and deciphering dolphin speech. He told me that they were developing, among other things, small, hand-held echolocation devices for boat owners, acoustic engineers, and the blind. He loaned me a prototype of one of these devices, called Sondols, and I began experimenting with it, learning how to interpret the echoes it made off objects and reflective surfaces. At about that time, I began reading Listening in the Dark, Donald R. Griffin’s wonderful book on acoustic orientation by animals and men. He describes how bats and other nocturnal creatures survive exquisitely by identifying objects and obstacles by the echoes that come back from them. They can discriminate between the sounds that go out and those that come back, which carry information about the environment. Actually, the title, Vespers, comes from the North American bat of the family Vespertilionidae.
If your purpose is sound, a bat is a useful creature to imitate because his purpose is entirely useful. He wants to play his environment so that he can move around in it.
Yes. It’s not to leave our environment now to go under the ocean or into outer space, where we could find ourselves without information coming into our eyes. In that case, we would have to rely on our ears and we haven’t done that very well as far as I can see. So Vespers is in part an educational piece. You’d be surprised how many people don’t know about echoes; some very fine musicians have been at performances and they think it’s about phase relationships. They just don’t hear the echoes, and I want people to hear those echoes.
They don’t always sound like what you usually think of as echoes; I mean, sometimes it’s the timbre of the click from the gun that seems to change. I know when I was performing the piece I wasn’t especially aware of a return click for every outgoing click because it’s much too complex; what you do hear is that what seems to be coming out of the gun changes as you move it to different areas in the room.
Yes. I know that if four people are playing in the same space, the echo situation is so complex that the players cannot read their own echoes; therefore, they have to stop. So the task that I set them, that is, to orient themselves in space and to move from one place to another, regulates the texture of the piece; I don’t have to compose that.
So again it imitates the usefulness of a bat’s equipment. You perform the piece in the most practical manner; when you can’t do what you’re trying to do, you don’t do it.
Right, I am satisfied not to compose terribly much but to let the space and the situation take over. In other words, I don’t intrude my personality on a space, I don’t bring an idea of mine about composition into a space and superimpose it on that space, I just bring a very simple idea about a task that players can do and let the space push the players around. In that way, I always learn something about a space and never forget one in which I’ve done the piece. It’s as if I take very slow audio photographs of that space.
The Sondols have their task to perform and they do it with clicks that sound like insects. In the versions of the piece where you handed out the little toy clickers, what relationship do they have to the people playing? Are they sort of a responsorial chorus from the environment? How are they supposed to respond to the mix in the air?
To the what?
To the mix of the ticks in the air.
Well, I remember last September Mary and I drove down to North Carolina from Ann Arbor, and as we were going through Kentucky, we stopped at a gas station. Out back, there was a whole field filled with cicadas, I think they were cicadas anyway. They were producing a great deal of noise and I don’t know what intent they had, whether it was social or sexual. Even so, I enjoyed the situation that thousands of them were producing these marvelous sounds at the same time. I also remember a bush I used to pass by. One day, it was August, I heard an insect in it, maybe a cicada or some other insect, but anyway it was alone and was producing a tremendous amount of sound, which echoed within the bush and off a cement wall, and I couldn’t help but superimpose my idea that it must have heard the echo that came back. Now perhaps its sound was for another use, but with my understanding of echolocation, I thought that, well, I’m sure it heard that echo. So whether the single insect in the bush or the thousands in the field were actually involved in the process of echolocating, I got the idea of having members of audiences participating in some way. It would do two things: one, relieve the anxiety or tension built up during a performance in which there are only four Sondol players and, two, while each person wouldn’t actually have an experience in echolocating, the room would buzz and ring in the same way that that field in Kentucky seemed to ring.
Would you agree that the bias of most people who feel themselves familiar with music toward expecting instruments probably hides the point of the piece from them? They expect the sound guns themselves to be of interest, when what you’re trying to do is to elucidate the particular place they happen to be.
Well, after performances people come up and play with the Sondols, a situation that I like very much, but one of the first things they do is put their hands over the loudspeakers and pretend they’re playing a trombone or some other brass instrument. They make wah-wah sounds or speed the pulses up and slow them down in rhythmic effects; they try to do old things with new means. Perhaps that’s strange for me to say because I’m tuning in to a very old activity, bats and other nocturnal creatures have been using echoes for years, so I’m more old-fashioned than anybody.
It seems a very social idea, a friendly idea, to have the audience be able to do something too.
Yes.
Do you think that the time will come when you can give a concert and the audience won’t be anxious, when they can accept it that an aspect of the concert is taking advantage of the social situation of being together, and so won’t feel left out?
I think so. It seems to work pretty well when I explain the piece before the performance, that is, when I tell the audience what is going to happen and how it’s going to happen. But even so, there’s often anxiety when a blindfolded performer bumps into something. Once in Zagreb, Mary Ashley got completely disoriented and ended up in a corner, but if the audience understands that, they will feel concern. I’d like to keep that in the piece.
Do you think that audiences that get uncomfortable perhaps feel they’re not getting any information from the music and are therefore gathered together for no purpose?
Perhaps if they don’t hear the echoes very much. I just did the piece in Cambridge for the Harvard School of Education, and for the first time, an audience that wanted to participate didn’t make banal rhythmic patterns. Individuals in the audience made clucking vocal sounds that imitated the sondols fairly accurately, and it didn’t bother me.
You mentioned that you wanted as neutral a sound as possible . . .
Right.
. . . from the clicking guns, and of course the patterns they make when they’re being played together are indeterminate, so it might seem as if you’re not getting any intentional information from the guns. Yet you can form a clearer picture of the environment because they’re not trying to tell you stories.
Right.
So I wonder what you think about the concept that musical performance is sending messages, because in this case, though no specific message appears to be sent, it’s paradoxical in a way, you do obtain specific knowledge about your environment.
Well, you know the old story about art as communication!
What do you think about that story?
We composers always denied it, but if you make a picture in sound about the space you’re in, you’re telling people something. The performers are spread out in the space when they start, and each of them can tell the others where he or she is and what the echo situation is in that geographical location. The audience receives the same information, so I suppose you’d have to say that Vespers is a communication piece.
It’s curious that by giving up your prerogative as a composer of sending information, you’re allowing the environment to reveal itself.