Text: Kathleen Brown, “Poe, Pipes, and Pathos,” January 23, 1995 (a paper written for a class on Media Rhetoric and Aesthetics)

[page 1:]

Baltimore takes Poe very seriously. To commemorate his death (October 7, 1849), the Poe Society lays wreaths on the grave and sponsors a lecture at the Enoch Pratt Library, not too far from the cemetery at Fayette and Greene Streets, Baltimore's oldest. To celebrate his birth (January 19, 1809), the Poe House generally collaborates in sponsoring some sort of theatrical presentation at Westminster Hall (formally the church to which the graveyard is attached) followed by a toast at the grave. And, of course, every January 19 since 1949 an unknown visitor has laid three roses and a half-bottle of cognac on the original grave in the rear corner of the cemetery (Poe's body was moved in 1875 to the Fayette Street entrance after Baltimore schoolchildren raised money for a new, rather ornate monument). No one knows who this visitor is. For many years, no one had even caught a glimpse of him. In 1993, he left a note saying, “The torch will be passed”; and, indeed, this year, observers report seeing a younger man, clad in the black cloak and fedora of his predecessor, leaving the scene.

On Saturday night (January 21) there was, as usual, a presentation at Westminster Hall. Conrad Pomerleau, a Poe impersonator, presented a two-act play based on Poe's writing. The play was followed by a procession to the grave, led by a bagpiper from the John F. Nicoll Pipe Band. It is not the play itself (enough has been said about this in the local papers) but the experience of the pipes that I wish to address here.

The first time that I heard the bagpipes live was in March of 1991 at the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. The piece was Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’ “An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise,” composed in 1985. The program notes quote Davies’ own interpretation: “the piper, in all his traditional finery, pacing up and down, represents the sun.” The piper was a woman — Nancy Crutcher [page 2:] Tunnicliffe — who, dressed in full Scots regalia, entered from the rear of the concert hall and slowly marched down the right-central aisle to the stage.

The first sound of the pipes — like a large moaning animal — scared me. I don’t think I had ever heard such a loud solo instrument coming up on me from behind. And then, strangely, I started to cry. Although I frequently cry in movies, I seldom ciy at concerts and the response surprised and embarrassed me. In Zettl's terms, my “aesthetic response” to “specific aesthetic stimuli” was not “predictable” (7). This last section of the piece did not last long, there was an intermission, and the performer I had come to see — Nigel Kennedy — played Bruch's Violin Concert No.l spectacularly in his spectacular blue suede shoes.

And while I never forgot Nigel Kennedy's performance, I also never forgot the sound of those pipes. A couple of weeks ago, on a Saturday morning when I found myself alone in the house, I had the chance to listen to Peter Schickele's show “Schickele Mix” on public radio. The show was all about continuos, and he was presenting examples that included the bagpipes. He said that almost any continuous sound can function as a drone, and to illustrate, he sang “Amazing Grace” over a vacuum cleaner. I remembered again, vividly, the sound of those pipes in 1991; and when I discovered that a piper would be at the Poe celebration on Saturday night, I vowed to go.

The experience was again incredibly stirring and I began to think about the pathos of the drone, to wonder why the instrument elicits such a response in me, and to tiy to describe the feeling. It seemed appropriate, given the circumstances, to follow the lead of one of Poe's characters — Ligeia's husband — who, in trying to describe the expression in Ligeia's eyes can only resort to naming those phenomena in nature that form a “circle of analogies” [page 3:] to that indescribable expression: “a rapidly-growing vine, . . . a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis, a stream of running water, . . . the ocean, . . . the falling of a meteor, . . . the glances of unusually aged people, . . . one or two stars in heaven, . . . certain sounds from stringed instruments, and . . . [certain] passages from books” (1378-79).

The drone is continual sameness. It is like the sound of the waves, the sound of “the fierce old mother incessantly moaning.” The cry of the sea bird is the melody, playing over the continuo. If we follow Whitman, then the drone is the sound of death — the secret, the “clew,” mystically interpreted by the poet but experienced only by those now gone from here.

It is the foundation, that which lies under the melody. It secures the melody. For the time of the piece, the listener can count on it to do so. In his chapter on “Sound Structures,” Herbert Zettl doesn’t discuss drones, but he does write about “homophony,” the “structure in which a single predominating melody is supported by corresponding chords” (363). He goes on to say that the “chords act like pillars (vertical vectors) that hold up the melody bridge (horizontal vector)” (363). Likewise, the drone supports the melody of the pipes. However, it does not “feel” like a vertical vector. It feels rather like something running horizontally underneath the horizontal vector of the melody. I would not even say that the drone is a vector — it doesn’t actually point, although it does, of course, as all music does, have its being in time. It begins, and in so doing it points towards its ending in the future. My point here, though, is that as the support, it feels like home, like the comfort of the pack, calling forth mankind's old impulse towards community, towards the snores of the others sleeping around the fire, towards the murmuring of the folk.

In Julian Jaynes’ terms, the drone would be the sound of the right brain, [page 4:] connected to the right brains of all the others who, in their pre-conscious state, hear the voices of the gods. It can be described as Jaynes describes poetry — a “nostalgia for the absolute” or the sound of the “search for the relationship with the lost otherness of divine directives” (375). Maybe this is

why the pipes evoke awe. In our individualistic, ego-bounded consciousnesses we are suddenly stricken by what we no longer have, struck down by the drone of “divine directives.” Diane Ackerman calls music “a controlled outcry from the quarry of emotions all humans share” (213).

The drone is the rumbling of the Over-Soul. It is the eternal OM, the sound heard in Forster's caves of Malabar. It underlies and nourishes phenomenal creation as a subterranean spring seeps unseen underneath the melodies above. It is our beginning and our end. When the music is over and the drone stops, we are as shocked as we were when it started and are left with trying to make pitiful word- analogies, the difference between writing about rain and feeling the rain on our faces. Susanne Langer describes this phenomenon quite accurately: “Because no assignment of meaning is conventional, none is permanent beyond the sound that passes; yet the brief association was a flash of understanding” (207).

Donald Sherburne, in an essay called “Meaning and Music,” corrects Langer's notion that music has content. According to Sherburne, “music is sheer predicative pattern” (134). It cannot by itself, he says, “convey a subject.” Rather, it conveys “the dynamic properties of feelings.” It is the listener who provides the subject, the content. “The clarifying, articulating, communicating dimension of music is released when the listener engages its predicative power by providing a subject for that predicative pattern” (135). In other words, these [page 5:] analogies, already in my thoughts, are waiting to be released, waiting to provide “a subject for that predicative pattern” (135).

What would Aristotle say about all this? Well, he would probably object to the title of this paper on the grounds that “pathos” is an inappropriate word. Music, I suspect he would say, is an inartistic means of persuasion. He might suggest that I call it “Poe, Pipes, and Poppycock” or maybe even, were he in an unkind mood, “Poe, Pipes, and Pretense.” [page 6:]

Works Cited

Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of the Senses. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Jaynes, Julian. The Origin of Consciousness in the Break-Down of the Bicameral Mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976, 1990.

Langer, Susanne K. Philosophy in a New Key. New York: Mentor, 1942, 1951.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “Ligeia.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. vol. 1. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989. 1376-85.

Sherburne, Donald. “Meaning and Music.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 24 (1966). Rpt. in Philosophical Issues in Art, ed. Patricia H. Werhane. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1984. 131-37.

Whitman, Walt. “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, vol. 1. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989. 2036-40.

Zettl, Herbert. Sight Sound Motion: Applied Media Aesthetics. 2nd ed. Belmont: Wadsworth, 1990.