The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment And The Tuning Of The World by R. Murray Schafer Page A

too emitted sounds of their own, like the bells and the wheels.” In the country, night had been accompanied by “the faint crackling of the wax candles” (Turgenev’s phrase), and she was immediately struck by the change. Another example: in his diary of 1919, amidst painterly thoughts, Paul Klee paused to listen when, in his Schwabing apartment, “the asthmatic gas lamp was replaced by a glaring, hissing and spitting carbide lamp.”
     
    The Sounds of Night and Day      When towns and cities were dark at night, the sounds of curfew and the voices of night watchmen were important acoustic signals. In London the curfew bell was decreed by William the Conqueror to be rung at eight o’clock. On the first stroke of the signal bell, St. Martin’s-le-Grand, all other churches took up the toll and the city gates were closed. Curfew bells were still rung in English towns up to the nineteenth century, as Thomas Hardy records.
     
The curfew was still rung in Casterbridge, and it was utilized by the inhabitants as a signal for shutting their shops. No sooner did the deep notes of the bell throb between the housefronts than a clatter of shutters arose through the whole length of the High Street. In a few minutes business at Casterbridge was ended for the day.
     
    In Persian towns curfew was also announced, but the sounds were different.
     
I had in succession watched the distant din of the king’s band, the crash of the drums, and the swell of the trumpets, announcing sunset.
I had listened to the various tones of the muezzins, announcing the evening prayer; as well as to the small drum of the police, ordering the people to shut their shops, and retire to their homes. The cry of the sentinels on the watch-towers of the king’s palace was heard at distant intervals. …
     
    After the town settled down for the night, the soundscape, even of a big city like Paris, became hi-fi.
     
Later that night—last night—when the children and women had quieted down in their back yards enough to let me sleep, I began hearing cabs roll by in the street. They passed only now and then, but after each one I waited for the next in spite of myself, listening for the jingling bell, the clatter of the horse’s hooves on the pavement.
     
    Throughout the night, in towns the world over, night watchmen reassured the inhabitants with their punctual sounds.
     
Twelve o’clock,
Look well to your lock,
Your fire and your light,
And so good night.
     
    Such was the London cry as recorded by Richard Dering in 1599. Milton records that in his day watchmen carried a bell and chanted a blessing (II Penseroso , line 82 f.). Leigh Hunt has preserved descriptions of several London night watchmen in 1820.
     
One was a Dandy Watchman, who used to ply at the top of Oxford Street, next the park. We called him the dandy, on account of his utterance. He had a mincing way with it, pronouncing the a in the word “past” as it is in hat,— making a little preparatory hem before he spoke, and then bringing out his “Pặst ten” in a style of genteel indifference, as if, upon the whole, he was of that opinion.
Another was the Metallic Watchman, who paced the same street towards Hanover Square, and had a clang in his voice like a trumpet. He was a voice and nothing else; but any difference is something in a watchman.
A third, who cried the hour in Bedford Square, was remarkable in his calling for being abrupt and loud. There was a fashion among his tribe just come up at that time, of omitting the words “Past” and “o’clock,” and crying only the number of the hour.
     
    But by this time the cries of the watchman and the chimes of the town clock were clearly tautological and the watchman was on the wane. Virginia Woolf catches this situation well by placing the watchman sentimentally in the distance. The quote is from Orlando , set at about the same period. “There was the faint rattle of a coach on the cobbles. She heard the far-away cry of the