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They were singalong songs, measured to the rhythm of working men, exhorting them to climb rigging, haul ropes, scrub decks, chase whales. But they were rediscovered in the midth century as part of the resurgent folk tradition, championed by the celebrated British ethnomusicologist AL Lloyd Ironically, this resurgence came at the same time that we discovered whales themselves could sing.
An animal that had been hitherto regarded as dumb — and therefore unable to protest its abuse — suddenly had a voice. And not only a voice, but a song, a beautiful, fluting, gurgling threnody for its own fate.
If anything could be said to have saved the whale, in an era of burgeoning awareness, it was that sound. That year, the folk singer and activist Judy Collins brought these two disciplines together — human and whale folk art, if you will — in her yearning recording of the traditional Scottish whaling song, Farewell to Tarwathie. The power of her transcendent voice, underlain with the sound of a singing humpback whale, caught an emotional moment in time — and still does.
I challenge anyone not to hear it and weep, freighted as it is with our troubled, shared history, between human and whale.
Now this vexed tale has resurfaced in the newly recorded whaling songs of Kings of the South Seas. The band — Ben Nicholls, Richard Warren and Evan Jenkins — have recreated a ferocious reimagining of whaling songs, recorded live at the historic folk centre of Cecil Sharp House in London - a place resonant with its own atmosphere.
The project came about when Nicholls found a book dealing with the s missionary expeditions to the South Seas, which coincided, disastrously, with the whaling trade in the same area. So you had this strange cultural boiling pot. Some were found buried in the archive at Cecil Sharp House. What Nicholls discovered was a lyrical index of a vanished world. Songs such as King of the Cannibal Islands, an s broadside ballad , invoked the imperial British sway over newly discovered indigenous peoples. From a gun came the roar of death and now I'm all done.
And now we are all gone, there'll be no more hunting. The big fellow is no more and there is no use lamenting. What race will be next in line all for the slaughter? The elephant or the seals or your sons and daughters? CDs Tradition Bearers Discogr. A bit of non-musical advertisement for very talented students of my department. There are about 30 recordings of this song which most of them call The Last Leviathan but I only have a few: He commented in the first album's liner notes: He commented in the first album's notes: This morning the sun did rise crimson in the north sky The ice was the colour of blood and the wind did sigh I rose to take a breath it was my last one From the gun came the roar of death and now I am gone And e'er since time began we have been haunted Through the oceans that were our home we have been hunted From Eskimos in canoes to mighty whalers Still you ignored our plea none came to save us Now that we're no more, there's no more hunting The big feller is now gone there's no use lamenting What race is next in line all for the slaughter?
On the contrary, the long moan is only one note in a complex composition, with distinct phrases, repetition, structure, organisation, shape and form akin to many kinds of human music. This is no random outburst of cries and whispers, but a song with power, verve, identity and design. As whale song entered the realm of popular artistic inspiration, so it began to be taken more seriously by science. However, in the five decades people have been studying this phenomenon, nobody has ever seen a female whale show any visible interest in the song.
In any one ocean, the humpbacks sing roughly the same song. But the song does not remain the same. As an ocean-wide population, the whales change the song, all together, gradually evolving new phrases and patterns from week to week, month to month, and year to year. Over the decades we can trace the gradual change of the phrases.
To the Last Whale Lyrics: Over the years you have been hunted / By the men who throw harpoons / And in the long run he will kill you / Jus to feed the pets we. Andy Barnes from Milton Keynes wrote The Last of the Great Whales in the early There are about 30 recordings of this song (which most of them call The Last.
But if they all sing the same song, why do they need to change it? Some believe the change is made for the sake of change alone, like our constant need for a new hit song.
Maybe the whales, like us, just get bored with the old tunes. So just how different from the glory days is the whale song of today? Roger Payne has repeatedly said that the whale song of the 60s is deeper and far more beautiful than anything the whales are singing these days, but people usually feel that way about the pop music of their youth. Where are the hit humpback tunes of today? Have they evolved away from melody and harmony into grit and noise and weirdness just like human pop music?
The increased human openness to hearing all sounds as music should mean that whale song sounds far more musical to us today than it ever did, even in the trippy 60s. I asked Jon Carroll if he remembered how he felt the first time he heard humpback whale song before he wrote that Rolling Stone review. A desire to go beyond memory and into the sounds of reality has led John Brien of Important Records and I to plan a release called New Songs Of The Humpback Whale , which aims to gather the best recent recordings of scientists and whale listeners the globe over, so we can assess what has happened to whale song during the last few decades.
One can hear gradual changes in humpback song from year to year, with some phrases lengthening, others shortening, others disappearing altogether as new variations appear. The change can be heard month to month, and even week to week within a single season. So Roger Payne is right: But is their musical culture going downhill?
These work for scientists and musicians because many of the sounds made by animals have a distinct form and structure, but not the usual tones and rhythms of human music, which are the only sounds musical notation can translate into images.
A flat horizontal line in a sonogram means a steady clear pitch, a vertical line means a clap or a rhythmic hit, and a busy, beautiful image of many layers and patterns means a sound with complex overtones and a noisy character — just the kind of thing that eludes easy description. But even these sonograms can look daunting to the uninitiated. I asked the digital designer and data visualizer Michael Deal to try his hand at simplifying these instantly generated images, colour-coding them in order to reveal the alien but organised structure of humpback whale song.
Already in Roger Payne and Scott McVay realised the song had a hierarchical structure, but since their initial publication of this fact, no one has really tried to improve upon their visualisation using the dynamic and interactive techniques now available to us. Such complex animal songs are actually quite rare in nature, but at such levels of beauty, there are strange parallels. Speed up a humpback whale song and it sounds surprisingly like the song of a thrush nightingale, with a similar balance between rhythms, jumps and long clear tones.
This morning the sun did rise crimson in the north sky The ice was the colour of blood and the wind did sigh I rose to take a breath it was my last one From the gun came the roar of death and now I am gone. These conditions explain why there is very little background noise on this recording, and what little there was I took out. An animal that had been hitherto regarded as dumb — and therefore unable to protest its abuse — suddenly had a voice. Now that we're no more, there's no more hunting The big feller is now gone there's no use lamenting What race is next in line all for the slaughter? Out of hardship and, yes, courage came their songs — a potent, plangent legacy that we are still discovering, as the Kings of the South Seas so lustily declare. The project came about when Nicholls found a book dealing with the s missionary expeditions to the South Seas, which coincided, disastrously, with the whaling trade in the same area.
In neither case can we accurately explain why such a song needed to evolve so extensively. But aesthetically, there are definite parallels. Does such a parallel mean anything? Perhaps there are basic principles at the root of what different species understand to be beautiful.
Evolution, as Charles Darwin knew well, is much more than survival of the fittest, but it also includes survival of the beautiful, through sexual selection, which is supposed to explain why whale songs are so long and moving, even though we have yet to see a female whale show any reaction to it.
Though humpback whale song did not evolve for humans to appreciate, it may be no accident that we are its best audience. The beautiful has evolved in the same world we have evolved, and this may be one reason we are always drawn to nature. But what does it take to record the best whale songs?