The music of May
From the noisy baa-ing of his Ouessant sheep to the cuckoo’s eponymous and repetitive, yet melodic, cuc-cu call, John Lewis-stempel lauds our natural summer noises and asks why we don’t venerate soundscapes in the same way as landscapes
THE owner of Ouessant sheep has a rare insight into Gulliver’s Travels. To describe Ouessant (pronounced ‘Wess-on’) as Lilliputian is wildly accurate. Originating in Brittany, Ouessant are the smallest native breed of sheep in the world. Max, our Ouessant ram, mature and magnificent, stands a mighty 19in high at the shoulder. But, just as miniature Jack Russells are all dog, Ouessant are all sheep. They, for instance, baa convincingly.
I was enjoying their contented communication this morning, as, up on the hill, in the greened copse, a cuckoo sounded its amplified bassoon notes of cuc-cu. Or ,as Wordsworth versed the bird’s booming call:
Is it not odd that we venerate landscape, but are careless about soundscape? I mean, we talk about ‘blots on the landscape’, yet never about ‘scratches on the soundscape’. Listening to the music of a May morning in hilly farmland, I idly totted up eight iconic sounds of the British countryside—a sort of personal Desert Island Rural Discs, the tracks that would remind us of home if unfortunately stranded. In addition to the calling of the cuckoo, the soft calling of sheep, my list went as follows: the clip-clop of horses on a lane on a wet autumnal afternoon; the lonely caw of rooks over furrows; the barking of the fox under a December moon; a skylark on a bright April morning; church bells on lazy Sunday mornings and the call of curlews above moorland. Precious sounds. Our aural heritage.
Some of these quintessential rural sounds have been captured in culture. Wordsworth poetised the cuckoo, Shelley the skylark, Keats the nightingale and Clare almost every bird of his native Northamptonshire. In music, the British countryside is particularly well represented. (Indeed, we could make the case that pastoralism is British classical music.) We have, for instance, Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, Elgar’s Enigma Variations (complete with the sound of a dog falling into the River Wye), Finzi’s Eclogue, George Butterworth’s The Banks of Green Willow and not forgetting Sumer is Icumen In, the Old English Round written in about 1226, with its famous phrases: ‘Sing, cuccu. Sing, cuccu, nu. Sumer is i-cumen in.’ The Round’s lesserknown phrases include: ‘Awe bleteth after lomb’, ‘Lhouth after calve cu’, ‘Bulluc sterteth’ and ‘bucke verteth’.
Appreciation of rural sounds, even the vulgar noise of snoring cattle and farting buck deer, is very old
When I am lying on the grass Thy two-fold shout I hear, That seems to fill the whole air’s space As loud far off as near.
Appreciation of rural sounds, even the vulgar noise of snoring cattle and farting buck deer, is very old. My personal list of the British countryside top eight was immediately challenged by the farmyard cockerel standing on the roof of the hen house and crowing in my ear. Then the breeze riffed the leaves of the trees. The joy of May for Nature-listeners is, of course, the melisma of the birds’ dawn chorus, but also that our deciduous trees are now, finally, fully clothed. Even the laggards; oak and lime. Each type of tree, the wind in its foliage, makes a definitely different sound due to the design of leaf and branch—aspens babble, fir trees hiss.
Trees are musical instruments and they play subtle symphonies. Elgar, of all our composers, understood this, once writing to his friend A. J. Jaeger. ‘The trees are singing my music—or have I sung theirs?’
But the cockadoodling of the cockerel, the singing of the skylark, the peal of church bells, the chatter of the aspen are all, in various ways, threatened. The industrialisation of agriculture has all but killed off the traditional hen-pecked farmyard, as well as turning tracts of the countryside into fields as silent as mausoleums.
Where the skylark does sing, he, like the aspen, is often obliterated by the tinnitus of traffic. Holiday-makers and incomers sometimes fail to hear the charms of cockerels and campanology.
Several years ago, second-home owners on L’île d’oléron, off the west coast of France, brought a case against a cockerel, Maurice, for crowing too early. The locals organised a ‘Save Maurice’ petition and a judge eventually upheld the cock-a-doodledoos, ordering the plaintiffs to pay €1,000 in damages to Maurice’s owner, Corinne Fesseau. Then the National Assembly unanimously backed a bill from Pierre Morel-à-l’huissier, a deputy from the Lozère, a remote country area, to protect France’s ‘sensory heritage’, meaning ‘the crowing of the cockerel, the noise of cicadas, the odour of manure’.
This May dawn, I ‘hear around’. The wind is in the willows, the cuckoo is calling, the cockerel trumpeting a réveille in the yard. Should such a law be passed in Britain? Twice crowned victor of the Wainwright Prize for Nature writing, for ‘Where Poppies Blow’ and ‘Meadowland’, John Lewis-stempel’s latest bestselling book, ‘Woodston: The Biography of an English Farm’, was published last year (Doubleday, £20)