 Generally
people have the
perception that only human
beings sing songs and create
music. If they paid closer attention and listened, they
would find that nature creates music on its own behalf, sometimes
utilizing the
same scales, rhythms, and harmonies, as humans do.
Trekking locally, I recently
encountered twin cascades
dropping into a wonderland of
pools. Stopping to listen closely, observed that the
cascades were tuned in perfect thirds. I backed up
twenty feet, trying to pick out the trace of a song emerging from the
falls and the pools. This is no easy task, demanding equal parts
concentration and imagination.
Years ago, while on a backpack through
the Sierra Nevada range, I made it my job to learn how to optimize
listening, and often camped beside promising waters to study the
aesthetics of stream song. Pleasing tones seem to emerge best just after
dusk, when the air cools down and vapor collects in the canyon bottoms to
enhance the bass tones concealed by the dry heat of the day. I noticed
that water falling over a rock may produce distinct intervals of notes,
essentially rhythms, that either harmonize or cancel intervals created in
nearby falls. Water dropping short distances into deep pools produces the
most musical tones. Like taking in a distant view through tall trees, a
song may alter inexorably as a person moves a few feet in either
direction.
A man I once met on a trail on the upper
Kings River insisted that certain streams hold every song ever sung. After
testing his statement for years, I conclude that he overstated the case.
Large roaring streams may contain every song, but they achieve this
dubious distinction by producing white noise that buries all the pure
tones. It's like saying radio static holds every song. The width and depth
of a stream, its rate of flow, and its angle of descent mostly determine
musical potential. Large roaring streams are too noisy to be musical.
Lax-flowing streams are too quiet. Mere drips falling down a stairway of
ledges into deep pools usually provide the most pleasing timbres, although
they generate too little variety of tones to grant the human imagination
free reign in picking and choosing notes to create an actual song. The
most musical streams vary between two and six feet in width. They often
lie just above or below alpine meadows where the land is sufficiently
canted to produce falls, although never more than two feet in height.
Wright Creek, located a few miles
southwest of California's Mount Whitney was the most musical creek I ever
experienced. I camped on a ledge just below an enormous lake-strewn meadow
and above a steep canyon that disappeared into a forest. The first evening
I listened to an infinitely deep baritone singing El Toreador for nearly
half an hour. I was stunned by the performance, and decided to stay
another night. The second evening, the singer sounded like Elvis crooning
a ballad I'd never heard before. I felt certain that if, somehow, I could
have gone backward in time to 1958, and then guided Elvis to this very
spot, the song we both heard would have been one of his greatest hits. I
conclude that some of humanity's most ancient tunes were learned by our
distant ancestors while camped on the slopes above musical streams. Music
they heard rising from the falling waters, they attributed to
fairies-water spirits--who hid in the rock cavities by day and emerged at
dusk to start their all night songfests. No doubt, someone in the tribe of
listeners learned the tune and taught it to the rest of his people. The
people may have named certain streams after individual fairies. And when
their progeny revisited the same stream a hundred years hence, the tribe's
songline map of the mountains cued them to listen to the same fairy
singing a tune they now knew by heart. 
Jim Nollman is a musician and founder of
Interspecies Inc.a nonprofit organization that publishes the
Interspecies Newsletter and is best known for a 25 year program of musical
communication with free-swimming cetaceans
www.interspecies.com
Reprinted by Permission.
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