Marvelous Possibilities For Living Connections Across Time

Visual art from the distant past is in lively dialogue with the present. Partly, this is a result of the recency of the discoveries. The Paleolithic flutes of southern Germany were found more than a century after the first figurines and cave paintings. But flute pieces were unearthed in the 1920s from the Paleolithic layers from the Isturitz cave in southwestern France. Perhaps the fragmentary nature of these finds accounts for their failure to spark interest among contemporary composers or musicians? Music also has difficulty traveling across deep time. Millennia later, we can see that ivory carved into a figurine is visual art. On viewing Paleolithic carvings, sculptors can immediately relate what they see to contemporary work. Although the cultural context of the original artist is lost, the objects still speak directly to us. But an ivory flute unearthed from a cave is silent. Instrumental music requires a musician to bring the art to life. Music is always ephemeral and relational, animated by the connection between instrument and player. Its essence and form cannot be captured and displayed in a collection of artifacts.

The World Keeps On Turning

The advent of electronic forms of sound making in the twentieth century also likely contributed to the disinterest among composers and players in Paleolithic instruments. Electronics gave musicians vast new powers. Compared with this, the discovery of bone flutes superficially similar to other flutes worldwide was a modest spur to imagination at best. But Paleolithic instruments offer marvelous possibilities for living connections across time. Music’s ephemerality places the living artist at the center of discovery. Springtime has come to southern Germany and I am sunning myself on a partly wooded slope, my back to the mouth of a cave in a limestone escarpment. In front of me is a steep incline, suffused with the aromas of reawakening wildflowers, maple and beech leaves, and grasses. The canopy cover is sparse, admitting the gentle afternoon light. From where I sit, the slope drops to a small river weaving around fields, wooded copses, and scattered buildings on a level valley floor. The pit from which they were removed is now backfilled with coarse stones, and its coordinates are marked with vertical strings hung from the ceiling, preserved and mapped ready for future explorations. A latticed steel fence keeps out visitors. As I sit on the chalky soil in front of the cave entrance, a Eurasian blackcap gives me a lesson in acoustics.

All I've Got to Do

The small bird wings to a low branch a few meters away and looses a melody, a string of ten fast, clear notes, each one inflected up or down. After a pause, he gives a variation of the original, this one with a couple extra sweeping notes. For the next five minutes, he unspools these phrases and rests, switching among variations. The song has a rich timbre, a rapid flow of fluty notes, a performance lauded in bird field guides as one of the finest in Europe. But most striking to me today is how the sound comes alive in this space. The blackcap chose a perch at the edge of a natural bowl, a partial enclosure for sound. Limestone buttresses extend on either side of the cave mouth, ribs of stone that have resisted erosion. The cliff overhangs here too, forming a high partial roof. The cave itself is a modest indentation in the limestone wall. The view to the valley is through a gap in the buttresses. No doubt this natural enclosure afforded protection for ice age inhabitants from wind and unwelcome visitors. It also created a space in which sound blooms.

Let It Loose

The space cups each note of the blackcap’s song, causing them to linger and ripen. The blackcap’s notes reflect back to me from the limestone walls, the reflections arriving about fifteen milliseconds after the sound that flowed directly from beak to ear. Because the reflections arrive so soon, my brain perceives them as part of the original sound, not as separate echoes. The reflections give a feeling of great clarity and richness. The architects and acoustic engineers who design modern recital halls pay special attention to what they term these early reflections. Large baffles above and to the side of the stage shoot early reflections straight to the audience, giving a feeling of intimacy and verve even in larger spaces. A few natural spaces do the same, notably Red Rocks Amphitheater at the foot of the Rocky Mountains near Denver. There, sedimentary rocks from the Paleozoic form a bowl and high side walls that combine to produce a spectacular performance space, a larger version of this cave entrance in Germany. The walls of shoebox recital halls produce a similar effect, bouncing sound from the players seated at one end of the narrow box all the way down the length of the room. Geißenklösterle cave and its buttresses act as reflectors for the blackcap’s song and, perhaps, long ago, the notes of a swan or mammoth flute. Enclosures also add reverberation and thus a sense of depth and richness to sound, as every bathroom singer knows. The polished hard ceramic tiles of bathroom walls are excellent reflectors of sound, and so each sung note ricochets over and over. These reflections meld into a reverberation that prolongs the life of each note. The effect at the cave mouth is subtler than a bathroom, maybe half a second of slight reverberation. But this is enough to add a touch of tonal gold to the bird’s voice. Half an hour’s brisk walk south of Geißenklösterle is another cave, Hohle Fels, the hollow rock. The cave entrance is a dark maw at the base of the slope, wide and high enough to admit a small truck. In the past, farmers stored hay inside, and during the Second World War, military vehicles were stashed here. Now the entrance is protected by a metal gate hung with signs naming visiting hours. In front, the narrow river meanders across a meadow glowing with thousands of dandelion blooms. Inside the cave mouth, beyond the cabinets of maps and artifacts that line the entrance, a passageway heads straight back into the hillside.