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| Autumn Fog on the Delaware River, photo ©Joy Kreves |
A sudden duet of animal call and electronic alarm pierced the otherwise still night. I'd forgotten to take the house alarm off before I ran downstairs to open the sliding glass door to better hear the strange animal noises from the back yard. They'd started around midnight, and it must have been around 2am by the time I finally decided to get up for a better listen, since they were keeping me awake anyway.
It's hard to tell where sounds are coming from at night; they seem to echo off the river that isn't far away, and bounce off the mountains and were probably not coming from our back yard. My first impression was of lowing cows, but the nearest cows that I know of would probably not sound this close or we'd hear them often. Wouldn't we? There seemed to be more than one and I judged the noise as having to come from a large mammal. We do have the occasional bear come around, and way too many deer. I decided it was most likely a deer mating call.
When I googled deer rutting sounds, the first video that came up was of a red-tailed deer in Scotland.
http://youtu.be/jf7bOSPihrk
That did sound very much like what I heard, but audios of the white-tailed deer we have here in New Jersey, did not come close to the sound at all! How odd that the two kinds of deer would have such different "roars." Days later, I don't really think the sounds could have been from our deer. The next day neighbors confirmed hearing the noises also and they were equally confused. Maybe it was cows after all; it's still a mystery.
In further pursuing an answer I came across this audio track of Shakuhachi, traditional Japanese bamboo flute, used for meditation and traditional Japanese music. This audio is part of a traditional piece that evokes the calls of deer in the autumn forest. The music sounds nothing like what I'd heard, of course, but is very lovely and appropriate for this season. "Distant Cry of the Deer":
http://youtu.be/f6ljwJoG8zU
According to the International Shakuhachi Society website the "Distant Cry of the Deer" was composed by Ueda Hodo who began the Ueda Ryu School with his brother around 1917.
What an image this music creates for me! I see the two deer standing in the midst of a forest of trees that are clothed in brilliant autumnal reds and oranges. A misty fog lingers between the mountains, hovering over a small creek that separates the deer. As they call to each other, leaves slightly quiver on the trees before they release to gently float down through the fog. It is a love scene full of longing, and the breathy bamboo flute sound aligns in my mind with this misty image.
Music can be so much like painting! In high school I had a wonderful violin teacher at The Chicago Conservatory of Music, Ki Joo Lee. I was having a bit of trouble with a passage in some concerto I was playing. Mr. Lee finally stopped me and described a scene...I wish I could remember exactly what he said now, but maybe it was something about walking through a shadowed forest, going around some turn, and then suddenly seeing a mountain range...perhaps there was a sunrise there, too... with a feeling of freedom at hand. Mr. Lee clearly related to the passage in the music in a personal, emotional and visual way, and I immediately played the passage much better, having realized on many levels, what it was (or could be) all about. Of course the best visual art touches us in those same ways.
The incident with the unidentified animal noises has brought home how little I know about my surroundings. In this way I am like so many American suburbanites, living amidst many plants I can't name and many animals whose cries I can't identify. We don't know our own environment! This year it took a more nature-aware friend to point out to me that our usually brilliant red and yellow autumn leaves are all dotted and disfigured by the drought we had last summer. There is a new term for our condition of ignorance about our environment, called "Nature Deficit Disorder," caused by living too much of our lives indoors. I am sad to find myself afflicted. Maybe we need a new version of the song every child is taught to learn farm animal identification - a version for city dwellers and suburbanites:
Old McDonald had a forest / EIEIO / and in that forest he had some deer / EIEIO / With a ? ? here and a ? ? there .... everywhere a ? ? ...
How many American adults can sing what the deer, the bear, the bobcat, the opossum....the raccoon....the squirrel....the skunk... the coyote...the tree frogs...say ?
Shame on us! We Americans should know all of these and more! The composer of "The Distant Cry of the Deer" knew what deer sound like before taking artistic liberties with that sound. I am saying that creativity comes from everything the artist has experienced as well as everything the artist knows. To be deeply touching, abstract art also must stem from an understanding of the environment the artist lives in. I've seen a lot of superficial abstract work! People often think it is easy to create abstract work because it doesn't have to conform to the visual rules of realism, but actually it does have to stem from that same realism or it rings false. My violin teacher understood that and the bamboo flute composer and player in the track above understood it. I am beginning to understand it in a much deeper way.
