Cymbals and Ceremonies
I suspect we all wonder from time to time what aliens might be like. How
different from ourselves can they be? Gene Bylinski speculated (Life in Darwin’s
Universe, Doubleday,1981) that just as the laws of chemistry and physics apply
throughout the universe, so we can expect the laws of evolution to be constant
too. If he’s right, the aliens may turn out to look a lot like us – or like
something that evolved on our planet, which includes a lot of weird creatures.
What does that say for alien societies? A useful way to think of the
possibilities here is to consider some of the hallmarks of our own, evolving
societies. Not the ones that may immediately come to mind, politics and
religions, wars or inventions, but something else: music and ceremony.
It’s difficult to think of a human ceremony or celebration anywhere without the
accompaniment of some form of music. It doesn’t have to be a sacred mass by Bach
or Mozart, performed to accompany the choreography of rich vestments, ritual
gestures and incense in a candlelit cathedral. A drummer and a boy with a penny
whistle can complete the ceremony of marching to the battlefield. In fact, a
bone whistle and a percussive instrument, usually a drum, go way back in human
history. Give a baby a spoon and a surface to bang on, and we quickly see the
pleasure of percussion for the human brain. The shaman found the voice of his
drum created a path to the supernatural world. Ordinary folk danced to its
persuasive rhythms to celebrate harvests and hunts, victories and marriages.
Other percussive instruments developed early on too, rattles, cymbals and gongs.
“Make a joyful noise unto the Lord,” the psalmist advised the ancient
Israelites, and to our modern ears it probably would’ve seemed like noise.
Early Greek harps had limited strings and made limited melodies. The Anglo-Saxon
bards most probably used their harp-like instruments percussively, striking the
strings to mark the pattern of alliteration in each line, a syncopated rhythm to
accompany their declarations of great deeds or the news of the day while the
clan-lords and their liege-men feasted, a ceremony in itself.
Sometimes, of course, humans experimented with silence to make an occasion
solemn; even there, important movement in the ceremony would often be marked by
the striking of a gong or a bell. We are so fond of musical accompaniment to our
activities that we use music as background to shopping, sitting in the dentist’s
chair, riding the elevator, watching a movie. My family had a pattern of rituals
in preparing the Christmas feast; not the least was the playing of Christmas
carols while the pudding was being assembled. “Put the music on,” my mother
would say, “and help stir the bowl for good luck!” And what would the ceremony
of welcoming the new year in be without singing “Auld Lang Syne” and lighting
firecrackers, the most percussive of fireworks?
Steven Mithen speculates that the origin of human language itself lies in
musical calls early hominids used in the forest (The Singing Neanderthals,
Harvard University Press, 2006). Unfortunately, language leaves no fossils, so
we will probably never know if his controversial theory is right or how close
the connection is.
So that leads us to ask, what about the alien societies we will someday meet?
Will they too have developed music – and if they have, what will be their
instruments, and will we be able to recognize the apparent cacophony as such? We
don’t have a very good track record so far; it took us a long time to recognize
the songs of the humpback whales for what they are: long melodic strings, not
repeated. We still have no idea what they may mean. If the aliens have no music
– percussive or otherwise – do they have ceremonies? What does it say about
their culture if they don’t?
I think about this when I’m designing alien cultures for my xenolinguists to
visit. It’s not enough to plan the dwellings, the clan connections, the
religious belief. The expression of self, whether hive-mind or individualized,
as it emerges in art of some kind is key to understanding. Music and dance
accompanying ceremony contribute to the richness of the story world. Often,
there’s no room, especially in a short story, to explore the alien experience
with music in any depth. But if I haven’t thought about such matters, I’m quite
certain the reader will sense a threadbare place in the tapestry I’m weaving.
Ursula Le Guin, who has said she has to know the myths and legends of her people
in order to write their story, gives us books full of alien ceremonies and music
( good examples can be found in The Left Hand of Darkness.) A personal favorite
of mine, Roger Zelazny’s “A Rose For Ecclesiastes,” paints a picture of a
society where the combination we’re considering is a big part of the reason we
suspend our disbelief in advanced life-forms existing on Mars.
Readers are right to criticize an author who has forgotten that a world most likely
will have more than one culture or one language, especially if the culture is
still at an early stage and hasn’t homogenized. But I would add that music and
ceremony belong in the toolbox of the author creating an alien world. What might
these aliens use to make music? It’s a good bet that if our aliens have limbs or
tentacles capable of holding anything, and some form of auditory capability,
there’ll at least be alien materials that will get clashed together in the
manner of joyful cymbals, alien skins that can be stretched over hollow alien
tree trunks, and alien bones that can be drilled out to provide flutes.
The author of eight novels, more than thirty short stories, dozens of poems and articles about science fiction, SHEILA FINCH has received several awards, including the Nebula Award, the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel in the Field, and the San Diego Book Award for Young Adult fiction. She has given workshops at
writers’ conferences all over Southern California and recently retired from twenty-eight years of teaching creative writing and science fiction at El Camino College, California. She lives in Long Beach, California, with a cat and two retired racing greyhounds.
To learn more about Sheila, see her website or read her blog.
