Heterospecific Song and Ecological Politics: Whale Song and Crumb's Vox Balaenae

Abstract

What does it mean to say that a whale has a voice, that a whale sings? Why is it important to human beings to say that whales sing? On the one hand, the use of musical terms to describe cetacean vocalisation is a matter of convenience. On the other hand, the history of human reception of these sounds shows that the usage is a trace of a determination and a desire: a determination to portray cetaceans as intelligent, articulate creatures; a desire to know of what they sing, and perhaps to sing with them. In this paper, I interpret George Crumb’s Vox Balaenae as both a response to the voices of whales and as an elegy of sorts that acknowledges the incommensurability of cetacean and human voices. My interpretation is both historical and music-analytical, and begins by exploring the subtle and occasionally not-so-subtle campaign in the late 1960s and early 1970s by Scott McVay, Roger Payne, and others to marshal public support for a whaling ban and conservation, an effort that included supplying composers, Crumb among them, with tapes of humpback whale vocalizations. With this context in place, I show how—as in much of Crumb’s music—shifting referential pitch-class collections articulate the gulf between the cetacean song we hear but cannot sing, and human music to which we do not—and likely never will—know if whales are listening.