The Bee Symphony is a project conceived by Chris Watson and Marcus Davidson in 2009 to explore the vocal harmonies between humans and honey bees in a unique choral collaboration around and within the hives of an English country garden. ISSUE Project Room is excited to host the US premiere of this seminal work, as well as the world premiere of an as of yet unnamed piece. American entomologist, performance artist, musician, playwright, actor, and filmmaker, Irene Moon, talks with Marcus Davidson about bees, field recordings and Schoenberg’s theory of resonances in anticipation of the September 15th performance.
IM: This interview is particular for promoting the September 15th show, part of the Touch.30 Festival that’s going to be held here in New York from the 13th to the 16th, primarily at Issue Project Room, and on the 15th you’re going to be performing the bee symphony again for the third time, is that correct?
MD: Fourth. Recently just done it at the Bergen International Festival in the Bergen Cathedral. That was only a couple of weeks ago. That was a very fine event; it was a perfect venue for The Bee Symphony and had a fantastic acoustic. And it was a very classy event; we had excellent singers and it was very well received. Everyone was very pleased, basically.
IM: I bet that was a beautiful place to do the symphony. Just gorgeous.
MD: It was totally awesome. It was an old ancient stone cathedral that was very large and the acoustic – you could hear a pin drop from the back. So it just lent itself very well to an occasion where you needed to hear specific things; it lent itself very well to a piece which had a lot to it aurally so you had to hear stuff basically, if that makes any sense.
IM: The minutiae of sound. And, you know, it’s also interesting from a historical perspective because monks were some of the original beekeepers. They devised a lot of the methodology that we use very much today for beekeeping, so it kind of makes sense to start in the cathedral environment to do the symphony.
MD: Yeah, at first.
IM: But on the 15th you’re going to be doing two pieces, is that correct? The symphony and then a piece that’s still untitled that’s a new thing.
MD: People keep on asking us to come up with a title.
IM: People want a name, don’t they?
MD: People do actually, haha, and I would really like to give one but it’s still in its developmental stage. We know what it’s going to sound like, but we have a sense that the name will appear of its own volition at the right time, so we’re just kind of sitting on it and letting it happen on the roots of programming people. Haha, that’s probably quite annoying, but there’s very much a sense of the thing evolving at the moment so we don’t really want to put a title which won’t be appropriate at the end.
IM: Yeah, the name will come out after performing it a few times. That makes sense.
MD: Well, hopefully actually before the first concert, haha.
IM: So, I really enjoyed the track that you sent me of some of the raw material for the concert. The song of the grey seal actually struck me as being very funny. The seal voice was strikingly similar to a human voice, except maybe a human that had too much to drink, haha, or a little bit of a fool or something.
MD: Yeah I definitely wouldn’t be able to relate to that of course.
IM: No, who would? Haha. So with The Bee Symphony, you come into a place and you work with a number of people as a chorus to sing along with the bees or communicate in a way with the sounds of the bees. Is it going to be the same for the new piece?
MD: Essentially yes. What I found working with the bee sounds is that It’s actually something which is now influencing everything I do now because what actually astounded me about the bees was how musical they were. Number one, all the notes they sing are easily in the human range, which is surprising for such a small animal. The other thing was I was really quite shocked at how musical they were. It was quite easy to notate what they sang. So as their mood changed, the chord would change and they’d sing these little tunes. Bee time is a bit longer than ours in kind of a change and so I actually literally notated what they sang in real time and then got humans to sing it. It sounds strikingly effective. To me, it almost sounded like aboriginal music. Also the bees sang perfectly in tune the whole time in A just below 440. They didn’t deviate from that note at all. That note, that bass note, only dropped when they were asleep, and it dropped by a semitone. I was completely shocked at how absolutely musical it all was. And, so, I lifted all these notes and arranged it myself so that every note in The Bee Symphony is a note sung by a bee. And so I felt that literally humans were singing with bees. I’ve been doing the same thing with the sea sounds - again I’m starting to go through them and when you listen, it’s very very musical. Now my ears are attuned to it. I can hear the notes and I’m just basically notating the music in these sounds. I’m drawing the music from there so when the humans sing it, they’re hopefully literally singing with this sound from nature. It’s kind of led me on a little exploratory journey really. One of the things I’m really interested in is the sounds of space. I’ve also been doing a lot of recordings of satellites, planets, the earth, and just kind of everything. And again notes of the whole planet are so tuneful it’s, again, it’s shocking. So I mean, the thing I’ve been discovering is that everywhere I’ve been looking in nature—it’s musical.
IM: Were you always interested in nature? As a young boy were you the kind of person that would sit outside and look in the grass or turn over logs or was it something that sort of came to you through the music itself, through the composition, that you start becoming more and more in tune with the natural environment?
MD: I suppose I was reasonably. I grew up in the north states in the countryside-ish where we were and everything. So I mean I didn’t exactly grow up in a kind of alienated, urban environment or anything. But I must say that this thing has suddenly tuned me in to something which has been latently lurking within myself. Holistic things and vibrations, you know. Just one look at this I found out so many ways where human beings are literally tuned to the planet. You know about the Shoenberg resonances; if you imagine the surface of the Earth to the edge of the atmosphere—it’s like a soundbox, almost like an organ pipe and each pipe for example flute has its own resonance frequencies that you blow. And so does the earth’s atmosphere. [...] I just said, “I can’t believe this. We are literally in tune with the planet.”
IM:: That’s amazing.
MD: I’ve just been on this crazy journey as a result and my mind is—I’m just completely shocked. Everytime I’m founding more and more that music is absolutely inherent in nature. And, another thing I found about Pythagoras is he gave us allegedly a scale, the thirteen semitones. To cut a very long story short, he found if you’ve got a string, and you divide it in half, and you divide it in three, so perfect fifth, divide in four, et cetera and easily frequencies which our human ear finds most attractive—and they found these intervals attractive before we knew these were perfect mathematical fractions. So Pythagoras said that human beings are predisposed to be tuned to the universe as it were, to the perfect ratios. I just found that concept also amazing. Because we find these intervals so fascinating perhaps we are literally tuned to the universe as Pythagoras says. It just me on this journey of investigations. Haha, I’ll shut up—
IM: No I mean, it is amazing. It’s the control of mathematics too behind the shape of the seashells, and the way the trees differentiate, or plants differentiate as they grow.
MD: As humans we like these perfect ratios best. Isn’t that interesting?
IM: Well we are part of nature, as much as we’ve tried to separate ourselves from it.
MD: Oh, absolutely.
IM: And perhaps, hanging out in our urban environments we perhaps forget, or there is a loss of touch with biodiversity.
MD: Oh, I think so. And, like I said, when I listen to the bees and I got humans to sing it. Humans, haha…
IM: Homosapians singing with the bees now—
MD: —as apart from… whatever—
IM: Aliens.
MD: Exactly. I just thought to me it’s strangely aboriginal music. It’s like perhaps this is where this aboriginals got their sense of music from, from listening to nature. And the bees sing notes and, why not?
IM: Why not? That seems like a very reasonable hypothesis. Just listening outside at night—I grew up in the country too—and you listen to the whirling sounds of cicadas along with the field crickets along with the frogs singing and there’s an order to all of that. Some of it is just a section selection order—one frog sings and then another frog responds and it’s sort of this call-and-response thing but, the whole ecosystem is singing and it does create sort of an orchestral sound.
MD: And I very much felt that it was also communication. I had a sense that after listening to hours of bees that they communicated also very strongly through sound. One of the things which put me on to this was that when we were doing the recording I was standing a while back and Mike was sticking microphones.
IM: Seeing the picture is pretty hilarious.
MD: Just before the recording he was stung and the whole bee hive sound changed and from diaphanous singing sound they all sang very strongly this one A, perfect pitch, monotone. So I don’t know if the decision is made via trade what sound or the sound helps to galvanize everyone to make the decision or how it works but it’s definitely a big element towards what’s happening.
IM: Well, here’s an interesting thing; so honey bees’, or the honey-producing bees’, biggest threats in this world are mammals. So if you imagine who’s after honey: bears are after honey, people are after honey, there’s other mammals that are after honey. Evolutionarily-speaking it’s always been the mammals that are the biggest devastators to bees. So it kind of makes sense then that bees would give threat signal to their potential threat in a tune that they would know, in a way that a human would understand, and human is one of the biggest predators of wild bees.
MD: I must say when this all kicked off and the bees were on to the attack I was standing a while back and some of the bees would come out of the hive and pass me and I was aware of this tiny thing emitting incredible anger and I wanted to get out just one of them going past. It was so violent, just the energy of this thing going past.
IM: You had like an innate fear.
MD: You could feel how angry this thing was. It was amazing; they were really, really angry. The beekeeper said she’s never known the bees this angry before.
IM: So, the other thing that strikes me about the two pieces – they’re both about communication with nature and not just a one-way communication necessarily but almost a two-way communication. The Bee Symphony is dealing with one species. It’s a journey, a very intimate journey with one organism, and one species and getting to know that species in a sense really, really well where the other piece – it’s more of a journey of biodiversity along a pathway, along a climb, a climate change where there are very rich areas of biodiversity in sort of a warmer climate in Norway all the way to some of the most extreme regions in the world where the biodiversity, at least the macrobiodiversity drops heavily. But it’s another way of viewing the richness of nature.
MD: Oh, certainly.
IM: How did you choose the recordings that you did of the animals as you moved along? How did that happen, did you take a boat trip or did you go to specific locations along the way?
MD: Well, these are all recordings that Chris Watson has made. When we were talking about the next piece he was thinking about those recordings as made over the years in various, different places and I suppose the idea of the journey came out as a way to utilize some of these different recordings and I’ve been slowly listening to them and they’re stunning in their variety. So this piece would be a different sound collage completely and we’re quite taken with the journey thing. It appears to us—it’s almost like a sound map of a particular part of the world, that’s kind of the area we’re going in. We’re still analyzing the different tracks to find their musicality. We have kind of an outline and so the musicality and the sounds of the tracks will eventually form our piece so this is why it was hard to give you an overall sound file because it’s still evolving in its shape and it’s taken us on a journey and we actually don’t know where it will lead to.
IM: Or what part of the world it will lead to.
MD: As a piece of music it’s going to take us somewhere different like The Bee Symphony did actually. So it’s quite an exciting journey, it’s definitely a jump over the cliff and we’ll end up somewhere. We know what we want, we know it’s a journey, it’s a specific shape, but that will also take you to another place as well. It’s quite exciting really. Like I said the diversity of Chris’ recordings, the quality is stunning, and we’ve got ice, kelp, and seashore—I mean it’s absolutely extraordinary the diversity of these recordings. Like I said this is going to evolve from its own nature.
IM: So is kelp the first plant that you’ve ever sung with?
MD: It may well be actually, haha.
IM: There’s all these recordings, I guess in the 70’s, songs that help your plants grow, songs that make your plants feel better—
MD: Songs to make friends with seals.
IM: Exactly. Yeah I was imagining listening to the seal recordings and thinking that
this piece may be comedic in some parts.
MD: Well, I was thinking that as well, bizarrely, when I was teaching The Bee Symphony, every time actually, especially this time when I was in Berghain when I teach the vocal parts and I’m trying to impress on the singers that this is actually the notes that the bees sing and there’s some very specific bee sounds in it basically. I’ve literally copied some of the sounds the bees make and there’s one sound that goes, “Nnnnnnnnnn-nyah!” Like that. The bees make this sound a lot in their hives. So I notated it musically, and they have to sing this and communicate with each other and when they first started trying it they were literally on the floor crying with laughter basically. I saw that as a good sign because they were really getting into it. But it is a shock to do it for the first time.
IM: Maybe a certain amount of joy in it, too.
MD: Oh, I think so. I mean once they got that out of the way and they go into the communication aspects of it, to me that’s the thing that brought it alive is the fact, like the bees, the singers are communicating with each other. Now that gives it the extra sparkle as it were. I’m sure I’ll be using that again, now I’ve learned these things to integrate nature and music.
IM: So the singers themselves sort of became part of their own hive?
MD: They did, exactly. When I realized this is the way to go, it’s worked every time basically, so it brings a bit of theatre and it kind of brings alive basically so I hope that you get the feeling that the bees and the humans are literally communicating with each other and we’ll be trying to again recreate that in our symphony.
IM: It seems bees are very familiar to people. Even here in New York we have honeybees on the sea. I think the challenge from the other piece is going to be bringing people in touch with organisms that they may never see or that they have impressions of perhaps but only from television shows but they don’t have any very personal memories with where most people can have a personal memory or a personal experience with bees, or honey, or products of bees.
MD: So, therefore the hopefully everyone will join in, this is actually a journey, an aural journey. Like I said, a journey sound map or however you want to call it and that’s going to differentiate this one particularly from the bees, which is just like one environment and one species so it’s a departure literally and metaphorically.
IM: Right, right. But you know it could also be a reminder in some ways that the tonal notes of the seal and how almost human voice it is already that we are all part of the same organism or earth.
MD: Oh, absolutely, we’re all codependent on each other and we all need the earth to survive so I think also what is very interesting to me at the moment this will also be a journey from the shore and then underwater as well so both sides of the surface so I find that very interesting and I use some electronic effects on The Bee Symphony and I’ll hopefully use some as well too and kind of create that sound aura as well. There’s almost too much material really. You’re going to have to be smart to balance it all out.
IM: Maybe more than one piece.
MD: Yes, exactly.
IM: So, the other thing from the very short description that you sent me about the journey, that the journey is going from a place that is very loud in many ways, the warmer parts of the world where there’s a lot of diversity to a place that’s fairly silent, or one of the more at least industrial silent parts of the world where there’s less air traffic. I mean just trying to set up my apartment for this interview and trying to cut out the street noises, the car sirens, the alarms, the guy working downstairs—all of this sort of ambient, industrial noise all the time. Do you find when closing for or listening to the silence, or the silent areas that you keep finding more and more songs or sounds in all those silent spaces?
MD: Absolutely. This is the thing, which again has really shocked me throughout nature, if you sit down and listen for the music. I live in Norway now and the family has a cabin, as a lot of Nordic families do, up in the mountains and there’s a fantastic, strong stream just by the cabin and as a kind of test for all this I’ve sat down and just kind of meditated next to the stream and within minutes you can hear notes and chords and sound movements and everything. So this is the exciting thing for me—it’s never dull. And if you listen to it you can find the music in it; new notes, new shapes, and you start working with it. It’s probably an inexhaustible supply of music, inspiration for you really. And, like I said before, it’s taken me all over the place at the moment and it’s been a great surprise for me I must say.
IM: Have you gotten into recording natural sounds yourself?
MD: I’ve started to a bit actually, yes. I’m learning having the right technique and the right instrumentation and gear is actually very important. That’s why Chis Watson is so successful in what he does, because he knows how to do it properly. There’s a big difference between having a go and doing it really, really well. One of the things with which I’ve been thrilled is, when you listen to Chris’ recordings, they’re brilliant. They’re so well recorded and so clear. You can actually feel and visualize the places where these things are recorded because they seem to be recorded so well. I think that’s a massive plus point actually, just the quality of these recordings. They have their own life; they’re so good you can listen to them on their own if you want to and be fully satisfied by the listening experience.
IM: I was wanting to ask you a little bit about the process with the people that you collaborate with because you travel from town to town and recruit volunteers more or less from whatever town you’re going to, so can you explain a bit more about that process? And has it ever completely failed?
MD: Actually, no, so far. We’ve usually been put in contact with people who know good local singers and we explain to them that it’s not a usual piece and that they’ll need a sense of humor and it can be quite experimental but we do need people who can pitch very, very well who are self-confident and are not afraid to sing out[side] the box, if that’s the right phrase. So far that’s worked extremely well. And I’ve always tried to write music where it’s learnable and performable. I think one of the faults of some modern, contemporary classical music I find is it’s so hard that it’s almost impossible to sing as it was intended so I’ve always tried to bear in mind specifically the performer and give them something which not only attainable but something which they actually quite like to sing. And if you do that, I think you get a good response from the performer. That’s always been in the back of my mind. I learned that at music college actually. So the process has been okay and I’ve got to know different people each time. We have a lot of fun and I try to keep the rehearsals fun and so far it’s worked every single time. Also, that is being part of the fun of these projects is we meet a new set of people each time and they have to be properly incorporated into the project for it to work and so we all get to know each other and we’re all responding and so the actual intensity in the performance is really quite high because you really have to throw yourself into it.
IM: You’re putting yourself in a very vulnerable situation. It takes a very brave heart to do it - where you walk into a place, you’ve maybe had some contact with them before, a set amount of time before the actual show happens and have to find a way to connect with both parties and meet in the middle before the show goes on. It’s an interesting way to work.
MD: I found that you can’t be too prescriptive. You’re going to find that people find their own thing and sometimes if they say, “Can we do it like this?” I like to yes because if they’re finding their own performance in it I quite enjoy that. Some of the sections are semi-improvised so if they can find their own character within that I think it adds a really strong edge and it means they’re being fully involved and enjoying it. I find that you’re pushing someone in a direction and seeing what happens. Each performance has been different for its own reasons as a result and again that’s kind of a live feel, like bees are alive. They don’t perform to a script, and again that gives it a really cool edge as well.
IM: So every Bee Symphony is slightly different than the last Bee Symphony?
MD: Absolutely. It’s also different because of the sound of the building and how it’s mixed as well. I’ve been lucky where I’ve had excellent sound people every time, particularly in Berghain. They spent a long time, haha, changing the timing of the speakers so when you heard the sound if you were at the back and when you heard the sound from the front it would come at the same time as the speakers in the back and everything. They spent ages doing these tiny, tiny [adjustments]. It was a total geek paradise. It was hilarious, you could see them absolutely loving it.
IM: Those are the people you want helping you do tech for the stuff.
MD: Yeah because the sound was excellent, you know, and I thought, “Wow! I know you’re geeking out but I’ll let you do that because I know it’s going to be really good.” And I’ve found when you put on a thing like this, the difference between good and really good is the last 2-3%. I think that’s the same for any realm of performer’s experience now. It’s the tiny, tiny things you pay attention which just push it up those final few percent which make it so special. That’s what you’re always looking for. It’s a lot of energy, haha.
IM: It’s a lot of energy, it is. So do you usually spend about a week with the singers before the performance or is it—
MD: Six hours.
IM: Six hours. Wow, I’m sitting here actually shocked. That’s mind-blowing.
MD: Yeah but I mean, singers cost money.
IM: That’s true. And time and moving places and everything. So I noticed in your biography you’ve worked with theater and contemporary dance some as well in your past. Have you thought of doing symphonic performances with dancers sort of echoing the sounds of bees or moving it into more theatrical means and not just vocal?
MD: Someone has already started talking about that at one point, and that was without me asking. I would certainly like to do that because like I said a lot of my background is with music for dance.
IM: I can almost see it.
MD: I can see it as well. I would love for it to be performed. We’re already thinking for the next Sea piece to have a visual component as well. We want to branch it out. I’ve actually held back from suggesting dance, but if you got dance involved that’s another level of production values and basically money.
IM: It’s another layer of complexity.
MD: If I’m ever in that situation that will be the first thing I suggest.
IM: I was having visualizations of dancers acting acting like waving birds.
MD: There’d be so much material there for a choreographer to use. It’s just a goldmine.
IM: Complete goldmine. Or a muppet show, haha.
MD: That’s very funny. I quite like the muppet show actually.
IM: I love the muppet show. That’s not a slight in any way whatsoever. Well, that was pretty much most of my questions; was there anything in particular that you’ve learned from these recordings experiences that you’re most excited about?
MD: I think I’ve probably mentioned most of it now actually. The fact is it’s an
unending store of material to inspire you and every—not most—everywhere I’ve looked in the universe, on the planet and off it, it’s musical—to a shocking degree. I’ve got a piece next Thursday with the Spire actually. I’m doing a piano piece, and I’m using recordings of the planet Jupiter’s and the Earth’s atmosphere and I found the same notes in both Jupiter’s and the Earth’s atmosphere. I’m using that as they’re singing to each other. That’s kind of the basis of this piece of music. To find actual clear-cut notes and things like that is completely shocking and amazing really. Like I said, everywhere I look, there’s music.
IM: Have you ever considered yourself to be a New Age musician?
MD: Haha! By default I am, because I’ve got literally the sounds of the planets. When you listen to these recordings, of space for example, it sounds like ancient Indian music with its notes and stuff. And again, I’m using an Indian drone in this piece of music now. And you just wonder, what do the ancients know? They all talked about the music of the spheres. Now we’ve actually recording them in the 20th century. And it’s musical! Absolutely. I’ve read a lot about quantum physics; if you look at quantum physics now, again this is something that has just blown my mind, matter is really solid energy held in different vibratory states basically. Vibratory states’ frequencies sound—it’s all there, everything in the universe is a different note, or frequency. Each different molecule, each different particle of matter has its own frequency, or set of frequencies. And that’s what we’re learning from quantum physics. So again, just to bore you further about this, one of the things I’ve found out that’s just blown me away—there’s a professor of astronomy at Virginia University. He’s analyzed cosmic background radiation, do you know that it’s the fuzz we hear on radios? And that’s an echo of the Big Bang from when light formed, which was 400,000 years after the Big Bang. He’s analyzed the Big Bang sound because we have these satellite pictures of cosmic background variations and he’s found that, like the Earth’s atmosphere, there’s a set of resonant frequencies in cosmic background radiation, and if you bring it up 50 octaves it’s a chord. So I now have the chords of the Big Bang.
IM: That’s incredible. That is mind-blowing.
MD: So therefore, you can use acoustical physics to look back to the start of the universe. Now you know there’s a chord which was formed 400 years after the Big Bang. You can use a different type of physics completely to look back in time. And I’m reading all this; I’m just thinking, “My brain is not big enough.”
IM: That’s incredible. So on Day One, God produced a chord.
MD: Yes. It’s the day where he said, “Let there be light.” The early universe was a quantum flux and then it cooled down enough that 400,000 years after the start of the universe for light to appear. So light appeared really quite suddenly. I find so many links with nature and the universe and frequency and energy—and it’s all completely connected. Each particle in the universe is communicating with everything else simultaneously faster than the speed of light. It shows you that the universe, and again we’re proving this scientifically, is communicating with everything simultaneously.
IM: I was just thinking while you were talking that, at least in organism studies, people take recordings of a species and take recordings of a similar species and use the wavelengths to differentiate one organism from another organism. They use this in a way of showing this is a different kind of cricket than this kind of cricket; they’re two different things. But I don’t actually know of anybody who’s recording the notes of nature as a means of analyzing the world. People are taking the recordings themselves and looking at the waveforms.
MD: Well, I suppose I do that as a musician. That’s what excites me. That’s part of the shock. Everything’s musical—what a shock.
IM: You could publish that. It’s totally a scientific paper.
MD: You’d have to show me how to do that, haha.
IM: Yeah, you really could. I’d be glad to help. The paper could be something funny like “Where the A Notes Are”.
MD: Well, I suppose I’ll start straight away.
IM: Well, it was very good talking to you and, can you think of anything else that we’ve missed?
MD: Covered most of the ground, most of the universe now so—
IM: From the Big Bang all the way to the modern times, haha.
