sustainable future.

1 See chapter 1, “Pastoral Ideology,” of Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, , and the Formation of American (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995). 2 Ibid., 32–33.

Music & Politics 13, Number 2 (Summer 2019), ISSN 1938-7687. Article DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mp.9460447.0013.201

2 Music and Politics Summer 2019

Encompassing the communities along the banks of the Hudson River between New York City and Albany, the Hudson Valley is a rich mixture of , , rolling fields, and of course, the majesty of the river itself. European colonizers found in it a combination of natural beauty and economic potential, “a very pleasant place to build a Towne on,” in one explorer’s laconic phrase.3 The “Travel Hudson Valley” website is more effusive: Designated as a National Heritage Area, the valley is steeped in history, natural beauty, culture and a burgeoning food and farmer’s market scene. Among many attributes, it’s the oldest wine producing area in the country, and the magnificent scenery inspired artists whose works became the of Painters. Lonely Planet describes the Hudson River Valley as “a real city break, with leafy drives, wineries and plenty of farm-to-table foodie options.”4

The region’s proximity to New York City has long made it a vibrant piece of the larger economy and culture. Pastoral spaces—areas of “middle landscape” shaped both by natural beauty and human alteration—abound. More telling is the value such spaces occupy in our collective imaginations. In the tourism ad copy, “[h]istory, natural beauty, culture and a burgeoning food and farmer’s market scene” all reference the interface between non-human natural spaces and human incursion or alteration to those spaces; the area’s status as a not-city, the way it preserves the air of a sheltered (but always threatened) pastoral refuge from human-driven development, is reckoned first among its advantages. My inquiry here is an ecomusicological one, oriented towards a consideration of “music, culture, and nature in all the complexities of those terms.”5 has often focused on “the affective qualities of ”—the mixture of human and non-human attributes which create our embodied sense of place—and “the physical and emotional responses that music induces in listeners and how they shape our view of the world.”6 It is thus well-positioned to examine the workings of the pastoral ideology in the Hudson Valley as found within musical texts.7 Not solely within musical texts, however: instead, I follow recent work that holds the true purview of ecomusicology to be not music but sound, broadly construed, not least because the boundaries between the two terms are so contingent on cultural norms.8 As suggested by R. Murray Schafer, I hear the sounding world as a text also, a composition in its own

3 Robert Juet, “Juet’s Journal of Hudson’s 1609 Voyage, from the 1625 Edition of Purchas His Pilgrimes,” Hudson River Valley Review 25, no. 2 (2009): 59. 4 “Travel Hudson Valley,” Hudson Valley Tourism Inc., accessed December 15, 2017, http://www.travelhudsonvalley.com. https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.A2240765. See also Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe, “Ecomusicologies,” in Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature, eds. Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe (New York: Routledge, 2016). In a recent essay, Allen refers throughout to “music and sound studies” (italics mine), underscoring that the two kinds of aural experience properly belong together in the same field of inquiry; see “One Ecology and Many Ecologies: The Problem and Opportunity of Ecology for Music and Sound Studies,” MUSICultures 45, no. 1 & 2 (2018). 6 Daniel M. Grimley, “Music, Landscape, Attunement: Listening to Sibelius’s Tapiola,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 64, no. 2 (2011): 395, https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2011.64.2.394. 7 From a wide field of possibility, notable ecomusicological approaches to representation of place through music include Denise Von Glahn, The Sounds of Place: Music and the American (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003); Daniel M. Grimley, Grieg: Music, Landscape and Norwegian Identity (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006); and Mark Pedelty, Ecomusicology: Folk, Rock, and the Environment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011). Germane to my reading of pastoral landscapes is Aaron S. Allen, “Symphonic ,” Green Letters 15, no. 1 (2011), https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2011.10589089. 8 Jeff Todd Titon makes an early call for the inclusion of sound—not simply music—in ecomusicological inquiry in “The Nature of Ecomusicology,” Música e Cultura 8, no. 1 (2013). In Truth, the Forest Hears Each Sound 3 right.9 I do so with a fine-grained resolution that regards as its purview all sounds within a defined locality.10 Furthermore, I am guided by the principle that what we hear in the physical world around us— its “soundscape”—and how we value those sounds we hear, is an ideological experience quite as much as music is. If we are to account for the experience of pastoral ideology, we need to grapple with the circular relationship between the soundscape of physical place and the manifestations of culture which hear, interpret, and value that place.11 In what follows, I draw in a purposely eclectic mixture of documents and varieties of accounts centered on representations of environmental sound in the Hudson Valley, demonstrating how we might integrate our hearing of the soundscape and the varieties of discourse that treat on that soundscape. Alongside an ecocritical approach to music, I refer to two fields of sound study, historical soundscape studies and soundscape ecology, for their utility in enabling rigorous, analytical approaches to soundscape. Scholars in the field of historical sound studies have excavated the soundscapes of past societies; as I seek historical antecedents to our current soundings of pastoral ideology, their methodologies for identifying and contextualizing the elements of vanished and altered soundscapes informs my own.12 Additionally, in order to theorize the link between discourses about place and hearing of the ecological place itself, I make use of several terms and concepts from the field of soundscape

9 The classic text of soundscape studies is R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1993). See also H. Järviluoma et al., Acoustic Environments in Change (Tampere, Finland: University of Tampere, 2009), which reprints the text of the seminal soundscape study Five European Villages (1976) and updates its findings. For all Schafer’s prominence, the close-read approach typified by Five European Villages is not widely used, but bears revisiting. Another important source for soundscape analysis methodology and theory is Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication, 2nd ed. (Westport, CT: Ablex, 2001). 10 Much of environmental sound studies proceeds by examining a single type or category of sound across a wide geographical and/or temporal span, as in Alain Corbin, A History of Silence: From the Renaissance to the Present Day, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2018), and Stephanie Rutherford, “A Resounding Success? Howling as a Source of ,” in Methodological Challenges in Nature-Culture and Environmental History Research, eds. Jocelyn Thorpe, Stephanie Rutherford, and L. Anders Sandberg (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2017). Such studies are illuminating for what they tell us about particular kinds of sounds or point sources, but necessarily focus attention on particular sounds to the exclusion of others. The methodology employed here focuses on a geographically and temporally-limited place, with a commitment to considering all of the sounds contained therein. 11 I thus take up the ecomusicological challenge identified by Margaret Q. Guyette and Jennifer C. Post, who call for “comprehensive understandings of local ecosystems and how they relate to various human and non-human interactions resulting in different forms of cultural expression in “Ecomusicology, Ethnomusicology, and Soundscape Ecology: Scientific and Musical Responses to Sound Study,” in Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature, eds. Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe (New York: Routledge, 2016), 52. Recently, and in collabration with soundscape ecologist Bryan C. Pijanowski, Post begins to follow through on the call for integrated analyses of sound and music together in “Coupling Scientific and Humanistic Approaches to Address Wicked Environmental Problems of the Twenty-First Century: Collaborating in an Acoustic Community Nexus,” MUSICultures 45, no. 1 & 2 (2018). 12 For book length studies recovering and contextualizing historical soundscapes see Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern : Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); and Richard Cullen Rath, How Early America Sounded (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). It is worth noting, too, that sound can still be passed over in historical studies, most obviously because of its ephemeral qualities; many cultural analyses of the Hudson Valley proceed from the record of written and visual artifacts, omitting conceptions of sound. It is thus worth continuing to insist on the relevance of sound and music as a field of historical analysis, particularly in the context of environmentalist politics, as Lenore Manderson and Ed Osborn argue: “Shifting our perceptual field away from the visual and attending to the aural environment, we suggest, deepens our understanding of planetary ecology,” in “Rumble Filters: Sonic Environments and Points of Listening,” Contemporary Music Review 36, no. 3 (2017): 120, https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2017.1401353. 4 Music and Politics Summer 2019 ecology.13 A critical facet of hearing in place is the frequent disconnect between sounds present in the environment and sounds actually heard by observers. Soundscape ecology considers as its purview all sound objects within an aural field: its taxonomy of biophony, geophony, and anthrophony (discussed below) provides a useful methodological framework for identifying how culture and ideology are often directing our attention to certain sounds, and past others. My analysis spans primarily the late eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. In this period contemporary notions of the Hudson Valley as “a real city break” took shape, as did patterns of infrastructure and residence that persist today. It offers, then, an era in which much of the discourse seems familiar and in dialogue with current understandings of the natural world, while providing revealing points of comparison with how we hear today. I begin with Hudson-Fulton March, a musical relic of the 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebrations. Working backwards, I discuss how nineteenth-century artists sounded the Hudson Valley in , poetry, and prose, a discussion that links natural sounds and musical ones through their conception of an environment alive with benevolent consciousness. Following a narrative thread raised by the previous two discussions, I examine how the Hudson Valley’s original inhabitants, the Algonquian Munsee and Mahican Native American tribes, were constructed aurally by colonizers. Finally, I ask what notions of environmental sound emerge from close-read examination of several Algonquian songs and stories. In each case study, I focus on what soundscape ecologists call the cognitive soundscape, the blend of sounds that come in at the ear and are then understood through a variety of cultural layouts that organize humanity’s relation to nature. I seek to complicate our understanding of hearing and sounding the environment in Western sonic practices, particularly those that privilege human sound as a distinct category worthy of attention. Approaching music and sound in granular detail, and within the same critical framework, highlights the constructed quality of our hearing and sounding of the natural world; and it directs attention to the way ideologies channel our experience of our environment, illuminating the use of race, class, and gender to shape narratives about a place, its history, and the lived experience of the communities within it.14

The Cognitive Landscape: Hearing History and the Environment in Hudson-Fulton March

In the fall of 1909, the Hudson Valley played host to the Hudson-Fulton Celebrations. Four years in the making, the Celebrations centered on the exploits of Henry Hudson, whose voyage up the river in 1609 marked the beginning of sustained European colonization of the region, and Robert Fulton, who was credited with launching the first commercially successful steamboat operation on the Hudson, and whose

13 For an introduction to soundscape ecology, see Bryan C. Pijanowski et al., “Soundscape Ecology: The Science of Sound in the Landscape,” BioScience 61, no. 3 (2011), https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2011.61.3.6. A book-length examination of concepts and methodology appears in Almo Farina, Soundscape Ecology: Principles, Patterns, Methods and Applications (Dordrecht, : Springer, 2014), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7374-5. 14 Ana María Ochoa Gautier argues that ecomusicological inquiry would be enriched by a fuller attempt to nuance and problematize a conception of nature as a fixed entity apart from human constructions and understandings, in “Acoustic Multinaturalism, the Value of Nature, and the Nature of Music in Ecomusicology,” boundary 2 43, no. 1 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-3340661. I propose that use of methods and concepts from soundscape ecology as a way of rigorously engaging with both human and non-human elements of soundscape is central to my attempt to do this. In Truth, the Forest Hears Each Sound 5 boat, The Clermont, made one of the first New York-Albany round trips in 1807.15 The Hudson-Fulton Celebrations were largely a celebration of place: New York State, as a geographical and political unit, was lauded for its contributions to American colonial history and to present industrial progress. At the center of the Celebrations was the Hudson River: 300 miles long, three miles across at its widest point, one of America’s great rivers. As one heads north along its banks, it is flanked by spectacular scenery: the Catskill and Adirondack ranges on its western shores, with gentler sights on the eastern bank—rolling hills, and, originally at least, broad expanses of forest. Crucially, the Hudson River has long been a conduit for industrial and political development, linking the Atlantic Ocean with the interior of the North American continent. Among the Celebrations’ remaining curios is Hudson-Fulton March by J. Louis von der Mehden, Jr. (Example 1). The piano arrangement used here was marketed to amateur musicians as a memento to recreate the sounds of the Celebrations in their homes.

Example 1: Hudson-Fulton March, cover art and piano arrangement. Courtesy of the Poughkeepsie Public Library Local History Collection.

15 Kenneth Pearl, “New York State and the Hudson-Fulton Celebrations of 1909,” Hudson River Valley Review 25, no. 2 (2009). 6 Music and Politics Summer 2019

Example 1 (cont.): Hudson-Fulton March, cover art and piano arrangement. Courtesy of the Poughkeepsie Public Library Local History Collection.

In Truth, the Forest Hears Each Sound 7

Example 1 (cont.): Hudson-Fulton March, cover art and piano arrangement. Courtesy of the Poughkeepsie Public Library Local History Collection.

8 Music and Politics Summer 2019

Example 1 (cont.): Hudson-Fulton March, cover art and piano arrangement. Courtesy of the Poughkeepsie Public Library Local History Collection.

Audio: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mp.9460447.0013.201 Example 2: Sound recording of Hudson-Fulton March (piano arrangement). Performance by Joshua Groffman.

In Truth, the Forest Hears Each Sound 9

The artwork that graces the cover of the arrangement gives us, before any music is heard, an overview of the ideological claims the piece will make. From the vantage of history, Fulton’s steamboats chug up the river once more, as do Hudson’s sailing ships. The view is northward-looking from New York City: the Palisades of New Jersey appear on the western bank, the steam of industry on the lower eastern bank. Further up is the natural beauty of the rural Hudson Valley, sweeping mountains and greenery. Most strikingly, and most in need of explanation, is the young Native American who dominates the cover, her torch aloft, her expression solemn. What does she see? The music will not tell us, for other than her presence on the cover, no Native American trace is found in Hudson-Fulton March. As the Celebrations were concerned with place and landscape, so too is the narrative of Hudson- Fulton. It is profoundly ideological, making claims about history, race, and economic development and tying them together into a narrative about New York State and the Hudson River. It wants us to feel a certain way about place: through a combination of music, text, and image, Hudson-Fulton proposes a specific experience of how we inhabit a geographic locale.16 It curates our experience, directing our attention towards certain features of the landscape and certain aspects of Hudson Valley history, while suppressing other features and facts by covering up, or directing attention past, other sounds and features. In the Hudson Valley of Hudson-Fulton, bands play, but birds do not sing; the deeds of Henry Hudson and Robert Fulton come alive in song, while the Native American so boldly depicted on the cover is silenced in the piece itself. Farina and Belgrano’s cognitive landscape hypothesis provides the framework around which I will organize my discussion of nature and place.17 Approaching landscape from an animal behaviorist , Farina and Belgrano argue for an epistemological approach to the landscape that is organismic-centered, rather than structured around ecological processes or systems. in insights from the theory of Umwelt, which argues that we live in a “subjective [i.e., species-specific] world,” and biosemiotics—the study of signs in living systems—Farina and Belgrano propose three categories that reflect an organism’s perception of the landscape.18 In a neutrality-based landscape, no specific meaning is derived from the landscape. In an individual-based landscape, an organism uses its bio-sensors (ears, eyes, sense of touch) to directly experience the world around it. In the observer-based landscape, an organism experiences a “perceived landscape” based on memory, previous experience, social cues, and cultural layouts. Cognitive landscape hypothesis theorizes how organisms’ relationship with landscape evolves as familiarity increases. As it explores an area looking for food and shelter, an organism first experiences an area as an individual-based landscape; returning to the same area, it brings to bear its memories and previous experiences to perceive the observer-based landscape and derive utility from the knowledge it has built. Here my primary focus is on the soundscape and the ear as the primary bio-sensor under consideration. As with all organisms, a human’s understanding of the soundscape emerges at the junction between what her ears detect and the memories and experiences she brings to bear on making sense of

16 Von Glahn argues that early American depictions of place often focus on individual or particularly notable features of American landscapes as subjects in themselves, while twentieth-century artworks—reflecting urbanization and an industrialized nation that increasingly assumed a leadership role in world affairs—focus on people in place, highlighting their interactions with, and alterations to, nature. Poised at the junction between centuries, Hudson-Fulton traces this shift, emphasizing both people in place and the features themselves: “Remember Henry Hudson and the stream that bears his name.” Von Glahn, The Sounds of Place, 269. 17 Almo Farina and Andrea Belgrano, “The Eco-Field Hypothesis: Toward a Cognitive Landscape,” Landscape Ecology 21, no. 1 (2006), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-005-7755-x. 18 Ibid., 8–9. 10 Music and Politics Summer 2019 those sounds. The observer-based soundscape will also be shaped by cultural layouts, for our perception of sound is constantly being mediated and negotiated for social, political, and economic ends.19 My analyses are situated at the junction of individual-based soundscapes and observer-based soundscapes: at the point at which sounds perceived through the ear become cultural experiences, freighted with broader meaning. Cognitive landscape hypothesis offers a theory of the embodiment of place that links physical experience and how experience is understood through the workings of culture. As noted above, Hudson-Fulton March highlights and contextualizes certain features of the landscape, while suppressing others. In the language of cognitive landscape hypothesis, music and “earwitness” accounts sound the landscape by focusing attention on specific elements of the individual- based landscape and by encouraging particular interpretations of these inputs. Hudson-Fulton is suggesting a highly specific observer-based landscape, encouraging the listener to experience the Hudson Valley in a particular way.

Table 1: Observer-based landscape in Hudson-Fulton March

The overall mood of Hudson-Fulton is buoyant, attested by the markings con spirito and giocoso. Its takeaway message: in this time and place, the Hudson River Valley of 1909, the listener should feel happy. The piece was itself part of the soundscape of the Hudson Valley in the moment of its performance; while it lasted, the Hudson Valley came alive as a cheery and boisterous place, covering up other (potentially more doleful) sounds. The sheet music arrangement allowed that celebratory soundscape to be recreated each time it was performed at home, extending the reach of Hudson-Fulton’s celebratory-ideological work. The march, and the marching band, have a martial origin, but in a time and place of peace, this march is a social and celebratory one. The 6/8 meter suggests the two-step dance, which enjoyed a great vogue in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America and Europe.20 The dance was often done to John Phillip Sousa’s Washington Post (1889) or pieces written in imitation of it; comparison of Washington Post and Hudson-Fulton reveals numerous similarities, in particular the accompaniment

19 “Listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political.” Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 6. 20 Patrick Warfield, Making the March King: John Philip Sousa’s Washington Years, 1854–1893 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 169, https://doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252037795.001.0001. In Truth, the Forest Hears Each Sound 11 figure in the opening strain that establishes the two-step feel.21 The accompaniment figure of both Washington Post and Hudson-Fulton contains one bass note per measure on the downbeat, with the lilting repeated chord that follows suggestive of a certain serenity. The figure establishes a relaxed feel, particularly in comparison to a more normative “oom-pah, oom-pah” texture with bass notes on every strong beat (Example 3).

Example 3: Actual and hypothetical accompaniment figures in Hudson-Fulton March

In Washington Post, Sousa quickly moves to this very texture in m. 13, but von der Mehden, Jr., maintains the relaxed feel throughout the first strain. The lilt of 6/8 time and pacing of accents on the downbeats suggests the gentle rock of a boat on the water. The listener of Hudson-Fulton might imagine herself on one of Fulton’s steamboats, or perhaps viewing them from the shore. The first strain of the march highlights the pastoral splendor of the river, and by implication, the scenery of mountains, forests, and settlement on its shores. Significantly, the music suggests the feel of a boat on the water, but not the sounds of water itself— these natural sounds are covered up in the music, as they would have been in the soundscape of 1909 itself. Flowing north from New York City in 1909, scenery there remained in abundance. But the river was also the site of considerable industrial and residential development. Incipient efforts to protect the region’s natural resources were sporadic at best until the late twentieth century.22 The individual-based soundscape included the noise of factories along the shore and commercial traffic on the water. The sound of train engines and signals on newly constructed tracks running parallel to the eastern shore of the river attracted the particular ire of many commentators.23

21 Ibid., 251. 22 Pearl, “Hudson-Fulton Celebrations of 1909,” 10. 23 David Schuyler, Sanctified Landscape: Writers, Artists, and the Hudson River Valley, 1820–1909 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 55, https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9780801450808.001.0001. Mark M. Smith, “The Garden in the Machine,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, eds. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 43–44. 12 Music and Politics Summer 2019

In contrast to these complaints, Hudson-Fulton’s first strain suggests that the sounds of industrial and human noise can be squared with the pastoral beauty of river, mountains, and greenery. It reflects what Leo Marx calls a “middle landscape,” in which natural beauty and industrial progress are coupled in a narrative of improvement, providing “sanction for the conquest of the , for improving upon raw nature and for economic and technological development.”24 While the tension Marx traces between natural splendor and industrial development can never be resolved, the belief that it can is the defining element of the American pastoral myth.25 With its upbeat affect and complaisant accompaniment figure, Hudson- Fulton suggests that we can appreciate the beauty while simultaneously celebrating a rising tide of industrialization and settlement. A trade-off is made between visual pleasure in nature and aural sounds of humanity: although we are encouraged to appreciate the visual aspect of the scenery, actual sounds of nature that were displaced or covered up by human encroachment are de-emphasized: the sounds of water, wind in the (now deforested) trees, the call of waterfowl and birds that once proliferated in abundance in the area. Vilém Flusser argues that “[v]ision is the sense that separates us from things, and hearing is the sense that submerges us in them. The seen world is circumstance; the world we hear, is a participated world.”26 Hudson-Fulton submerges us in the boisterous world of industrial progress, while maintaining a link to nature as a visual spectacle. The second and third strains of Hudson-Fulton give the middle landscape a heroic air: this process of improvement, of domination of the landscape, is hard, it suggests, but the fight is worthy. Markings of con forza and marcato sempre establish a martial and purposeful affect, as do trumpet fanfares opening the first strain and in the climactic figure of the second strain. The dogfight interlude between statements of the celebratory trio melody—a traditional spot for musical drama—here juxtaposes menacing pesante figures with a timid scherzando. The triumphant end breaks out, however, with the risoluto marking suggesting a heroic striving. Military-style sounds are martialed to fight the good fight simply of existing in the Hudson Valley. Conventional march form, and the inevitable trio tune, leaves us assured of ultimate triumph. In the words accompanying the tune of “Auld Lang Syne” in the trio strain, the striving is made both contemporary and historical. Much of the impetus for the Hudson-Fulton Celebrations was a growing worry that New York State’s contributions to the national story were being overshadowed by historicizing efforts in Massachusetts and Virginia.27 In this vein, Hudson-Fulton can be heard as claiming an important slice of history for the Hudson Valley. The words of Auld Lang Syne (authored by Robert Burns), and its accompanying tune, were known in the nineteenth century across “the habitable , and beyond all question [was] the widest-spread social song in the Anglo-Saxon language.”28 It is an explicitly backwards- looking piece, a tune to be sung as a commemoration of days gone by. The words tailor-made for the occasion begin with an injunction to reclaim the importance of New York history, highlighting both the landscape and the people who filled it with their deeds: “Remember Henry Hudson and the stream that bears his name!” (emphasis mine). And in a deft rhetorical turn, the lyrics glory in Fulton’s 1807

24 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 128. 25 Peter F. Cannavò, “American Contradictions and Pastoral Visions: An Appraisal of Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden,” Organization & Environment 14, no. 1 (2001): 75, https://doi.org/10.1177/1086026601141004. 26 Quoted in Dominic Pettman, Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics (or, How to Listen to the World) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), 70. 27 Pearl, “Hudson-Fulton Celebrations of 1909,” 7. 28 Dick, James. “Auld Lang Syne: Its Origin, Poetry, and Music.” Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (1892): 379–97. Reprint in Poetry Criticism, ed. Lawrence J. Trudeau, 197 (2018). In Truth, the Forest Hears Each Sound 13 commercial conquest of the River and pair it neatly to Hudson’s 1609 military-colonial conquest of the same terrain. Absent from the soundscape of Hudson-Fulton is the young Native American whose image is so unavoidable on the cover. Such imagery would have been recognizable in 1909 to Hudson Valley residents from novels, movies, and the Wild Buffalo Bill Indian shows.29 Rather than the “wild and vicious savage” of early twentieth-century dime-store characterizations and the cowboy paintings of Frederic Remington, the unthreatening (because young, feminine) depiction here harkens back to the older trope of the “vanishing Indian” that had been a feature of commentary since the early 1800s.30 In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was conventional wisdom that Native Americans and their culture had been displaced in the northeast. In fact, Native American individuals and communities still inhabited the area, though they would hardly have looked like the stereotypical image portrayed here.31 The Hudson-Fulton image is thus a forceful gesture in erasing the actual presence of Native Americans from the landscape. The Celebrations were a platform for the efforts of the Americanization movement to incorporate immigrants within the U.S. cultural mainstream. The use of the Native American, and in particular, posing her in a recreation of the Statue of Liberty pose, encourages recent Italian, Polish, German, and Irish arrivals to feel a historical pride in the heritage of a vanished American culture and to merge their disparate voices and languages into a unified speech community; at the same time, it denies that Native Americans might themselves have any part in the contemporary soundscape.32 Hence, the soundscape that is Hudson-Fulton March lacks any Native American musical element (whether based in actual Native American music or not). While noting the brutal violence with which Native Americans were forcibly removed from their lands in North America, Bonita Lawrence points to “identity laws” as more insidious because of how they imposed colonizers’ systems of discourse upon Native American thinking: Of course the only way in which Indigenous peoples can be permanently severed from their land base is when they no longer exist as peoples. The ongoing regulation of Indigenous peoples’ identities is therefore no relic of a more openly colonial era—it is part of the way in which Canada and the United States continue to actively maintain physical control of the land base they claim, a claim which is still contested by the rightful owners of the land.33

The same can be said of Hudson-Fulton and other cultural tropes re-inscribing the image of the “vanishing Indian”: by asserting the Native American as vanishing, they make it so.

29 J. Gray Sweeney, “Racism, , and Nostalgia,” in Race-ing Art History: Critical Readings in Race and Art History, ed. Kymberly N. Pinder (New York: Routledge, 2002), 157–60. 30 Robert F. Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Knopf, 1978), 89–90. 31 Richard H. Gassan, The Birth of American Tourism: New York, the Hudson Valley, and American Culture, 1790–1830 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 83–84; Theodore L. Kazimiroff, The Last Algonquin (New York: Walker, 1982). 32 Bruce Smith suggests the idea of a speech community—the “‘experience of simultaneity’ among speakers of the same language in the same place at the same time”—as a component of the analysis of soundscape. See Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England, 38. I am grateful to the participants of the Global Prehumanisms conference held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in October 2018, and in particular Dr. Lisa Grossman, for pointing out the visual link between the Statue of Liberty (dedicated in New York harbor in 1886) and the Native American on the cover of Hudson- Fulton March. 33 Bonita Lawrence, “Real” Indians and Others: Mixed-Blood Urban Native Peoples and Indigenous Nationhood (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 38. 14 Music and Politics Summer 2019

Silence, Quiet, and Western Ears in the Nineteenth Century

Here I step back in time, changing modes away from music and towards other cultural artifacts— painting, poetry, and prose. I do so in hopes of demonstrating how the analytical lens of individual-based and observer-based landscapes can place non-musical soundings of place in counterpoint with musical ones. Hudson-Fulton created an experience of place through music, encouraging us to experience a particular observer-based landscape and thus embody the Hudson Valley in a particular way. The accounts below are accounts of observer-based soundscapes, reflecting a mixture of sounds heard, sounds omitted, and sounds imagined. For their viewers and readers, these works shape hearing, and embodied experience, in the Hudson Valley. My thesis will be that through a dual sounding of the environment alternately as “silent” and as “musical,” commentators create a hearing that, like Hudson-Fulton, tends to reinforce a binary distinction between (white, European-descended) humans and non-humans, as well as between white and Native American inhabitants of the area. By 1807, when Fulton’s steamboat operation sailed to prominence, the Hudson Valley had been the site of European colonization for some two hundred years, with the attendant accumulation of cultural and ideological claims made. But the early 1800s also marked a starting over: the United States’ independence from Great Britain necessitated a reset, a fresh examination of the region in light of a burgeoning national culture. Central to conceptions of place in the post-revolutionary cultural milieu was the idea of the area as possessed of a uniquely beautiful, uniquely American landscape capable of providing fodder for original national styles of art.34 In this period, the sparsely settled, heavily forested terrain changed to accommodate a booming tourist economy centered at far-flung locales like Saratoga Springs and Kaaterskill Falls, access to which was facilitated by Fulton’s steamboats.35 At the same time, a flood of economic dynamism was unleashed by the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. Eye- and earwitness accounts from this period, therefore, tend to mix a fascination with wilderness and the “virgin” forest with acknowledgement that the wildness is receding. The Romantic penchant for nostalgia and eulogy, backward-looking to a halcyon time, appears frequently. ’s The Last of the (1826) purports to tell of 1757; Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) is set in 1790. Visual works like ’s Falls of the Kaaterskill (1826)36 are often carefully staged to make the area appear less developed than it was: in composing his scene, Cole omitted the recently constructed refreshment booth to de-emphasize human alterations to the landscape.37 The Hudson River School painters—among them Cole, Asher Durand, , and Frederic Church—refined techniques for displaying light, clouds, and water as hyperreal and luminous and, in composition, a predilection for wide-angle views in which humanity is perpetually dwarfed by nature.38 In their work, we see a “realistic” depiction of the world that nevertheless offers nuanced and calculated shapings of the observer-based landscape, highlighting features for the viewer to notice and suppressing—or even removing—others. I begin the discussion here with an image that depicts the

34 John Paul Driscoll, All That Is Glorious Around Us: Paintings from the Hudson River School (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 8. 35 Gassan, The Birth of American Tourism, 28–31. 36 Thomas Cole, Falls of the Kaaterskill (1826). This painting was previously in the collection of the Westervelt-Warner Museum of American Art and is now in private ownership. A high-resolution image can be viewed at: http://www.explorethomascole.org/tour/items/14. 37 Schuyler, Sanctified Landscape, 33. 38 Driscoll, All That Is Glorious, 18. In Truth, the Forest Hears Each Sound 15

Hudson Valley from much the same ideological perspective as the earwitness accounts that follow. What strikes this observer first about Sanford Gifford’s A Coming Storm39 is the forest, the pleasure of recognition of the fall foliage I know so well from many Hudson Valley autumns. Early Americans were particularly proud of the American fall, standing it toe-to-toe with the reputed beauty of the European spring. Striking, too, is the stormy, Romantic interplay of light contrasted with dark and the rising storm; the rays of light penetrating down from above, reflecting on the water, are a specialty of Hudson River School technique. The scene is Lake George, at the northern edge of the Hudson Valley. All is isolation and darkness, but the experience is the shivery pleasure of a fall day, of being outside and knowing the shelter and warmth of the indoors is moments away. As wild as the scene is, it is useful to remember the first viewers who saw this painting exhibited did so in New York City, partaking of a voyeuristic sense of adventure, of the wilderness experienced at a remove. Not for nothing is the human presence in this painting a Native American one, a representation I take up below. We can conjecture what the individual-based soundscape would have included on a fall day at Lake George: sounds of the storm, including rumbles of thunder, wind rising and falling in the trees; a few late autumn insects; the calls of migratory birds and waterfowl; water lapping at the shores. Or we might turn to a more contemporary observer of the soundscape, for Last of the Mohicans is also set in and around Lake George and thus might stand as earwitness for the Gifford painting. Early in Mohicans, British troops make ready for battle; Cooper’s description of the setting sun, its meshing of natural beauty with ominous portents, bears a certain similarity to the Gifford picture: At length the sun set in a flood of glory, behind the distant western hills, and as darkness drew its veil around the secluded spot the sounds of preparation diminished; the last light finally disappeared from the log cabin of some officer; the trees cast their deeper shadows over the mounds and the rippling stream, and a silence soon pervaded the camp, as deep as that which reigned in the vast forest by which it was environed.40

Cooper’s soundscape, in actuality, contains none of the aural possibilities mentioned above. Instead, he directs the reader-listener’s attention to the sounds of military preparations and, as these fade, prompts us to hear silence. As has been established in previous work, the tendency to hear nature as “silent” is a long-running and many-splendored thing in Western culture.41 The case study offered here seeks to trace and nuance a more generalized tendency for its specific ideological workings in this time and place. Occasionally, listeners’ capacity to ascribe silence to obviously non-silent features of the Hudson Valley beggars belief, as in Cole’s initial description of the Kaaterskill Falls as “silent and savage” in a letter.42 It is tempting to weight such a description lightly, as slapdash writing in private correspondence. I suggest, nevertheless, that the persistence of this rhetoric should prompt us to pause over these depictions—for the obvious disconnect from the individual-based soundscape, from the actual sonic profile of place, is surely affecting our experience of that place.

39 Sanford Gifford, A Coming Storm (1863). This painting is in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A high-resolution image can be viewed at: https://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/94025.html. 40 James Fenimore Cooper, The Leatherstocking Tales, Volume 1 (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1985). Italics mine. 41 See especially Corbin, A History of Silence. For aural constructions of the wilderness in early American history, see Peter A. Coates, “The Strange Stillness of the Past: Toward an Environmental History of Sound and Noise,” Environmental History 10, no. 4 (2005), https://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/10.4.636, and Mark M. Smith, “Listening to the Heard Worlds of Antebellum America,” in The Auditory Culture Reader, eds. Michael Bull and Les Back (New York: Berg, 2003). 42 Schuyler, Sanctified Landscape, 31. Cooper also describes the waters at Ballston Spa as “solitary and silent.” Leatherstocking Tales, 611. 16 Music and Politics Summer 2019

From a wide field of possibilities, two more examples. Cole, who regularly chronicled his observations in poetry, sounds the environment this way in his “Lines Suggested by a Voyage up the Hudson on a Moonlight Night”: Midnight the hour when silence sleeps When o’er dim vales and craggy steeps The viewless spirits of the sky Pour from their starry urns on high The pearly dew . . .

Hudson! The breeze has ceased to press Thy wave! And on its placidness The moonbeams are caress’d, and lie Bright sleeping undisturbedly Ever should loveliness recline On couch as beautiful as thine —

From out the depths the mountains rise And lift their shadows to the skies — In silent awfulness they tower . . . 43

Secondly, William Cullen Bryant, foremost among the New York “Knickerbocker” writers and a friend of Cole’s, merits a quote. “A Walk at Sunset” blends nature imagery with a narrative in which Bryant laments the (apparently inevitable) displacement of Native Americans by “the offspring of another race” and “new empires built upon the old.” Speaking directly to the sun, Bryant imagines the pre-human soundscape: For ages, on the silent forests here, Thy beams did fall before the red man came To dwell beneath them; in the shade the deer Fed, and feared not the arrow’s deadly aim. Nor tree was felled, in all that world of woods, Save by the beaver’s tooth, or winds, or rush of floods.44

In each account, silence is attached as a descriptor to something specific. It can encompass temporal concerns (midnight, the distant past), as well as particular features of the landscape, most frequently of all the “vast” forest. It accrues a host of related but subtly different emotional valences, employed to convey a nuanced impression of the environment for the reader. And, read literally, the invocation of silence masks a great profusion of sounds that would have been present in the individual-based soundscape: birds, insects, mammals, water, wind. A final example from Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow provides a related description of a Hudson Valley setting:

43 Marshall B. Tymn, ed. Thomas Cole’s Poetry: The Collected Poems of America’s Foremost Painter of the Hudson River School Reflecting His Feelings for Nature and the Romantic Spirit of the Nineteenth Century (York, PA: Liberty Cap Books, 1972), 174. 44 Tremaine McDowell, ed. William Cullen Bryant: Representative Selections, with Introduction, Bibliography, and Notes (New York: American Book Co., 1935), 26. Italics mine. In Truth, the Forest Hears Each Sound 17

Not far from this village, perhaps about two miles, there is a little valley or rather lap of land among high hills, which is one of the quietest places in the whole world. A small brook glides through it, with just murmur enough to lull one to repose; and the occasional whistle of a quail or tapping of a woodpecker is almost the only sound that ever breaks in upon the uniform tranquility. I recollect that, when a stripling, my first exploit in squirrel-shooting was in a grove of tall walnut-trees that shades one side of the valley. I had wandered into it at noontime, when all nature is peculiarly quiet, and was startled by the roar of my own gun, as it broke the Sabbath stillness around and was prolonged and reverberated by the angry echoes. If ever I should wish for a retreat whither I might steal from the world and its distractions, and dream quietly away the remnant of a troubled life, I know of none more promising than this little valley.45

This account focuses on lack-of-sound as an aural marker of the Hudson Valley but emphasizes quiet instead of silence, especially in juxtaposition with notions of progress (“world and its distractions,” “troubled life”). Something of a patrician elitist, Irving lamented the rise of populist politics in the early nineteenth century and was skeptical of the brand of strenuous positivity that coupled capitalist progress with pastoral beauty. His description of the “little valley” is of a piece with his hope that his works would serve as a moral counterweight for the rising commercialism he observed in New York life.46 Cooper, Cole, Bryant, and Irving are not implying a total lack of sound, or even quietness as such. These accounts experience the soundscape through the presence and lack of human sounds. Indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary’s first listing for “silence” denotes “abstaining or forbearing from speech or utterance”; only in the second constellation of meaning does the word imply “the state or condition when nothing is audible; absence of all sound or noise.” The OED also confirms the tendency to ascribe silence to obviously non-silent features of the landscape, such as the night, extending back at least to the 1500s. The aural slippage between a lack of human sound and a lack of all sound is therefore both common and highly revealing. These accounts of observer-based landscapes show an alienation from the natural soundscape common to Western modernity. From a soundscape ecology perspective, sound falls into three categories. Biophony are sounds made by living things; human voices and movements are encompassed by this category, together with birds, insects, and other animate objects.47 Anthrophony is the sounds of human artifacts: engines, tools, weapons, mechanized sound. Geophony is the sounds of abiotic features of the landscape such as water and wind.48 Commentators often note the increase of anthrophony in the modern world and soundscape ecologists have documented the danger to human and non-human quality of life due to rising anthrophonic noise levels. There has also been acknowledgement that undisturbed soundscapes constitute a conservation-worthy resource akin to undisturbed landscapes.49 Acoustic ecologists argue that diminishing the chorus of anthrophony may result in increased appreciation for non-

45 Washington Irving, History, Tales, and Sketches (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1983), 1058–59. Italics mine. 46 Gassan, The Birth of American Tourism, 83–84. 47 Some soundscape observers place all human sounds in the category of anthrophony. Because my project is an environmentalist one that seeks to underline commonalities with non-human biota, I opt for a definition of biophony inclusive of human bodies and voices. 48 Bryan C. Pijanowski et al., “Soundscape Ecology: The Science of Sound in the Landscape,” BioScience 61, no. 3 (2011). The authors credit Bernie Krause with coining the terms biophony and geophony, to which they add anthrophony. 49 Bernie Krause, Stuart H. Gage, and Wooyeong Joo, “Measuring and Interpreting the Temporal Variability in the Soundscape at Four Places in Sequoia National Park,” Landscape Ecology 26, no. 9 (2011), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980- 011-9639-6. 18 Music and Politics Summer 2019 human sound.50 This is certainly a useful step; yet the observer-based soundscapes of nineteenth-century commentators are interesting (and a little discouraging) because they illustrate that non-human sound often does not register perceptually even in the absence of human biophony and anthrophony. For some, the lack of soundscape presents an opportunity to fill it with human noise. This is the brand of silence that accompanies the observer-based landscape of Hudson-Fulton March. The silence is a gap waiting to be filled: the triumphant accomplishment of Hudson-Fulton is the domination of the wilderness to the (emphatically human) sounds of a march, filling up the aural emptiness of the forest and river while leaving the visual scenery for us to admire.51 Others, though, experience the soundscape through the prism of the Romantic’s nostalgia for a simpler time, the sublimity of the silent, primeval forest contrasted with the noisy humdrum of the present. For someone like Cole, the nighttime voyage north along the river, away from the noise and industry of New York City, produced a pleasurable feeling of aural isolation. I will change tack here and note it would be wrong to say these authors are never attentive to non- human sound in the environment. Indeed, an accompanying impulse discernable in observer-based soundscapes of this period is to hear nature as musical. Consider, for instance, this image from Cole’s “The Complaint of the Forest”: I heard a sound - ‘twas wild and strange - a voice As of ten thousand - musical it was A gush of richest concord - deep and slow - A song that fill’d the universal air –

It was the voice of the great Forest that arose From every valley and dark mountain top Within the bosom of this mighty land -52

The forest speaks at length, lamenting the rapidity with which the old-growth forest of the Hudson Valley is being cleared for agriculture and industry; it is a distinctly clear-eyed appraisal of the sorts of trade-offs between economic gain and natural preservation that Hudson-Fulton glosses over. Cole again images a kind of musicality emergent from the soundscape in “The Voyage of Life”: The song of birds uprose on every side And mingled sweetly in the jocund air That frolicked free across the dimpling tide And o’er that paradise of flowers so fair; And it did seem as though the sky and earth Sang choral hymns at some blessed Angel’s birth.53

And in the very poem in which Bryant comments on the silent forest of pre-human habitation, he

50 Krause is an eloquent advocate against an assumption that (non-human) soundscapes are less valuable, or less vulnerable, than landscapes, especially in Wild Soundscapes: Discovering the Voice of the Natural World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016) and The Great Animal Orchestra (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2017). 51 Mark M. Smith emphasizes the predictable quality of human sounds that filled the wilderness: “As Americans pushed westward, the rhythmic, ordered, sound of progress quashed the sporadic, unpredictable noise of the frontier before them.” “Listening to the Heard Worlds of Antebellum America,” 67. 52 Tymn, Thomas Cole’s Poetry, 102. 53 Ibid., 146. In Truth, the Forest Hears Each Sound 19 includes a seemingly contradictory image of sound in the same forest: When insect wings are glistening in the beam Of the low sun, and mountain-tops are bright, Oh, let me, by the crystal valley-stream, Wander amid the mild and yellow light; And while the wood-thrush pipes his evening lay, Give me one lonely hour to hymn the setting day.54

Finally, Alfred Street, upon seeing the Adirondack Mountains, wrote: “It seemed as if seraphic music might breathe from that dreamy mist, as if on those summits rested the quietude of heaven.”55 Here, music does not emerge from a specific source, but streams from the generalized environs. We might add “seraphic music” as another possibility for the observer-based soundscapes of A Coming Storm, Falls of the Kaaterskill, and other Hudson River School works—the downward-streaming rays of sunlight are easily imagined as accompanied by sustained choral or string sounds. The invocation of music is obviously more a literary trope than any record of literally hearing music in the environment; but it reveals much about how attention is directed within the landscape and how sound can be used to shape an experience of place. The musical landscape is consistent with the Romantic conception of nature as a divine tutor of the human soul.56 The sounding of music imbues the landscape with consciousness, suggesting that as music is organized by a human consciousness, for human purposes, so too must the landscape be organized by a similar, beneficent consciousness. The music described often sounds very much like European symphonic music, and as with the invocation of “vast” or “deep” silence, it is a way of communicating the grandeur of the landscape. At a time of emerging appreciation for natural science as a discipline of observation and evidence- gathering, the Hudson River School painters made sketching from nature and careful attention to the visual detail of geology, botany, and meteorology a central part of their technique.57 Cole went further still, making the case in his “Essay on American Scenery” that appreciation of, and attention to, nature was a vital element in every American’s education.58 But the attention paid to natural elements was intended to uncover the “ideal” forms that lay behind, or beyond, the prosaic detail of rock, wood, and water.59 The sonic descriptions included here grow from an impulse towards immersion in nature and specific consideration of the sound of the environment. Bryant implies that humans learn music from nature, invoking the wood-thrush, taking up the evening lay from the bird and adding his own.60 Cole too hears transference, the song of birds taken up by the more generalized “choral hymns” of sky and earth.

54 McDowell, Bryant: Representative Selections, 25. 55 Quoted in Driscoll, All That Is Glorious, 11. 56 Roderick Frazier Nash notes, in his chapter on “The Romantic Wilderness,” that notions of the wilderness “based on , deism, and the sense of the sublime” become popular only once it was increasingly possible to spend the majority of one’s life without encountering truly wild spaces, and that poets and artists who glorified nature in this way did so at a remove from the pioneer’s point of view. Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 5th ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 51–57. 57 Driscoll, All That Is Glorious, 14–15. 58 Schuyler, Sanctified Landscape, 37. 59 Rebecca Bailey Bedell, The Anatomy of Nature: Geology & American Landscape Painting, 1825–1875 (Princeton: Press, 2001), 50. 60 Cole creates a similar image in The Arcadian or Pastoral State (1834) in which humanity’s first musician, inspired by nature but improving upon it, accompanies on a wooden flute the efforts of shepherds and farmers as they create a Marxian middle landscape. 20 Music and Politics Summer 2019

Nevertheless, it is striking that, while gesturing towards non-human sound, the resulting sonic descriptions—hymns, choral songs—are so clearly idealized and, ultimately, human-sounding.

Table 2: Observer-based soundscapes of the nineteenth century

I have traced here two strains of sounding the experience of place in the Hudson Valley; Table 2 gives an overview of the shifting use of language in these strains. In one, non-human sound is rendered silent and wedded to the majesty of the landscape, in particular the vast, overawing forest and the mighty flow of the Hudson. The majesty and the silence are beautiful, mysterious, and perhaps a bit dangerous. Hearing a vaguely menacing silence creates a gap to be filled with human sound, paralleling the tendency to speak of the landscape, and especially the forest, as uncivilized or unimproved.61 For others, though, the sublimity of silence or the coziness of “quiet”—a gentler term implying only a comparative paucity of anthrophony, rather than stark absence—can be heard as a comforting retreat from the noisiness of an overcrowded world. Some commentators hear music in the environment and perceive in it a kind of emergent musicality made possible by the presence of human observers in nature. While gesturing towards the perception of non-human environmental sound, this conception reinforces the same human/nature divide by different means: nature is audible, but only to the extent that humans are there to hear it. Hence Bryant can sound the pre-human forest as silent and, in the same poetic breath, describe the musical inspiration he takes from the “evening lay” of the wood thrush. Despite the Romantics’ affection for the sublimity of nature, their experience of the soundscape is communicated as human music that, like Hudson-Fulton,

61 A representative sample of the visceral contempt nineteenth-century commentators could still feel for the Hudson Valley “wilderness”: “[An eighteenth-century survey] reported the land worthless and not fit for the habitation of man. . . . But eventually some pioneers . . . began to clear the forests, and as they gradually opened the woods, giving the sun’s rays a chance to warm the earth, the waters in the marshy grounds retreated and became absorbed in the atmosphere. The stagnant pools which were so unhealthy to the early settlers dried up, and the ground was converted into natural meadows. But emigration was so slow that it was not till 1720 that the county wore the aspect of civilization.” Henry D. B. Bailey, “Early History of Dutchess County,” in Local Tales and Historical Sketches (Fishkill, NY: John W. Spaight, Publisher, 1874), 294. In Truth, the Forest Hears Each Sound 21 immediately covers up the actual sounds of nature. Instead of directing attention outward to the individual-based landscape, to what is coming in at the ear, these hearings of the soundscape direct attention to inward reflection. Natural spaces, even in Cole’s conception, are worth inhabiting only to the extent that they stimulate thought and self-improvement in humanity.

Mahican and Munsee Sonic Practice in the Hudson Valley

In A Coming Storm, the bold mass of seraphic beams threatens to obscure the Native Americans, just noticeable in the middle ground. They are a symbol of the humanity-in-nature element within the composition, while also serving as the Other for the (white) viewer: for them, there is no pleasurable dissonance of viewing a stormy scene in a heated gallery, for they are portrayed as nomads, in their “natural” environs. The colonizer’s perspective encourages the viewer to feel the shiver of the brisk air while thinking, “At least it’s not me out there.” Just as the young Native American on the cover of Hudson-Fulton March stares portentously into the distance but does not sound, musically or otherwise, the Native Americans of A Coming Storm make no noise: the viewer is depicted at such a distance from them across the lake that even their voices would have been absorbed peacefully into the “silence.” Similarly, the solitary Native American in the Falls of the Kaaterskill is, like Cole’s description of the falls itself, “silent and savage.” The “quiet of the savage” is a theme throughout Cooper’s work, which, like Irving’s, often uses the natural environs of the Hudson Valley as fodder for pastoral mythologizing. In Last of the Mohicans, the Native American characters are firmly divided between “noble” and “bloodthirsty” “savages.” All, however, lack sound: , the villainous Huron, is first introduced as “still, upright, and rigid,” while at various points, the noble Mohicans and are characterized as “silent and reserved” or simply “silent.”62 Cooper’s influence on stereotypical portrayals of Native Americans—most often through film and other adaptations of his work—has been noted by several scholars.63 The widespread trope of the impassive, terse Native American still current today may well have its origin here. The link between silent Native Americans and silent forest will be apparent. The soundings of the colonizers’ observer-based landscape establish the Native Americans as of a piece with nature, emerging from its primordial majesty, with all the attendant prejudices of silence and savagery inferred. White commentators approach Native Americans from a deficit model, perceiving what they lack in Western characteristics and imagining them as “counterimages” of Western values.64 Thus, for a literate, visual, and noisy society, they lack speech and sound and are separate from the everyday world of human perception. Present when Europeans first arrived in the Hudson Valley, they are twinned to overawing nature.

62 Cooper, Leatherstocking Tales, 487, 505. Kilpatrick discusses the stereotypical presentation of the impassive Native American primarily from the vantage of portraying them as inarticulate and therefore mentally inferior. She notes that, by contrast, Cooper’s Native Americans are articulate when they do speak; nevertheless, we should not overlook the extent to which silence is central to their characterization in Mohicans. See Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians: Native Americans and Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 8 63 Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor, Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native American in Film (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 8. Cooper popularized this depiction but its presence in the American cultural milieu does predate him, as in the 1655 description of the Hudson Valley Native Americans as “notably melancholy, unaffected, calm, and of few words. . . . The little they do say is long considered, slowly spoken, and long remembered. When buying, trading, or having other business, they say no more than is necessary.” Adriaen van der Donck, A Description of New Netherland, trans. Diederik Willem Goedhuys (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 95. 64 Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian, 27. 22 Music and Politics Summer 2019

The wilderness is “silent or howling” in much of the discourse around American nature.65 When Native Americans are incorporated into the European observer-based soundscape, they are heard as inarticulate sound emerging from nature. Cooper again: “The alarmed colonists believed that the yells of the savages mingled with every fitful gust of wind that issued from the interminable forests of the west.”66 Michael Pisani charts an ongoing fascination with Native American sound throughout the nineteenth century. This resulted in the great popularity of wild dances, war whoops, and arcane rituals performed before enthralled white, urban audiences, “half realist/half exoticist” performances that alternately showcased genuine Native Americans hired to perform their culture, white performers in red face, and sometimes a mixture of the two.67 Silent and howling: as nature was heard by colonizers, so too were Native Americans. Noxious stereotypes aside, how might the area’s original inhabitants have heard the observer-based landscape? Any account of sonic practices in the Hudson Valley should engage with Native American hearing and sounding. I consider below several songs and stories sourced from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century accounts from the Algonquian tribes—principally the , Munsee, and Mahican— that inhabited the Hudson Valley and neighboring regions. Such a consideration underlines once again the contingent (and essentially ideological) aspect of hearing and sounding nature; my hope is that the mode of analysis I have pursued here, tracing the interaction of individual-based soundscapes with the cultural shaping of observer-based soundscapes, can be made part of what Ashley Reis calls the “iterative process of enacting decolonizing research methodologies.”68 The discussion above revealed some of the many constellations of meanings that can accrue between individual- and observer-based soundscape: between sounds as they come in at the ear, sounds as they are experienced, and the resultant cultural expressions that record that experience. With hopes of further problematizing the racial and environmental ontologies that are normalized through constructions of aural “emptiness” and the impassive Native American, I seek to adumbrate additional soundings of the same Hudson Valley landscape in Indigenous . Cherokee Nation citizen Brian Hudson reminds us that any juxtaposition of Native American and non-Native traditions risks creating a binary between two forms of cultural expression, in turn papering over cultural differences between individuals and tribes that are themselves heterogeneous and multiple.69 Gary Tomlinson discusses in particular the challenges of consideration of historical perspectives on Indigenous music and sonic practice: fully reconstructed forms of historical cultural expression are often lost to us, nor are we free to “upstream” past historical practices from present ones.70 As a potential way to navigate these issues, Hudson and Tomlinson both propose carefully historicized and localized consideration of specific texts, seeking what Tomlinson calls a “middle ground [where] we might nurture textured and unexpectedly specific accounts of uses to which song was put, of expectations for its efficacies, of the sense of world embodied in it.”71

65 Coates, “Strange Stillness of the Past,” 643. 66 Cooper, Leatherstocking Tales, 481–82. 67 Michael Pisani, Imagining Native America in Music (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 98, https://doi.org/10.12987/yale/9780300108934.001.0001. 68 Ashley E. Reis, Review of The River Is in Us: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community, by Elizabeth Hoover, Environmental History 24, no. 1 (2019): 190, https://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emy102. 69 Brian K. Hudson, “Introduction: First Beings in American Indian ,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 25, no. 4 (2013): 4–5, https://doi.org/10.5250/studamerindilite.25.4.0003. 70 Gary Tomlinson, The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 5. 71 Ibid.; Hudson, “First Beings in American Indian Literatures,” 7. In Truth, the Forest Hears Each Sound 23

The Hudson Valley in the pre-contact era was peopled principally by the Mahican and Munsee tribes of the Algonquian language group. Both are closely related to the Lenape nation originating further south in New York and New Jersey, and more distantly to tribes inhabiting a broad swath of the eastern United States and Canadian seaboard. Algonquian languages are distinct from Iroquoian dialects spoken by tribes who inhabited western New York; the Hudson was often the site of conflict between the two groups. The contact-era history of the Munsees and Mahicans reflects a cycle of displacement and resettlement that is sadly familiar. Large numbers of Munsees were forced from the Hudson Valley at the opening of the eighteenth century, landing first in western Pennsylvania and central Ohio. By 1800, many had settled in present-day Muncie, Indiana, while others gravitated to Ontario or settled in Salamanca, New York, on lands belonging to the Iroquoian Seneca Nation. Communities remain today principally in Oklahoma and Ontario. The Mahican tribe was evangelized by Moravian missionaries and, facing increasing land loss from colonial incursion, congregated in settlements in Shekomeko, New York, and Stockbridge, Massachusetts; in the eighteenth century, they were forced into Pennsylvania and central New York. By the 1830s, a community was established in Wisconsin that remains today.72 Music in eastern Algonquian cultural life was often responsorial, blending call-and-response or antiphonal textures; in addition to drums and voices, some European observers noted the presence of flutes.73 It accompanied dance and was incorporated into celebrations that marked changing seasons, such as the Green Corn ceremony that celebrated the arrival of the maize harvest. Music was functional, part of the careful attention paid to the nuance of seasonal change and variation, and commemorated life events, deaths, and past histories of important figures or the tribe in general.74 Songs were also folded into hours- long storytelling sessions in wintertime, enjoyed as a way to pass the time.75 In eastern Algonquian conceptions of music, a song is often a gift from a spirit being, sometimes received via a dream.76 Such songs can be associated with the hunt—the dream songs a hunter receives might presage the type and number of animals that will be caught in the next excursion; the hunter could then reconnect with the dream by performing the song before setting out on the hunt.77 Such conceptions thus conceive of musical texts originating from an extramusical source rather than a human composer. Such is the case for the song contained within an account from a Munsee storyteller, “The Boy Who Became a Flock of Quail.” In it, a child wanders away from his mother and climbs a tree, where he begins

72 Detailed overviews of Mahican and Munsee history can be found in William A. Starna, From Homeland to New Land: A History of the Mahican Indians, 1600–1830 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1ddr6w0; Julian H. Salomon, “Munsee and Mahican: The Indians of Dutchess County,” Yearbook of the Dutchess County Historical Society 68 (1983); Rachel M. Wheeler, To Live Upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), https://doi.org/10.7591/9780801463488. 73 James M. Volo and Dorothy Denneen Volo, Family Life in Native America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007), 62; John Bierhorst’s liner notes accompanying Cry from the Earth: Music of the North American Indians, (Folkways Records, 1979), compact disc; Rachel Wheeler and Sarah Eyerly, “Songs of the Spirit: Hymnody in the Moravian Mohican Missions,” Journal of Moravian History 17, no. 1 (2017): 16, https://doi.org/10.5325/jmorahist.17.1.0001. In addition to Cry from the Earth, other sound recordings of Algonquian and related musical traditions that inform the discussion here include Creation’s Journey: Native American Music, (Folkways Records, 1994), compact disc; Seneca Social Dance Music, (Folkways Records, 1980), compact disc; Anthology of North American Indian and Eskimo Music, (Folkways Records, 1973), compact disc; Songs and Dances of the Great Lakes Indians, (Folkways Records, 1956), compact disc; Heartbeat: Voices of First Nations Women, (Folkway Records, 1995), compact disc. 74 Beverley Diamond, Native American Music in Eastern North America: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 68. 75 John Bierhorst, The White Deer and Other Stories Told by the Lenape (New York: W. Morrow, 1995), 10–11. 76 Wheeler and Eyerly, “Songs of the Spirit,” 13. 77 Diamond, Native American Music in Eastern North America, 66. 24 Music and Politics Summer 2019 to sing a song: pitiful pitiful all alone it seems I’ll be a quail potchpai Potchpai is a rendering of the call of the quail (or northern bobwhite78) as the boy sings, his limbs begin to fall off and leave the tree, each time transforming into a quail and accompanied by the potchpai call. The storyteller closes by noting, “That’s why the Delawares always hated to kill quail: they’re that woman’s little boy.”79 This storyteller creates an observer-based soundscape, recreating the call of quail heard in the forest and explaining how the song made its way to us via a miraculous origin (the quail-boy). It directs attention to the natural soundscape and to the call of a specific species; the quail is heard via linkage between human and non-human species, worthy of the perceptual hearing accorded to a relation. The Mahicans referred to the Munsees as “grandfathers,” and the use of relational terms was an important way in which Munsee and Mahican cultures established allegiance or connection with other tribes or groups.80 Such kinship frequently extended, as in the potchpai song, to claims of relation between humans and animals; the Mahicans also used the term “grandfather,” with its valences of relation and respect, to refer to the northeastern rattlesnake.81 The potchpai story shows a porousness between species, humans and non- humans acting and speaking within the same frame of perception and being, one species turning into another. We might usefully juxtapose the potchpai song with Cole’s poem in which he hears “choral hymns” emanating from the Hudson Valley scenery. In both texts, music is sourced from the natural world but the human-natural link flows in different directions. Cole’s sounding is an adding in or hearing in of human- like voices to a soundscape where there are none—nature is made audible to the extent that it is made human. By contrast, the Munsee storyteller asserts that human audibility (the potchpai song) flows from listening to and identifying with a non-human aspect of soundscape; it is not an improvement or addition on the quail call, but a recreation of it. In another narrative, “The Girl Who Joined the Thunders,” told by a Lenape storyteller, flow and porousness adheres between humans and geophony (sounds such as water and wind). A young girl is taken by her new husband to live under a lake, which, beneath its surface, appears to resemble the everyday woodland she is used to. She grows suspicious of her husband, often waking in the night to find a snake-shaped form beside her. Repeated attempts to escape are foiled, until one day, running through the woods, “she thought of her dream helper, the weasel, and called upon him to save her.”82 The weasel fights off the pursuing snake and the girl emerges from under the lake, where she finds the Thunders waiting for

78 Call of the northern bobwhite. Recordings of the calls and songs of the northern bobwhite can be heard at: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Northern_Bobwhite/sounds. 79 Bierhorst, The White Deer, 31. Both the potchpai tale and the following story of the Thunders are sourced from this collection, a gathering of stories and songs with origins in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from Delaware and Munsee storytellers. 80 Salomon, “Munsee and Mahican: The Indians of Dutchess County,” 41. 81 Tom Arne Midtrød, The Memory of All Ancient Customs: Native American Diplomacy in the Colonial Hudson Valley (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 65, https://doi.org/10.7591/cornell/9780801449376.001.0001. 82 Bierhorst, The White Deer, 36. In Truth, the Forest Hears Each Sound 25 her. The Thunders rub her body and snakes drop from her, until “she was clean and human again.” The girl departs to live with the Thunders, telling her family: “I will tell you how you can tell when I am coming . . . [w]hen a cloud comes up making a continual rolling or rumbling sound, that is the noise made by my garments.”83 The Thunders story prompts us to attend to a taxonomy of the varieties of thunder; rooted in specificity of natural detail, it encourages listening to the individual-based soundscape, and geophony in particular, by emphasizing the interconnection of humans, animals, and non-living features of the landscape. A final example, the “Song of the Drum” from the Algonquian Passamaquoddy tradition, envisions dialogue between human and non-human sound.84 “Song of the Drum” would traditionally be performed by a motewolon (shaman), who details all of the animals and natural elements that listen to the drum, including “that great monster . . . the great Wind Bird [and] the water creatures.” As well, the “storm clouds and thunder reply with their drums.” No categorical distinction is made between the human voice, animal hearing, and non-human sound, and human artifacts like the drum are twinned to the drums of the thunder. There is a distinction in Passamaquoddy tradition between “drums” and “drumming”: the latter can be accomplished by striking shakers on the ground, with a roll of birch bark, or by beating hands on a resonant object.85 The distinction underlines what Diamond calls “careful attention to the of nature materials used for sound production.”86 Music is thus not an anthrophonic venture, but is a sounding of the landscape in dialogue with non-human agents. “Song of the Drum” resonates with Bryant’s poem in which his “hymn” is inspired by the “evening lay” of the thrush; the two pieces differ in their level of engagement with non-human sound, the extent to which two-way dialogue between human and non-human sound is made structural to the respective works. The examples of eastern Algonquian sonic practice discussed here differ from one another in several ways. The potchpai song and Thunders story are presented as origin myths, whereas “Song of the Drum” was given as ongoing engagement with natural sound. Too, the potchpai song underlines a familial relation between humans and non-humans, while the Thunders story hinges on an oppositional portrayal between girl and snake and celebrates the moment when the girl is “clean and human again.” A through line is the idea of sound as proof of life: an aural experience like thunder is heard as alive and capable of engaging in dialogue with human observers, rather than as the emanation of a (divine) consciousness that creates the sound of thunder.87 This stands in contrast to Cole’s and Bryant’s depictions of idealized environmental sound as audible proof of a beneficent consciousness in a space beyond or above the physical world. Another point of commonality is that in different ways, all three Algonquian works elide boundaries between human and non-human aural phenomena. Hudson-Fulton March gave evidence of an increasing perceptual separation between human and non-human sound as anthrophonic noise levels increased and sources of biophonic noise were covered up or pushed out along the shores of the Hudson; I have maintained that it sought to couple the visual enjoyment of natural scenery with the aural pleasure of music that filled the aural “silence.” As we have seen, musical works like “Song of the Drum” and the potchpai story erase the distinction between biophony, geophony, and anthrophony, underlining the idea that to inhabit an environment is to be immersed in the specificity of natural sound.

83 Ibid., 37. 84 Brian Swann, Algonquian Spirit: Contemporary Translations of the Algonquian Literatures of North America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 95–96. 85 Ibid., 93–94. 86 Diamond, Native American Music in Eastern North America, 21. 87 Rath, How Early America Sounded, 16, 30. 26 Music and Politics Summer 2019

Conclusion: New Hearing in an Old Soundscape

In his song “I Must Belong Somewhere” (2007), singer Conor Oberst concludes: “In truth, the forest hears each sound, / Each blade of grass as it lies down. / The world requires no audience, no witness.” Opening our ears to the way currents of history have shaped our hearing in a specific geographic locale clarifies aspects of how we inhabit and value natural spaces. The old question—Does a tree falling in the forest with no one around make a noise?—makes sense only in a tradition of hearing like that found in the writers and poets of the nineteenth century, that holds human presence and human hearing as an ontological category apart. Particularly in light of the mounting climate crisis and the Trump administration’s opposition to the very idea of environmental , it is vital that we unpack such constructions surrounding nature in hopes of identifying or creating commonalities where none may currently seem to exist. Thinking about how various actors have shaped their own, and others’, embodied experience of the landscape through sound is one step towards moving past a Western, anthropocentric hearing of nature and exploring the possibility of opening our ears to other soundings. As Ojibwe Nation water protector Winona LaDuke points out, “it is entirely possible that the paradigms of thought and action that have created the problems our society currently faces may not be the paradigms that will create the solutions.”88 This paper has pursued ecomusicological inquiry through a deliberately eclectic assemblage of materials, united by a common geographical-temporal location and the way all give evidence of hearing or sounding in that location. We are used to treating musical artifacts as texts and reading them for their implicit ideological claims. I have followed R. Murray Schafer in reading soundscape, too, as a text laden with cultural meaning. Accounting for sound in granular detail directs attention to how discursive ideologies shape the individual-based soundscape—the clearing of forests, the manipulation of species blend, the channeling of water—to suit our sonic whims. Granular detail, in turn, can inform our consideration of the observer-based soundscape, which hears and values a selected portion of the total soundscape through the prism of ideology. In a piece like Hudson-Fulton March, we hear a condensed narrative, an experience of place that packages centuries of history in the Hudson Valley into a neat and self-satisfied parcel. Creating a more ecologically just future might begin with something like its opposite: exploding the soundscape, zooming in on the sounds of the individual-based landscape. A granular methodology combining music and soundscape in the same critical lens opens the door to a fuller consideration of the sounding ideologies of the contemporary Hudson Valley, ranging across Pete Seeger’s musical representations of the Hudson River in service of environmental activism, to the speech communities and live music heard at trendy farmers’ markets, to the musical soundtracks of real estate ads hawking the area’s pastoral charms to moneyed residents relocating from New York City. The sounds of a beautiful place are often the sounds of power, contestation, and control—how we respond to what those sounds tell us is an open question.

88 Winona LaDuke, “Water is Life,” (lecture, University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, Bradford, PA, November 15, 2018). In Truth, the Forest Hears Each Sound 27

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In Truth, the Forest Hears Each Sound 31

Acknowledgements

I thank the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford for ongoing support of research related to this project; Kira Thompson, Head of Local History at the Poughkeepsie Public Library, who located a great deal of valuable archival material; and Dr. Kevin Ewert, who was a sounding board on ideas relating to several aspects of this paper.