Circle of Scholars

Most of North America froze over the 2009 holiday season.  Here in North Central Texas, we had a rare Christmas blizzard, with all of the attendant joys and challenges.  But the real story started when the temperature warmed up.

Mud, mud, and more mud.  Snow that had drifted and swirled in wind-driven filigree vanished, leaving behind a deep slush of mud.  With a mile-and-a-half of dirt road separating our front porch from a paved surface, the mud has created heroic driving challenges.  And sparked its own musical rhythm!

With mud cascades à la Jackson Pollock splashing around my little white Malibu, I find myself thinking about the connection of mud and music.  Music interacts with everything, so it must be connected to mud, right?

Of course, the most famous Mud-Music interaction in recent history took place in 1969 at Woodstock, NY.  And apparently in September there will be the 1^st Annual Music in the Mud Festival in Jacksonville, Texas, with the headliner group being the Eli Young Band.

But let’s look farther back.  What about actual repertoire?  Are there mud-pieces, or, put more graciously, pieces of music inspired by mud?  We find plenty of snow and ice pieces (e.g., Debussy’s “Snowflakes are Dancing” from Children’s Corner).  But, mud pieces?

Music more than once has depicted the rugged oxen cart struggling through ruts of mud.  Muddy, tired characters trudged on and off opera stages.  But orchestral tone poems about mud?  I’m still looking for them.

And what about the daily realities of musicians struggling with mud?  Remember that fine scene in the 1984 Peter Schaeffer film Amadeus where Mozart is traveling down the cobblestone streets to play for the Emperor, folks running behind his carriage, carrying his fortepiano?  Beyond questioning why Emperor Joseph II couldn’t provide Mozart an instrument to play on (surely he had them in his palace . . . ), we might consider just how hard it was to transport instruments in those days.

Streets throughout European history were dusty, dirty, and downright filthy.  Of course, the lucky folks rode in carriages.  You know, those nice carriages that look so romantic on the silver screen?  Ha!  I finally got to ride in one—a restored German carriage built in 1854.  I never realized how bouncy, cold, and uncomfortable they were.  Not to mention prone to breaking down.

Plus, only the musical stars could afford to ride in such fancy things.  Rank-and-file musicians were back to trudging with their instruments through the muddy streets.  Puddles of mud and ice would splash not just on cloaks and boots, but on precious fiddles, wrapped in whatever protection the musician could find.

And that brings us to instrument cases.  Musicians have always tried to protect their instruments.  A recent book by Glenn Wood on violin cases called The Art and History of Violin Cases (Authorhouse, 2008) brings us a history of both ordinary cases and the extraordinary ones—those crafted for royalty and virtuosi.  Here practical protection from rain and mud was transformed into priceless objets d’art.

Today, elementary school students shoulder instrument cases that would have wowed musicians of the past.  Cases made to withstand all kinds of weather, not to mention mistreatment in the band hall!  How those players in Mozart’s orchestras would have envied those seventh-graders.  Imagine the lamentation they might write:

Here I, with genius fingers ten,
Wrap in cloth my precious lyre,
While they, so clearly lesser men,
Boast such princely case-attire.

Which brings us to . . . poetry.  Remember the watchword in our Discovering Music course: Prima le parole, e dopo la music (“First the words, and then the music”). We must wend our way back to poetry to see what we can find.

Voila: mud and poetry meet up wonderfully in this poem by poet Robert Service (1874-1958).

Mud is Beauty in the making,
Mud is melody awaking;
Laughter, leafy whisperings,
Butterflies with rainbow wings;
Baby babble, lover’s sighs,
Bobolink in lucent skies;
Ardours of heroic blood
All stem back to Matrix Mud.

Mud is mankind in the moulding,
Heaven’s mystery unfolding;
Miracles of mighty men,
Raphael’s brush and Shakespear’s pen;
Sculpture, music, all we owe
Mozart, Michael Angelo;
Wonder, worship, dreaming spire,
Issue out of primal mire.

In the raw, red womb of Time
Man evolved from cosmic slime;
And our thaumaturgic day
Had its source in ooze and clay . . .
But I have not power to see
Such stupendous alchemy:
And in star-bright lily bud
Lo! I worship Mother Mud.*

Famous for his rough-and-tumble poems “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” Service was clearly spurred to delicate heights . . . by mud.  Absolutely marvelous!

Remember to scrape your boots!  And as you do, pay respect to that mud!

*Reprinted with permission

Image by drgillybean – Creative Commons