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By Peter Rejcek
An Adélie penguin colony can be a cacophonous
place, with hundreds of birds braying in an unlikely chorus.
That was one of the sounds that Cheryl Leonard wanted
to capture, but it wasn’t the most interesting one
that she discovered.
Instead, she literally found music at her feet. Or, more
accurately, at the feet of the Adélies. The dense
stones on Torgersen Island off the Antarctic Peninsula
produced melodious sounds — like coins falling together
in a pile — when the penguins walked across them.
“Little melodies would come out from their feet
as they walked on the stones, kicked the stones, jostled
the stones,” says Leonard, a San Francisco-based
composer and musician who spent about a month at Palmer
Station this past season on an Antarctic Artists and Writers
Program grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF)
.
Leonard composes musical pieces not for piano and violin,
but from more unconventional sources such as pinecones
and shards of glass. She started her career writing traditional
compositions, but eventually gravitated toward stranger
sounds that can be made with instruments, such as playing
the strings of a violin behind the bridge, which produces
high, squeaky notes.
“It was a slow morph into weirder and weirder sounds
and sound sources,” she explains, adding that she
was later influenced by friends interested in “noise
music,” an avant-garde art form that uses a variety
of elements, from feedback to random electronic sounds.
Leonard found inspiration in urban objects, producing
music from box spring mattresses and circular saw blades.
At the same time, she developed an interest in the outdoors,
and took up mountaineering and climbing.
“I think for me it was a natural progression from
playing sounds with urban objects to playing sounds with
natural objects,” she says. “I was looking for
a way to combine the musical side of myself with the outdoors
side of myself.”
An opportunity to work in Antarctica and record the creaks
of icebergs and the calls of its birds seemed ideal.
“I’ve always been attracted to remote, wilderness
places. Antarctica is the ultimate location for that,”
Leonard says. “At the same time, I was really interested
in what kind of sounds one might find there. Antarctica’s
sounds haven’t been that well documented. We’ve
seen lots of pictures and films and science about Antarctica,
but not heard many of its sounds.”
She found those sounds in dripping icicles after rappelling
down a crevasse, and in growling snow and ice while boating
near the edge of the calving Marr Ice Piedmont.
And just as her companion and fellow artist, Oona Stern
, discerned immense variety in the types of ice in Antarctica
for an unrelated sculpting project, Leonard discovered
a range of music in the icebergs that calve, float and
disintegrate in the sea. [See related story: Ice structures.]
“I was really surprised at how different the icebergs
sounded,” she says. “The melting ice was always
different, sometime subtly and sometimes extremely different.
… It’s kind of like snowflakes. Visually, snowflakes
are all different and aurally, the icebergs each have
their own sounds.”
Leonard’s recording equipment — which she carried
on hikes or on the small inflatable boats used for local
travel around Palmer Station — included contact microphones,
condenser microphones and hydrophones. Contact microphones
pick up audio vibrations directly from objects that they
touch, while hydrophones record sound underwater.
“I sort of looked like I was doing sound for a film,”
Leonard says.
Recorded sounds only make up part of Leonard’s compositions.
She also collected various objects found during her trip,
including limpet shells and Adélie penguin bones.
Normally the removal of such items from Antarctica is
restricted, but Leonard had a permit from the NSF.
She is undecided about how she will incorporate the penguin
bones into a composition, but says she will likely assemble
them into little instruments that she can slide a bow
across or rub, brush or strike with mallets or other objects.
“Some of the thinner bones can probably be plucked.”
“I’ll be amplifying those and playing them
live together with field recordings and projected video,”
she adds.
How do you notate music for a penguin bone? You really
can’t use traditional musical staves and notes, Leonard
says. Instead, she has developed her own style of sheet
music that combines graphics and words to describe how
someone should perform on one of her unique instruments.
“Every time I have a new instrument and a new way
of playing an instrument, I also have to invent a notation
to explain that to the performer,” she explains.
“I like the idea of performing [my compositions]
live. It’s been a big focus for me because I’m
using these unusual materials and getting these unusual
sounds from them. I think it’s interesting for people
to see where the sounds are coming from and how they are
being produced.”
The public won’t have to wait too long to see and
hear some of Leonard’s first compositions from Antarctica.
She will premiere several pieces in October at Mills College
Concert Hall in Oakland, Calif., including a composition
called “Lullaby for the E [lephant] Seals.”
Many of the works, she explains, subtly combine aesthetics
with a message of environmental awareness. “I am
trying to make a great piece of music, but I’m really
inspired by aspects of the environment and ecosystems.”
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Antarctic
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