ABSTRACT Title of dissertation: THE COWBELL IN MUSIC AND CULTURE John Matthew McGovern, Doctor of Musical Arts, 2023 Dissertation directed by: Dr. Michael Votta, School of Music Cowbells are used as percussion instruments in a variety of musical settings today. Such uses represent a number of distinct musical practices. In this dissertation I attempt to chronicle cowbells in music from the first such use (the mid-19th century) to the present day, with a focus on historically linking and differentiating cowbell practices in orchestral music, in early musical theater and popular music, and in Cuban and Cuban-derived music. I argue furthermore that perceptions of the cowbell and its connotations, in the cultures that produce these musical practices, affect the way that the instrument is used and perceived. The word “cowbell” makes no differentiation between cowbells used historically for farming and the modern instruments descended from them. This, coupled with historical associations between cowbells and the carnivalesque exemplified by charivari practices, has led to perceptions of the cowbell, throughout its musical history, as an object of othering, humor, and/or derision. THE COWBELL IN MUSIC AND CULTURE By By John Matthew McGovern Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Musical Arts 2023 Advisory Committee: Dr. Michael Votta, chair Jauvon Gilliam Dr. Lee Hinkle Dr. Fernando Rios Dr. Robert Slevc © Copyright by John Matthew McGovern 2023 ii Acknowledgements It seems to me that a great many thanks are in order. To the percussion teachers and mentors I have had at the University of Maryland: Jauvon Gilliam, James Wyman, and Dr. Lee Hinkle. I must extend special thanks to Lee for his willing ears, insightful questions, and research guidance from the very earliest days of this project’s conception. Likewise to the three Johns from Florida who helped me take earlier steps on the path that led me here: Dr. Parks, Shaw, and Bannon, who instilled in me respectively a capacity for technical and musical rigor, an excitement for performing, and a deep love for the learning about and appreciation of music as a whole. Also to the members of my committee not already listed who have generously granted my work their time: my advisor Dr. Michael Votta, Dr. Fernando Rios, and Dr. Robert Slevc. To the performers and researchers who corresponded with me during this process and helped the cowbell’s history in music take shape: Kelli Rae Tubbs, François Papirer, and Bob Becker. And lastly to those who have supported me through this process: my dear friends and confidantes Andrew Bockman, Sabrina Peterson, Tucker Johnson, Dominic Ellis, Micca Page, Jon Sotelo, and others; my colleagues in the University of Maryland percussion studio; my parents, my sister and brother-in-law, all my aunts, uncles, and cousins; and above all else my wife Jen McDonald McGovern and our cat, Friedrich, who was a constant presence in my lap during the writing process and contributed greatly (in his own special, inimitable way) to the composition of this text. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. ii Table of Contents ..................................................................................................................... iii List of Figures .......................................................................................................................... iii Terms for “Cowbell” ................................................................................................................. v “I Got a Fever” .......................................................................................................................... 1 The Cowbell as Category......................................................................................................... 9 The Humorous Cowbell ..........................................................................................................18 “A Simple Piece of Iron” .........................................................................................................30 “The Finest Cowbell Known to Jazz” ....................................................................................44 “The So-Called Cencerro” ......................................................................................................60 Stockhausen and the Almglocken .........................................................................................80 For Me, the Cowbell .............................................................................................................. 103 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 116 iii List of Figures Figure 1: Bevin Kentucky bell and Latin Percussion Black Beauty, exterior ................................................ 5 Figure 2: Same bells, interior ........................................................................................................................ 5 Figure 3: Two almglocken (pitched C4 and D4) from the University of Maryland’s collection .................... 10 Figure 4: From the September 29, 1908 San Jose Evening News............................................................. 24 Figure 5: Charivari from the Roman de Fauvel ( folio 34r of the Chaillou de Pesstain manuscript). .......... 27 Figure 6: Herdenglocken as notated in the first movement of Mahler’s Symphony no. 6. ......................... 34 Figure 7: A caricature of Mahler and his percussion sounds, from January 1907 Die Muskete ................ 37 Figure 8: From the September 21, 1847 Baltimore Sun. ............................................................................ 46 Figure 9: From the May 24, 1850 Buffalo Commercial. .............................................................................. 47 Figure 10: From the February 17, 1848 New York Herald.. ........................................................................ 48 Figure 11: From the April 3, 1869 San Francisco Daily Examiner.. ............................................................ 48 Figure 12: From the October 30, 1870 Petroleum Centre Daily Record.. .................................................. 48 Figure 13: From the July 14th, 1900 Washington Star. .............................................................................. 49 Figure 14: From California Band Instrument Company 1922 Ludwig catalog ............................................ 53 Figure 15: From the 1922 Ludwig & Ludwig catalog. ................................................................................. 54 Figure 16: From the 1922 Ludwig & Ludwig catalog. ................................................................................. 55 Figure 17: 12-pulse (or 12/8) standard bell pattern, after Peñalosa and Greenwood (2012). .................... 61 Figure 18: Single and double iron bells (including at lower right a Brazilian agogo) .................................. 63 Figure 19: Bars 3-5 of drums in Led Zepplin’s “Good Times Bad Times” (1968). Cowbell represented by square note head. Transcription by the author. .......................................................................................... 75 Figure 20: mm. 1-8 of cowbell in “Honky Tonk Women” (1969) by The Rolling Stones. Transcription by the author. ......................................................................................................................................................... 75 Figure 21: From the English instrumentation of Gruppen’s published score .............................................. 82 Figure 22: Cell of cowbell music from period 8 of Zyklus. .......................................................................... 84 Figure 23: Cell of cowbell music from period 7 of Zyklus. .......................................................................... 84 iv Figure 24: Cencerros visible in rehearsal footage prior to the premier of Et Exspecto. From Les Grandes Repetitions (1965). ...................................................................................................................................... 90 Figure 25: One example of the pitch material for finalbells’ backing track. ................................................ 97 Figure 26: Excerpt from finalbells’ solo obligato almglocken part. .............................................................. 98 Figure 27: Instrumentation from Kondo’s Under the Umbrella ................................................................... 99 Figure 28: My setup for …for me, the cowbell… ...................................................................................... 105 Figure 29: "Gertie's bell," exterior. ............................................................................................................ 107 Figure 30: "Gertie's bell," interior. Note empty loop for clapper attachment. ............................................ 107 Figure 31: My Cow Box. ............................................................................................................................ 112 Figure 32: Final bars of …for me, the cowbell…, including Cow Box (marked sicuro di sé, or “self- assured”). .................................................................................................................................................. 113 v Terms for “Cowbell” In German Kuhglocke Herdenglocke (“herd bell”) Herdengelauten (“herd ringing”) Kuhschellen (“cow ringer”) Viehschellen (“livestock ringer”) In Basque Zintzerrat In French Cloche à vache In Spanish Cencerro Gangarria In Italian Campanaccio 1 Introduction “I Got a Fever” “So clear and unprejudiced ears hear the sweetest and most soul-stirring melody in tinkling cowbells and the like (dogs baying the moon), not to be referred to association, but intrinsic to the sound itself…” - Henry David Thoreau, journal entry dated June 9, 1852 On April 8, 2000, the long-running sketch comedy television program Saturday Night Live (then in its 25th season) aired a sketch which is variously referred to as “Behind the Music: Blue Ӧyster Cult” or, more commonly, “More Cowbell.” Written by Will Ferrell and Donnell Campbell, the sketch opens with narration implying it to be a segment of the VH1 series Behind the Music, and the footage is appropriately treated with faux-grain in order to suggest a provenance from the year 1976. Rock band Blue Ӧyster Cult, portrayed by SNL cast members Chris Parnell, Chris Kattan, Horatio Sanz, Jimmy Fallon, and Ferrell, are shown in the studio recording “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” with production handled by the fictitious Bruce Dickinson (portrayed by the episode’s host, Christopher Walken). In the sketch, the band’s attempts to run the tune are repeatedly stymied by fictitious cowbell player Gene Frenkle. Portrayed by Ferrell, Frenkle plays the song’s cowbell part in various comedic ways - overly loudly, accompanied by intrusive dancing, and, in one case, badly out of time and directly in the face of lead singer Eric Bloom (played by Parnell). Each time, after the band members inevitably object to Frenkle’s cowbell playing, Dickinson emerges from the producer’s booth, insisting that not only was the cowbell not too loud, it was in fact too quiet. Christopher Walken’s deadpan delivery of lines like “I gotta have more cowbell!” gets riotous laughs from the studio audience and pushes the rest of the cast to the point of breaking - Fallon (portraying drummer Albert Bouchard) can be seen biting down onto his drumsticks to keep himself from laughing. Over the final track, after the band has evidently been convinced by Dickinson’s endorsement, the video freeze-frames on Ferrell. Text fades in, reading “Gene Frenkle 1950-2000,” and the sketch concludes. It is five minutes and forty-two seconds of truly inspired comedy. 2 Will Ferrell and Christopher Walken are both closely associated with the sketch to this day. Ferrell in particular has made a large number of appearances alluding to his role as Frenkel - for example, he played cowbell on the song “Little Sister” with Queens of the Stone Age during the May 14, 2005 episode of Saturday Night Live, while in costume and character as Gene Frenkel. In December 2022, Ferrell made headlines for appearing - playing the cowbell - onstage during a musical performance by his teenage son Magnus Ferrell, as reported by Rolling Stone1 for example. Christopher Walken, on the other hand, does not share Ferrell’s evident enthusiasm for the notoriety of the sketch. In 2004, in an interview with the Orlando Sentinel, Walken complained, “I hear about it everywhere I go. It's been YEARS, and all anybody brings up is 'COW-bell.'”2 On November 21, 2019, Ferrell, appearing on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, claimed Walken had told him the sketch “ruined [his] life.” This piece of phrasing was a widely reproduced headline soon after the episode aired. “During the curtain call, people bring cowbells and ring them,” Ferrell recalls Walken saying. At an Italian restaurant where Walken lunched, “the waiter asked if I wanted more cowbell with my pasta bolognese.” Will Ferrell’s recollections here – an anecdote on a late night television show – need not be taken as gospel. And indeed, the personal feelings of the celebrities involved in this sketch are not crucial to a study of the cowbell. But “More Cowbell,” the sketch, is crucial to a study of the cowbell, because like Christopher Walken and Will Ferrell, the cowbell itself has become closely associated with it in the popular consciousness. “More Cowbell” is beloved now - Rolling Stone called it the ninth best sketch in SNL’s history in 2014,3 and some online “listicles” call it the best. When I began to research this dissertation, references to Will Ferrell or to “More Cowbell” more broadly were a nearly universal response when I mentioned my topic. This, and the preponderance of “More Cowbell”-related content that appears when one types “cowbell” into a search engine, suggest that the sketch, or at least the slogan, is 1 John Blistein, “Will Ferrell Brought His Signature Cowbell to His Son’s First Live Show,” Rolling Stone, December 5, 2022, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/will-ferrell-played-cowbell-son- magnus-first-concert-1234641626/ 2 Roger Moore, “Nobody Does It like Walken,” Orlando Sentinel, October 25, 2004, https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-xpm-2004-10-25-0410240130-story.html 3 “50 Greatest Saturday Night Live Sketches of All Time,” Rolling Stone, accessed 4/27/2023, https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-lists/50-greatest-saturday-night-live-sketches-of-all-time- 12735/ 3 the go-to point of reference for at least the modern American mind. For this reason, it is worthwhile to examine the cowbell’s portrayal therein. The sketch is funny. In fact, it is hilarious. It is likely beyond the scope of any dissertation outside of the disciplines of psychology or media studies to attempt to argue for the objective humorousness of anything, but if the stifled laughter of the sketch’s cast, and the roars of delight from the studio audience, are anything to go by, it is safe to conclude that “More Cowbell,” comedically, works. But it is of use to at least make an attempt at answering the question of why. Where is the humor here? There is physical humor - Will Ferrell’s gyrations, his comically undersized shirt that rides up and exposes his stomach. There is a kind of tonal dissonance in the contrast between the song’s dark sound and morbid lyrics and the whole premise of comedy being drawn from it. Christopher Walken’s continued request for more cowbell may be humorous in part because of the contradiction - it is plainly obvious to the audience as well as to the band that the cowbell is too loud, and yet the Bruce Dickinson wants more of it! Let me now ask a rhetorical question of the reader - a question that will hang over this entire dissertation. Could this joke have been made about any of the other instruments present in the song? Could this have been a “More Guitar” sketch? A “More Vocals” sketch? The premise of this joke could be applied to other instruments. But I suspect that the sketch would not have reached an iconic status if it had not focused on the cowbell. I will in this dissertation argue that there is in Western culture a long history of the cowbell being associated with humor. This history predates the cowbell’s introduction into music. Its influence near-inevitably colors the ways in which it has been used musically, as well as how it has been both heard and understood musically by audiences. And the fact that perhaps the cowbell’s most visible presence in modern popular culture is this extended joke at the expense of the cowbell itself - this “More Cowbell” sketch - is surprisingly appropriate in light of this history. “More Cowbell” singles out the cowbell for ridicule. It sets the cowbell apart from the other instrumental forces that make up the song, and in doing so implies that the cowbell does not belong - that its presence here is inappropriate somehow. “More Cowbell” portrays the cowbell as an interloper among “proper” rock instruments, the cowbell as a goofy sound amidst a serious and dour soundscape, the cowbell played in a comical (but realistic) manner live on set by Will Ferrell while the rest of the cast 4 members mime their instruments soberly (and inaccurately). There is even an additional humorous contradiction that might be perceived by a viewer familiar with the actual Blue Ӧyster Cult song in question - that contradiction between the obnoxiously loud cowbell present throughout the sketch, and the actual cowbell present in “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” which is so low in the mix as to be nearly inaudible. There is something inherently funny about the cowbell being the center of the sketch, independent of the funny things that people say about it and the funny way that Will Ferrell plays it. This is why “More Cowbell” seems to exist today as a slogan, as something that coffee mugs and t-shirts and indeed cowbells have printed on them, as least as prominent as the actual sketch if not more so. The cowbell itself is a punchline. The task at hand So the cowbell is a punchline. For now, what else is it? Let us first define the cowbell, as objectively as possible, in the context hitherto described: the context of “More Cowbell,” and of the song “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper.” In both of these contexts, the cowbell is a struck metal percussion instrument. It is shaped like a kind of trapezoidal, square-mouthed bell, and has no clapper inside it. It can be held (as we see Ferrell doing in the sketch) and struck, or it can be mounted (using a bolt connected to an O-ring) onto any metal rod between ⅜” and ½” in diameter. In order to produce sound, the instrument is struck with an implement, such as a drumstick or a mallet. This instrument - this cowbell - is a universal feature of the modern drumset and a common feature of the Western concert percussion battery, not to mention a ubiquitous sound in many styles of African diasporic music: Washington D.C.’s own Go-Go, the music of Cuba, and the various Cuban-derived musical styles that are sometimes referred to as “Latin” or “salsa,” but which I follow Fernando Rios in calling instead tropical music. When “cowbell” is written on a wind ensemble or orchestra part, percussionists know to reach for this instrument. But this is not the only way to interpret the word “cowbell.” There are also the bells that cows wear. By way of a representative example, let us consider a modern example manufactured by Bevin Bells - to be specific, it is their Kentucky model in size 2k. It has a trapezoidal shape, a rectangular mouth, 5 and a rectangular metal loop at its upper extremity, shaped so that a leather strap (such as on a collar or harness) can be threaded through it. It also has a clapper hanging inside it. When this bell is hung from the neck of a cow, the motion of the animal’s head as it grazes and mills about will cause the clapper to swing and maintain a reasonably constant noise to broadcast the animal’s location. Its physical attributes, therefore, suggest that it was manufactured for the purpose of being hung from the neck of a cow. Figure 1: Bevin Kentucky bell and Latin Percussion Black Beauty, exterior. Figure 2: Same bells, interior. 6 Figures 1 and 2 show these bells. In both images, the Bevin Bell described above is on the left, and on the right is another cowbell from my personal collection, a Latin Percussion Black Beauty.4 Figure 2 shows details of the bells’ interior - clearly visible is the clapper of the Bevin bell, as well as the smooth, featureless interior of the Black Beauty. Both of these objects are cowbells. I mean by this statement that there is not a more clear or specific term in common parlance, whether among musicians or the general public, which will differentiate these objects. The word “cowbell” is the most intelligible and widely used means to denote both of them. But they are not so interchangeable as their identical names might imply. They are similar - these two bells have a nearly identical shape, and indeed if I were to remove the clapper of the Bevin example and strike it with a stick it would have a similar tone to the LP example and would be able to perform in many of the same musical roles. But in their current states - clappered and unclappered - they are different in construction, purpose, and method of sound production. And yet they are both cowbells. Why are they similar? The reason that they share the same name and so many features of construction is simple: they share a common origin. The hanging of bells from domesticated animals dates back thousands of years. Percival Price, in his 1997 volume Bells and Man, remarked that “the small amount of Greek and Roman evidence of animal bells cannot mean that these people rarely put bells on their animals. The ancient universality of the custom and its mention in fable belie this.”5 Similarly, Panayotis Panopoulos - one of the rare writers to chronicle the social aspects of animal bells in their agricultural use (though unfortunately for our purposes he writes primarily about goat bells) complained in 2003 that “although animal bells are highly important artefacts in the material culture of stock-keeping societies, they have received little attention from ethnographers.”6 And cowbells - meaning for us specifically elongated, non-spherical bells of the type typically hung on cattle in Europe and in the post-Columbian Americas - have been reappropriated for musical purposes on several occasions over the course of the last two hundred years. 4 To be clear, “Latin Percussion” thusly capitalized in this document refers to the American musical instrument manufacturer of that name, founded in 1964 by engineer and entrepreneur Martin Cohen. 5 Percival Price, Bells and Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 74. 6 Panayotis Panopoulos, “Animal Bells as Symbols: Sound and Hearing in a Greek Island Village,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9, no. 4 (2003): 640, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3134704. 7 To put it another way: the reason that my LP Black Beauty and my Bevin Kentucky bells look so similar is that the musical practice which the LP cowbell was manufactured to meet the needs of originated, historically, in the use by musicians of cowbells as instruments. The specifics of this process will be the focus of much of this dissertation. But an unavoidable parallel focus of this dissertation will be this way in which the definition of the term “cowbell” is split. The musical cowbell and the nonmusical cowbell are hopelessly intertwined. They are alike and yet distinct. They are not interchangeable, and yet the process by which one can become the other – the removal of the clapper – is simple and easy to do, and is what has allowed the cowbell to have such varied musical uses. I hypothesize that this aspect of the cowbell is what makes it particularly susceptible to being assigned the role of punchline. It is what makes the cowbell’s otherness, as portrayed in “More Cowbell,” seem so natural to the viewer. We are aware that the cowbell is an instrument, and we are familiar with its use in musical contexts and can recognize its sound. But we intuit that it is also somehow different from other instruments. It is less an instrument, because it can easily be not one. It has the word “cow” in its name, after all, and this is a reminder of a utilitarian, agricultural function - a status not as an instrument but as a tool - that no other musical instrument is saddled with the memory of. I will argue, in this dissertation, that this intrinsic otherness has been a feature of the cowbell in all its musical contexts. Some of these contexts - such as “More Cowbell” - have purposefully exploited this feature of the cowbell for comedic effect. But the cowbell stands to be potentially heard as a punchline, or at least to carry an association with cows, a sense of coming from outside music, even when used with no humorous intent at all. Certainly it is this “otherness” which has prompted quite a large number of people - both musicians and non-musicians - to assume that I am joking when I tell them I am writing a dissertation about cowbells. This is the cowbell’s cultural heritage. In different contexts, cowbells can suggest public festivity, idyllic pastoralism, or just sheer comedy, but thanks to this unique origin and the otherness that it grants, in music the cowbell is (so to speak) always good at suggesting something. Some composers and performers have successfully exploited this suggestiveness for artistic effect; at other times, however, the cowbell’s seeming readiness to be funny in and of itself - a readiness that may be completely unavoidable 8 by simple virtue of the fact that the word “cow” is in its name - threatens to stand in the way of serious questions about it how it got to be where it is, so to speak, in music. And so the intention of the present document is outlined. My goal from the genesis of this dissertation project was to write a history of the cowbell in music, with a focus on understanding the relationship between the distinct objects both musical and nonmusical which fall under that name. But as I began to research this topic I quickly discovered that the history of the cowbell is not just one history - it is multiple histories that stretch over multiple continents and are privileged to influence one another at times, seemingly, by simple virtue of the fact that the same word (be it cowbell, cencerro, kuhglocke or any other synonymous term) has the power to denote them all. Under the umbrella of “cowbell” are many rich instrumental traditions, from many different styles of music. This document will attempt both to explore these usages and, more importantly, to relate them to one another in history and to when possible document discourses surrounding them. Nevertheless, the sheer breadth of the topic means that the depth of musical analysis which all of these uses merit was, at times, beyond the scope of my time and resources to cover. In making an effort to prioritize breadth and context, I hope to improve upon prior organological writings which have described the cowbell’s musical usage only in incomplete ahistorical ways. My own musical interests, experience, and training, however, have all left me best equipped to discuss music of the European concert hall tradition (including both the orchestral canon and the 20th century avant-garde). Though I have made an effort to, through scholarship, ensure that my accounts of music beyond this tradition (including West African and Afro-Cuban music) is clear, accurate, and thorough at least as far as it relates to the topic, I must acknowledge that my particular perspective, as a performer, is reflected in the more historical approach of chapters dealing with musical practices beyond my wheelhouse. 9 Chapter 1 The Cowbell as Category Denoting, describing, and using In order to set the parameters of a study of the cowbell, it is necessary to establish exactly what is meant by “cowbell.” This may seem inane and obvious, but I contend that it is a question with hitherto- unexamined subtleties in its answering. The word “cowbell” is used, by different speakers over the course of history and today, to refer to a variety of objects - some similar, related, or closely comparable with one another, and others less so. The phrase “musical usage of the cowbell” likewise encompasses a variety not only of musical contexts but of actual musical instruments - ranging from cowbells used as sound effects in 19th century American musical theater, to cowbells used as soundscape in the orchestral works of Mahler and Webern, all the way to the modern cowbell whose role in “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” has already been examined in the introduction. A study of the history of the cowbell, in music and culture, becomes therefore in part a history of what, in music and culture, people have called “cowbells.” As far as I am aware this dissertation represents the first comprehensive study of cowbells in music. But this is of course not to suggest that this is the first time that any writers on music have examined the cowbell. In this chapter, however, we will examine ways in which prior writers have attempted to document the cowbell, including both simple descriptions and proposals of classification. The concept of “classifying” the cowbell will appear frequently in this text, and I will specify here that I use this term to indicate the use of terminology which suggests that cowbells come in clearly- defined “types,” which can be donated by terms other than “cowbell.” Though such a practice has obvious benefits for clarity when discussing the disparate objects and musical practices that can be called “cowbell,” I aim to show here that such classification systems - as outlined in reference works on percussion instruments - are typically non-comprehensive or contradictory due to their lack of a broader cultural and historical perspective. 10 Prior Descriptions and Classifications of Cowbells It is readily observable that not all cowbells used in music are the same “kind” of cowbell. The best, most interesting, and most demonstrative example of this fact is the distinction understood by modern percussionists between “cowbell” and “almglocken.” Almglocken are a kind of cowbell - they are specifically central European cowbells, their name being German for “Alpine bells” - but they functionally are a distinct instrumental practice from other cowbells in music. Almglocken are often (but not always) tuned, and often (but not always) understood by composers as resonant metal instruments. They are more delicate than other cowbells, ring for longer, and belong much more firmly to the European concert tradition, having originated in the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen in the 1950s. They are distinct both in their physical characteristics and in way that they are used in music. But they are still cowbells – as will be covered in the relevant chapter, the first almglocken were selected from the stock of a West German cowbell factory.7 Figure 3: Two almglocken (pitched C4 and D4) from the University of Maryland’s collection. 7 Jonathan Hepfer, “Christoph Caskel and the Birth of ‘Zyklus,’” Percussive Notes 60, no. 2 (April 2022), 56. 11 Some scores - such as, for example, Betsy Jolas’ 1991 solo percussion work Etudes Aperçues - are written for instruments which the composer identifies as “cowbells” but which a modern percussionist would identify as “almglocken.” Jolas’ cowbells have definite pitches and are described by her in the performer’s note as “resonant sounds.” Resonant, pitched cowbells - this is a reasonable definition of almglocken, though as we shall see it is not a comprehensive one.8 The most standard reference on percussion instruments - James Blades’ Percussion Instruments and Their History (1970) - includes the following as the full extent of its coverage of the cowbell. “Cowbells have been used descriptively and otherwise, as in Mahler’s Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, and in Strauss’ An Alpine Symphony, in each case shaken intermittently and in rhythmic structures as in the percussion ensemble accompaniments to the pianoforte cadenza in Rio Grande. Here Lambert specifies a small cowbell without clapper. Varese in Ionisation (1931) specifies cowbell (cencerro) without clapper, to be struck with a drumstick, and muffled by inserting a handkerchief or a similar piece of material into the bell. Copland in Music for a Great City scores for two cowbells of different pitch to be struck simultaneously. Peter Schat in Signalement scores for cowbells, 3 ½ octaves (chromatic) F to C, and Messiaen for an even larger number in Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum.”9 Blades notes that cowbells are used both with and without clapper, and with or without pitch, but makes no attempt to differentiate these fundamentally different uses as distinct instruments - they are all simply cowbells to him. However, those reference works which do try to parse out the distinction between different kinds of cowbell, in music, are often non-comprehensive and/or contradictory. The Handbook of Percussion by Karl Peinkofer and Fritz Tannigel in their entry for “animal bells” identify three types of cowbell. They identify almglocken as the type of cowbell most commonly found in the Alps, without reference to pitch or to the presence or absence of a clapper. They then list two types of cowbell which are definitely clapperless. 8 The history and usage of almglocken will be explored in detail in Chapter 6. 9 James Blades, Percussion Instruments and Their History, London: Faber and Faber, 1971, 392. 12 “The straight walled bells, high, narrow, and clapperless, belong to the instruments characteristic of Latin American folk and dance music… Called cencerro, they are beaten singly or in pairs with sticks… In Western jazz and dance music such bells have become widespread under the name cowbell (also jazz cowbell).”10 Furthermore: “Recently [this book was published in 1969] manufacturers have developed a very short and dry- sounding instrument of strong tin, shaped like an angular trapezoid… this instrument often called metal block because its sound is so far removed from that of the original cowbell.”11 I find this classification - a distinction between cencerro/cowbell or jazz cowbell on one hand and “metal block” on the other hand, with both being clapperless and distinct from the possibly clappered almglocken - to be unsatisfactory. For starters, “metal block” as a category of instruments is untenable. The term “metal block” was used by Darius Milhaud to describe an instrument used in his pioneering multipercussion setups, in Creation du Monde (1923) and his Percussion Concerto (1930). These works draw their sound palette from the American jazz drummers Milhaud heard in London and New York, and accordingly the metal block is conventionally understood to be a high-pitched clapperless mounted cowbell of the type common in the early jazz drum kit.12 In this sense, the term “metal block” (or “bloc de métal”) serves, for Milhaud, as a kind of descriptive phrase. I have not been able to find documentation of Milhaud’s familiarity with the cowbell or where he got this terminology from, but it is suggestive of Milhaud’s desire for a sound which is similar in timbre to that of the wood block (“bloc de bois”), but metallic rather than wooden in character. Peinkofer and Tannigel’s usage of the term implies that it is used beyond Milhaud’s work, something that my research has not been able to corroborate. They moreover imply that the “category” of 10 Karl Peinkofer and Fritz Tannigel, Handbook of Percussion Instruments: Their Characteristics and Playing Techniques, with Illustrations and Musical Examples from the Literature, trans. Kurt Stone and Else Stone (London: Schott, 1976), 130-131. 11 ibid. 12 Stephen W. Dodge, “The ‘Concerto Pour Batterie et Orchestre’ by Darius Milhaud With a Look at Percussion in His Music Life,” Percussive Notes 17 no. 3 (Spring/Summer 1979), 58. 13 metal block has been created by unnamed manufacturers. The distinction between “cencerro” and “metal block” is likewise muddled, generalized, and non-specific. As far as the physical qualities of these two instruments go, it appears that the “metal block” is shaped like a trapezoid, and the “cencerro” is “straight- walled, high and narrow.” Without images being provided of the two, I am inclined suggest that the physical distinctions between the “metal block” and “cencerro” are envisioned by Peinkofer and Tannigel are within the conventional variance of size and shape that we see in the cowbells of the Western world. The relationship between the cowbells of tropical music (which they may denote with the Spanish cencerro simply because they associate the music in question with Spanish speakers) and the so-called “jazz cowbell” goes unelaborated upon. In fact, I will argue in this volume that the Cuban cowbell practice and the American one (which does figure prominently in the percussion palette of early jazz) are distinct practices historically, but that these practices have coalesced into a single modern practice, and that accordingly differentiating cencerros and “jazz cowbell” as though they are entirely separate instruments is not particularly useful. This is also not the only time that a writer on the subject of cowbells has tried to treat cencerro as a specific kind of cowbell, rather than a word for cowbell which is applied by speakers of Spanish, either. James Blades’ Oxford Music Online entry for “cencerro,” for example, describes it as a “clapperless animal bell of Spain and the New World.”13 This framing suggests that the cencerro is an animal bell distinguished from other animal bells either by its clapper or its provenance in the Hispanosphere. This is a strange assertion to make, given that a “clapperless animal bell” - which I interpret to mean an animal bell which typically lacks a clapper, and therefore would be clapperless even when hanging from an animal’s neck - would make no sound from the animal’s motions. While this “cencerro” entry makes more of an effort to parse out distinctive uses of cowbells than Blades’ Percussion Instruments and Their History, it becomes ahistorical (insofar as it tries to engage with the peculiar Cuban or tropical usage of the cowbell without seemingly engaging with the history of that usage) and internally contradictory (when Blades refers to cencerros tied to the backs of the celebrants of Ecuadorian festivals and “shaken while dancing” - will a clapperless cowbell make noise when shaken?). 13 James Blades (rev. James Holland), “Cencerro,” Oxford Music Online, accessed 4/25/2023, https://www-oxfordmusiconline-com.proxy- um.researchport.umd.edu/grovemusic/display/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo- 9781561592630-e-0000005273?rskey=9PgqdZ&result=1. 14 Both the Blades book and Peinkofer and Tannigel’s book date back several decades. What might a more up-to-date reference work have to say about the different kinds of cowbells? As an example of such a work, we need look no further than John Beck’s 2007 Encyclopedia of Percussion, 2nd edition. Though this book is both remarkably broad and remarkably thorough - touching upon percussion instruments from virtually all of humanity’s musical practices, and featuring longer sections on such a wide range of topics as the history of multipercussion, calfskin head manufacture and maintenance, and the percussion instruments of the Turkish Janissary (not to mention long articles on most of the instruments of the Western concert battery) - its treatment of the cowbell is brief, non-comprehensive, and self-contradictory. Beck’s definition of “cowbell” reads as follows: “Originally a bell hung around the necks of cattle in order to identify their location, now referring to a conical or rectangular bell without a clapper that is struck with a wooden stick.”14 Note how Beck avoids the fundamental linguistic trap of the word “cowbell” - the fact that the term can refer to both of the distinct objects he describes here - by implying, through his wording, that one definition has supplanted the other. Beck’s wording sidesteps the cowbell’s history completely. In reading this definition, one might get the impression that the struck musical cowbell is unrelated to the agricultural cowbell, that perhaps it is an instrument that resembles the agricultural cowbell only through a kind of convergent organological evolution. We will in this dissertation attempt to trace the history that Beck here sidesteps. This is the “music” portion of the titular “music and culture.” But in order to do so - to describe the relationship between the cowbells used in music and the cowbells worn by cows - we must first examine the factors that allow us to pronounce a given bell as belonging to either category. Manufacture and Use 14 John Beck, Encyclopedia of Percussion, 2nd ed.( New York: Routledge, 2007), 21. 15 Classifying cowbells - even to simply describe them as “musical” and “non-musical” - involves choosing which of two criteria are used to classify them. I identify these criteria as manufacture and use. It is an accurate, general statement that most musical instruments are intended to be used as musical instruments when they are manufactured. Clarinets are manufactured to be played by clarinetists in musical settings where clarinets are appropriate and/or called for. A guitar is constructed so that it can be used as a guitar, even if many guitars end up instead functioning as dust-gathering knicknacks on the walls of middle-aged men (or percussion doctoral students). But this does not apply to all percussion instruments. Indeed, since the early 20th century the use of “found sounds” - instruments which were not manufactured for musical use - has become a common feature of the percussion repertoire. We could, by way of example, mention the coffee cans in John Cage’s works for percussion quartet, such as Third Construction (1941), or the nonspecific metal sounds found in such works as Iannis Xenakis’ Psappha (1975) or David Lang’s The Anvil Chorus (1991), both for solo percussionist. Today, cowbells like the LP Black Beauty I have referred to already, or any other cowbells made by musical instrument manufacturers for drummers and percussionists to play on, are both instruments by manufacture and instruments by use. They are made to be used for a musical purpose and then used for a musical purpose. But this does not describe all cowbells throughout history. The manufacture of cowbells for musical use came into existence in order to meet an extant demand for musical cowbells - a demand that existed because musicians had already begun playing music with cowbells not manufactured for musical use. Such uses involve a contradiction between use and manufacture. Consider also the example provided in the introduction - were I to remove the clapper of a Bevin bell, made for express agricultural purpose, and find a way to mount it on a drumset or a set of timbales, it could fulfill all the same musical roles that the LP Black Beauty could. Its pitch is lower and its tone is a bit washier and a bit clangier, but it would be instantly recognizable as a cowbell and have the cowbell’s biting, piercing tone quality. Indeed, the distinction between manufacture and use could apply not only to the cowbell’s status or non-status as a musical instrument but also to the distinction between different “kinds” of musical cowbell which are suggested by modern parlance, and by the extent to which the terminology of manufacturers must be fallen back on in order to avoid overgeneralization of the traits of cowbells. Latin 16 Percussion today manufactures cowbells under names which seem to orient them towards certain styles of music - Mambo, Cha-Cha, and the “Classic Rock Ridge Rider,” just to name a few examples. If, however, a percussionist were to play a mambo’s cowbell part with a Classic Rock Ridge Rider, is it now a Mambo cowbell? In terms of manufacture, no. The LP Mambo Cowbell is a specific model of cowbell with a specific size and a specific character of tone. So is the Classic Rock Ridge Rider. They are different instruments, insofar as they are distinct objects from one another and produce sounds which are not identical. But they sound alike enough to where it is possible to use either cowbell for either purpose - though experienced players of either genre may find one cowbell or the other to be preferable for their purposes, due to its particular sonic characteristics. We could even extrapolate an unlikely if amusing hypothetical from this thought process by envisioning a somewhat clueless drummer who, when asked by a contractor to bring a cowbell to a big band gig, goes to his university’s instrument collection and borrows a C4 almglocke. He brings this enormous, mellow-toned, resonant bell to the gig and mounts it on his drum kit. It is recognizable to musicians as a cowbell by its shape and its method of sound production (being hit externally with a stick), but its low, sonorous clang sounds nothing like the cowbell the contractor expected. The drummer is not likely to be hired again, and worse still, the kind of cowbell playing that goes on at a big band gig will almost certainly lead to him cracking the almglocke and shelling out hundreds of dollars to replace it for the university. Nevertheless, in this case, the instrument in question was an almglocke by manufacture but a cowbell by use. This whimsical misunderstanding has likely never happened, however. The practical fact is that for drummers and percussionists, the almglocken/cowbell dichotomy rarely if ever poses an actual obstacle to comprehension. Nor, aside from the direct usage of cowbells to simulate the sound of a grazing herd of cattle in certain orchestral works,15 is the distinction between clappered cowbells and non- clappered cowbells of relevance to percussionists. But if we are to explore the history of the cowbell in music, these distinctions will be relevant. In order to chronicle the process of how cowbells became musical instruments (again, while simultaneously retaining an understanding as non-musical objects), we 15 This will be explored in Chapter 3. 17 will need to explore terminology that can differentiate between different roles that cowbells can play, as well as differentiate between clappered and non-clappered cowbells. Therefore, in addition to the term almglocken already introduced and summarized, I will also introduce the term agricultural cowbell. This term could be defined a number of ways based on the context. It could mean a cowbell that is made to be worn by a cow (agricultural by manufacture) or a bell that is worn by a cow (agricultural by use). Further subtleties of this particular concept will be explored as they arise in future chapters. The appropriateness of this terminology, as far as describing purpose of manufacture, is further rendered questionable by the fact that some portion of the cowbells advertised and sold online, despite being physically equivalent to “true” agricultural cowbells, are in fact produced either as souvenirs or as noisemakers for sporting events. To fully document and parse out this distinction, however, is a future project. For simplicity’s sake I will use “agricultural cowbell” to refer to all cowbells made, with clappers, for non-musical use. However, because of the cowbell’s peculiar history - its pattern of adoption followed by manufacturer’s codification - much of this document will concern points in history when the specific cowbells being used by the musicians being discussed will be cowbells of non-musical manufacture and musical use. Accordingly, the terms outlined above will often only be partially applicable to a given cowbell example. This is why I argue that the cowbell resists classification. Accordingly, though I maintain that James Blades’ coverage of the cowbell in Percussion Instruments and their History is insufficient given the prominence in music the cowbell had even by 1970, I am simultaneously struck by the sense that by making no attempt to distinguish terminologically between the wildly different uses of cowbells in jazz, Mahler, and Messiaen, Blades sacrificed specificity for clarity. After all, what those three uses of cowbell have in common - the only thing they have in common besides the fact that they are all musical uses - is that in one way or another, they are played on cowbells. 18 Chapter 2 The Humorous Cowbell The Carnivalesque and the Charivari The preceding chapter has established terminology which can be used to try and differentiate between different uses of cowbell without attempting to comprehensively (and inaccurately) classify all cowbells. This is a necessary step in order to describe the history of the cowbell’s use in music. But the second half of this dissertation’s title describes the secondary purpose which runs alongside this musical history – the cowbell’s cultural history. As we saw in the introduction, the cowbell has, in modern culture, some kind of intrinsic humor. It is possible that this humor results from the extramusical associations the cowbell carries into music from its past and present usage outside music. The most obvious such association is right there in the name: “cow.” For so long as the objects which we call cowbells continue to go by a name that contains the word “cow,” there will be an association with the idea of cattle tied to every denoting of those objects - even when, as is usually the case in music, the moniker is an orphaned etymology. But this is not the whole picture. The link to agricultural practice is part of the humor, as we will see. But the cowbell’s cultural baggage goes far beyond this simple fact of its use. Indeed, for centuries the cowbell has been established in European and postcolonial American culture as a symbol and component of the kind of mocking and transgressive public spectacles that fall under the umbrella of Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesque. In order to demonstrate this, we will examine the spectacular practice which most firmly and intriguingly links cowbells with both music and humor: the medieval spectacle of social judgment known as the charivari. Bakhtin and the carnivalesque In his 1965 work Rabelais and his World, the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895- 1975), exploring how Francois Rabelais’ 16th century pentology Gargantua and Patagruel reflects the aesthetics and social dynamics of the pre-modern carnival, utilizes the term and the concept of the carnivalesque. This term is difficult to succinctly define, but is used both by Bakhtin in this work and by 19 those writers who have followed him to refer to the specific brand of parodic humor and the peculiar suspension of ordinary societal relations within carnivals and other comparable festive occasions. Bakhtin mentions the pre-modern celebration of Easter and the Feast of Fools, historically celebrated on the first day of the new year, as examples when introducing the concept.16 The carnival and its relatives, according to Bakhtin, operate within a social framework entirely separate from that from everyday, non- carnivalesque life. “Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom.”17 The social hierarchies of non-carnival life are suspended or inverted in the carnivalesque - jesters are crowned kings and clowns elected abbots and bishops. Bakhtin stresses, however, that while the humorous elements of the carnivalesque, in parodying the conventions and power structures of everyday life, seek to tear them down, this is not a purely destructive force. It is a transformational force which destroys so that it can create. The laughter of the carnival, says Bakhtin metonymically, “is ambivalent: it is gay, triumphant, and at the same time mocking, deriding. It asserts and denies; it buries and revives.”18 Of pertinence to the present study is the fact that Bakhtin does see significance in, and explore, the otherness of cowbells as it relates to the carnival and the carnivalesque. The passage in question concerns an episode in Gargantua and Pantagruel wherein the titular giant Gargantua steals the bells directly from the steeple of Notre Dame, intending to hang them from the harness of his enormous horse. A horse-bell, of course, is not the same as a cowbell, but what a horse-bell and a cowbell share, functionally, is the act of taking a metallic noisemaker and adorning an animal with it - something that, when the metallic noisemaker in question is so lofty and pious as the bells of Notre Dame themselves, becomes what Bakhtin terms “a typical carnivalesque gesture of debasement. It combines a destructive theme with that of renewal on another material, bodily level.”19 Bakhtin goes on to describe bells (“usually” cowbells in his words) as appearing “even in the most ancient carnivals as an indispensable accessory,” 16 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1984), 5. 17 Ibid., 7. 18 Ibid., 11. 19 Ibid., 214. 20 and notes that “we still hear the jingling of carnival bells on bridal vehicles.”20 The translator notes that by this Bakhtin means the single bell hung over the horses in the traditional Russian sled known as the “troika.” This association with “carnival bells” and weddings will be returned to later in this chapter. Nicola Scaldaferri has written that the Italian campanaccio, meaning “cowbell,” is in fact a pejorative form of campane, meaning “bell,” and that this reflects how the cowbell and the church bell “create an oppositional couplet that draws on their materiality, their positioning and their context of use.”21 Scaldaferri does not connect this with Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque, but it does evoke the “debasement” portrayed in Gargantua and Pantagruel - a debasement which in that work is an actual physical action rather than a state of symbolic, rhetorical opposition. Accordingly, though Bakhtin’s discussion of the cowbell has an entirely non-musical focus, the act of “debasement” which is inherent to the cowbell - to the constant linguistic attachment of the cow to the bell - also applies to the cowbell in music. When we identify a cowbell - or a cencerro, or a kuhglocke - we are keeping that “uncrowning” of the concept of the bell, by association with the cow, alive. This is an aspect of the inherent humor that the cowbell has, the humor that has associated it with laughter and with mockery for centuries. Now, to demonstrate this in detail, we will examine a historical spectacle of popular comedy with a close association to the cowbell. It is a social phenomenon which Bakhtin associates with the carnivalesque: the charivari. Charivari and its cousins Charivari is the most commonly used name for a set of related folk customs of historical Western Europe and postcolonial North America. The most thorough charivari documentation (including all examples cited in this chapter) dates from the 15th century and later. Regional variations and alternative names include shivaree (often used in North America), the English rough music, the German Katzenmusik, the Italian campanate, the Spanish cencerrada, and the Basque zinzarrotse.22 Note that 20 Ibid. 21 Nicola Scaldaferri, "Soundmasks in resounding places," in Sonic Ethnography (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2020), 56. 22 Violet Alford, “Rough Music or Charivari,” Folklore 70, no. 4 (1959),http://www.jstor.org/stable/1258223, 508. 21 these last three names all specifically invoke the ringing of bells, with the last two specifically referring to cowbells. Indeed, Mark McKningt has documented a specifically New Orleans-based 19th century American charivari tradition known by its practitioners as “cowbellion.”23 These are all “mock serenades.” They are transgressive, social events where a community gathers together to make loud noises aimed at a particular individual. In some instances, the dedicatee might be mock-kidnapped and paraded around the community on a donkey. The dedicatee might alternatively be represented by an impersonator, who bodily parodies them much as the charivari itself parodies a serenade or a parade. The charivari participants would often request a retribution of some sort, in the form of money or food and drink. In spite of what the name “rough music” might suggest, however, charivaris are generally described as a kind of sonic social practice rather than as actual music. Certainly, historical commentators on the subject did not seem to consider it music. Violet Alford quotes medieval writers calling the charivari an “obnoxious sport” and an “iniquitous game.”24 And the instruments with which they were accompanied were broadly not seen as actual instruments; functionally, the charivari was noise and its “instruments” noisemakers. Some charivaris included chants or rude songs written for the occasion, and it is an intriguing possibility that a modern, open-minded listener, hearing an actual 15th century French of English charivari, would in fact process it as a particularly noisy kind of music - songs or chants accompanied by pots, pans, cowbells, and any other piece of houseware or farming equipment that could be enlisted to bang and crash. However, songs are not a requisite of a charivari (the practice has little to no actual “requisite” elements save the overall social dynamic of community vs. individual or married couple), and many charivaris recorded by Alford, Davis, Johnson, Ingram, and others are more so simple community justice (or antagonism). It is possible, however, that this is because the study of charivari has taken place almost entirely within the field of sociology. Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque also describes the charivari. The charivari and carnival are both boisterous, grotesque, public festivities. The carnivalesque’s paradoxical laughter - simultaneously creative and destructive - can be compared with the charivari’s blend of violence and tomfoolery. So, too, 23 Mark McKningt, “Charivaris, Cowbellions, and Sheet Iron Bands: Nineteenth-Century Rough Music in New Orleans,” American Music 23, no. 4 (2005), https://doi.org/10.2307/4153068, 409.. 24 Alford, “Rough Music,” 505. 22 does the carnivalesque’s rejection of conventional social structures and power relations evoke the charivari’s peculiar dynamic - that of the individual placed, regardless of social position, at the mercy of the community. Natalie Zemon Davis has shown that besides their aesthetic common ground, charivaris and carnivals shared a more concrete, institutional origin in that both were - in late Middle Ages France, the purvey of Davis’ study - organized and carried out by transgressive organizations of the laity which called themselves Abbeys of Misrule.25 Charivaris of all nationalities are often malicious or humiliating in intention, and always have, according to Natalie Zemon Davis, a “boisterous mixture of playfulness and cruelty.”26 From culture to culture, as well as over history, the precise mix thereof varies. English and French charivaris, for example, seem to have historically tended towards the malicious end, and functioned almost entirely as public humiliation for the sake of moral judgment by the community. Alford speaks of French peasants as late as the early 20th century living in fear of these bands of young men who would roam their communities, raising rackets and demanding wine.27 The so-called Bal des Ardents or “Ballad of Burning Men” in which Charles VI of France nearly burned to death along with four other nobleman while engaged in a dance covered in flax and resin to affect the appearance of wild men was, according to Alford, a charivari - given in honor of a remarrying lady-in-waiting whose new husband was much younger than her.28 American charivaris (also called “shivarees” or “bellings”), on the other hand, seem to tend toward the less malicious (albeit still playful) end of the spectrum. Loretta T. Johnson, the first writer to integrate studies of American charivaris with their European roots, describes the Midwestern shivaree of the 19th century as “a raucous, high spirited, occasionally even violent celebration after a wedding.”29 Contrast this - an “inevitable adjunct” to any wedding - to the 15th century French charivari documented by Davis, an instrument of mockery which, when given during a wedding, served to mark that wedding as a recipient of social ill will. The donkey of French charivari and English rough music was often replaced with a 25 Natalie Zemon Davis, “The Reasons of Misrule: Youth Groups and Charivaris in Sixteenth-Century France,” Past & Present no. 50 (1971), http://www.jstor.org/stable/650243, 43. 26 Natalie Zemon Davis, “Charivari, Honor, and Community,” in Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance, ed. John J. MacAloon (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1984), 42. 27 Alford, “Rough Music,” 512. 28 Ibid. 29 Loretta T. Johnson, “Charivari/Shivaree: A European Folk Ritual on the American Plains,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 20, no. 3 (1990), https://doi.org/10.2307/204083, 372. 23 wheelbarrow. In America and Canada it became instead a traditional festivity, albeit one with teeth, so to speak. The “instrumental forces” of a charivari were often themselves mockeries of what might be ordinarily thought of as instruments. The iconic example is struck kitchenware - seen, for example, in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma when Curly’s cowboy friends raise a ruckus below his window on his wedding night with pots, pans, and ladles. Any object that can make noise is fair game, however; and in stock-keeping societies where animal bells are to be found, cowbells are readily available and particularly efficacious noisemakers. Martin Ingram lists the components of English and Scottish rough music as the “ringing of bells, the raucous playing of musical instruments, the beating of pots and pans and other household utensils, and the discharge of guns and fireworks.”30 Indeed, most scholarly accounts of charivaris will, when listing the objects used for the noisemaking, at least mention “bells” when not singling out some kind of animal bell (for example, “mule bells” in Davis’ Renaissance French example).31 And in the case of the American examples, cowbells in particular are common elements in the practice. One common historical American shivaree feature, for example, is the covert attaching of cowbells to the marriage bed.32 The effect of this is that when the married couple go to consummate their marriage, any shaking or moving of the bed that might occur will additionally shake and clatter the cowbell. This practice clearly evokes Alford’s description of the charivari as potentially a “prophylactic” to goad a couple into consummation; however, in the events described by Alford, the charivari’s participants would be present, below the couple’s window, not unlike the pot-and-pan wielding cowboys from Oklahoma.33 When the cowbell is attached to the bed itself, however, the act of noisemaking is shifted, by the crowd, from the crowd to the couple themselves. This parallels the shift in sonic control when a human being takes a cowbell from a cow - taking control of the sound from an animal to human - but in the opposite direction. It furthermore means that instead of making noise to mock consummation which is understood, but not known, to be occurring, the shivaree’s crowd will have in the cowbell’s noises direct, 30 Martin Ingram, “Ridings, Rough Music and the ‘Reform of Popular Culture’ in Early Modern England,” Past & Present, no. 105 (1984), http://www.jstor.org/stable/650546, 86. 31 Davis, “Charivari, Honor, and Community,” 48. 32 Norma Hancock, “Shivarees.” Western Folklore 14, no. 2 (1955), https://doi.org/10.2307/1497005, 146. 33 Alford, “Rough Music,” 506 24 audible indication of the consummation. This is a more direct, incisive embarrassment of the couple than the simple mock serenading from outside. It also evokes Bakhtin’s account of the poetic image in Rabelais of the church bells of France being removed from their belfries and transformatively debased - “uncrowned, destroyed, and regenerated”34 - by being hung from the beard of the feasting giant Pantagruel so that he will by the action of chewing ring them. Figure 4: From the September 29, 1908 San Jose Evening News. Cowbells have also seem to have retained, from this historical usage in the shivaree, an evident cultural association with weddings. I cite here a couple of examples that were considered newsworthy in the early 20th century. I reproduce in Figure 4, for example, a San Jose Evening News article from September 29, 1908, describes a groom who has been pranked by his male friends with a cowbell padlocked around his neck. A July 21, 1909 article in the Morning Olympian of Olympia, Washington, tells of wedding guests filling the luggage of the newlyweds with cowbells and rice, for the purpose of making both a racket and a mess when the luggage is opened. Innocuous pranks like these, tempering the jubilation of the newlyweds with the unexpected sound of the cowbell, recall the shivaree, but deprived of 34 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 214. 25 the charivari’s transgression and its retributive nature, they are simply traces. And this association did not die out in the early 20th century; agricultural cowbells are widely sold online as wedding accouterments, with advertising copy (to cite one example) asserting: “Plain or custom imprinted cowbells make great wedding favors! Guests ring them as the couple leaves the church and/or at the reception for the couple to kiss. Sure beats birdseed or bubbles!”35 Indeed, my own wedding in December 2022 was accompanied by my family and friends ringing cowbells - though I will readily admit that this was due in part to their familiarity with my dissertation project. The last and most intriguing example of cowbells within the charivari tradition which we will now examine brings us back to Bakhtin. It is the charivari described in the 14th century French verse satire, the Roman de Fauvel (1310-1314), and the charivari that Bakhtin most frequently evokes with his deep study of Renaissance accounts of the carnivalesque. Fauvel most famously exists as a manuscript, compiled by Chaillou de Pesstain in 1314, filled with illuminations as well as monophonic songs in both Latin and French which accompany the narrative. There is a good deal of music scholarship dealing with this work, but focus tends to be on the musical compositions by Philippe de Vitry rather than the text. The actual poetic text of the Roman de Fauvel, by Gervais du Bus, is written in archaic French; no English translation exists. In fact, in 2022 (last year as of the time of writing), a dissertation was submitted by violist Rebecca Flank drawing attention to this fact. Flank did translate a large portion of the text into modern English as part of her project, but not the portion which includes the charivari.36 Accordingly, the excerpt below is my own translation (into English) of Armand Strubel’s 2012 translation (into modern French). The charivari in Fauvel is given on the occasion of the wedding of Fauvel, a horse, to the allegorical figure of Lady Vainglory. It is possible that the social transgression committed by this couple, which earns the community’s carnivalesque ire, is the fact that the wedding is between a horse and an 35 “Wedding Bells, Plain & Printed,” Cowbells.com, accessed 4/26/2023, https://cowbells.com/collections/wedding-bells-plain-imprinted. 36 Rebecca Flank, Accessing Music: The Modern Interpolation of the “Roman de Fauvel” (DMA Dissertation, University of Cincinnatti, 2022), 61-89. 26 allegory. At any rate, as Fauvel takes his bride to the wedding bed, people gather outside and begin to make noise with a variety of implements. “They are extravagantly disguised. Some have reversed the front and back Of their clothes and put their clothes inside out The others made themselves adornments With coarse sacks and monks' frocks. It's just if we could recognize a single one, They were so painted and transformed; They only meditated evil deeds. One brandished a large frying pan, The other a kitchen hook, grill and A pestle, and the third a copper pot, And all counterfeited the drunkard; Another held a basin, and they knocked on it, So loud that they stunned everything, like thunder. One had cowbells Sewn on the thighs and buttocks, And above great bells that made When shaken and ringed, a clear sound; The others had drums and cymbals, And great ignoble and dirty instruments, Castanets and ‘macequotes’37 From which they drew sounds and notes So acute that no one can describe them.”38 37 Strubel identifies this word as a hapax (a word which appears only once in a text or group of texts) and is unsure what it refers to. 38 Armand Strubel, Le Roman De Fauvel, Lettres Gothiques (Paris: Librarie Général Française, 2012), 583. 27 I will note that the term I have translated as “cowbells” appears in the original text as tantins à vaches, which Strubel translates as clochettes à vaches. In both cases the cattle connection is clear and present (the word vache), and the grotesquery of the event is emphasized by the fact that a cowbell- wielding participant has fastened the bells to his body, just as they would be attached to the cow, to make noise when he moves. The charivari in question is also in one of the work’s most vivid and widely reproduced illuminations, shown in Figure 5. Pots and pans beaten with spoons can clearly be seen in the hands of the charivari’s participants. It is possible that the shovel-like shape visible in the left side of the charivari is intended to be a cowbell, but it may also be a frying pan as described in the text. Figure 5: Charivari from the Roman de Fauvel (folio 34r of the Chaillou de Pesstain manuscript). 28 Fauvel is pervaded with the spirit of the carnivalesque. It is a biting satire, with Fauvel - a socially mobile horse, his name an acronym for six of the seven canonical vices, who comes to amass a huge religious and political following before his aforementioned marriage - being, as argued by Flank, a stand- in for the unpopular figure of France’s King Phillip IV.39 The social order it presents - a horse ruling over people - is just the kind of debasement that Bakhtin identifies with the carnivalesque. Embodying the flipside of this debasement - the notion of the carnivalesque as comedic renewal as well as comedic destruction - is the yearning for a more just social order that lies implicit in its rhetorical tearing-down of the social order as is. The cowbell’s cultural baggage In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin is careful to distinguish between the ambivalent parody of the Renaissance which he calls carnivalesque - laughter that destroys so it can create - and the altered form that he claims parody has tended to exist in since the Renaissance’s end. “In the new official culture,” writes Bakhtin, “there prevails a tendency toward the stability and completion of being, toward one single meaning, one single tone of seriousness.”40 For Bakhtin, writers and audiences of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries lost the ability (or desire) to appreciate the transformational, rejuvenating power of the ribaldry and obscenity in Rabelais’ (and others’) work. I seek to add to this concept a changing position of the cowbell. As I have already noted, the notion of the cowbell as a debasement of a “true” bell is a poetic image rather than an actual physical transformation that occurred in any kind of real time. No Gargantua ever could have actually taken church bells down from the steeples and hung them from domestic animals. However, if we understand the charivari as we have already sought to understand it - as a mock serenade - it follows that the sonic element of the charivari is a mockery of music, and that its instruments are themselves mockeries of “actual” instruments. Rabelais presents the cowbell as a near-universal feature of the carnivalesque, and so we can surmise, within his historical narrative, that it too was a victim of the changing understanding of parody after the Renaissance. Since well before Rabelais’ time, the cowbell has been a fixture of parody and comedy - in the charivari and in the carnivalesque. But within Bakhtin’s framework, since Rabelais’ 39 Flank, Accessing Music, xv-xvii. 40 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 101. 29 time, that status has since ceased to be transformational. To put this suggestion into modern terminology – cowbell jokes have a tendency to punch down. Sometimes this is only because they are jokes at the expense of inanimate objects with “cow” in the name. But sometimes, this is borne out by an association of the cowbell, in humor, with cruel racial caricaturing. Examples of this will be examined closely in Chapter 4. 30 Chapter 3 “A Simple Piece of Iron” The Orchestral Cowbell Before 1920 The cowbell’s introduction into the musical world was not seamless or continuous. The musical practices which have featured the cowbell - American theater music, Afro-Cuban music, European classical music, the globalized popular music world today - have all done so with varying degrees of independence. In this chapter we will examine the small but prominent place that the cowbell has held in the European orchestral repertoire during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Gioacchino Rossini: Guillaume Tell (1829) There is not a cowbell in Guillaume Tell - at least, there is not a literal cowbell. But it has been argued by one writer - none other than the great composer Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) - that Rossini’s percussion writing contains an allusion to, or representation of, the sound of a cowbell. The opera’s percussion section features timpani, triangle, bass drum, cymbals, and an instrument simply called campana or “bell.” This is no cowbell but rather a church bell - it rings at the beginning of the second act to signal the end of the shepherds’ work day, and is thusly identified within the libretto. The role of the cowbell is instead played, according to Berlioz, by the triangle. This occurs during the third section of the overture, which the musical literature has come to describe as “Call to the Dairy Cows” or ranz des vaches. The ranz des vaches, also widely known as kuhreihen, is a distinctly Swiss genre of worksong - the melody of this particular section of the Guillaume Tell overture is an example called “Appenzell.” Kuhreihen were historically sung, or played on alphorns, by cowherds to their cattle as a sort of “come-hither” command.41 Given the ubiquity, and usefulness, of cowbells in the exact kind of mountainous terrain where kuhreihen would be sung, it is not off-base of Berlioz to associate the sounds. Kuhreihen were something of a melodic trope in early romantic classical music, being utilized for pastoral color in Beethoven’s 6th symphony and Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique among many others. 41 “Ranz des vaches,” Oxford Music Online, accessed 4/26/2023, https://www-oxfordmusiconline- com.proxy-um.researchport.umd.edu/grovemusic/display/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo- 9781561592630-e-0000022893?rskey=yBQraq&result=1. 31 But the “Call to the Dairy Cows” in Guillaume Tell is distinctly programmatic, insofar as its presence in the overture serves to establish the opera’s Swiss identity and rural, mountainous setting. The section, the third of the opera’s widely-heard overture, is an andate ⅜ in a ternary ABA form. The distinctive kuhreihen melody, familiar to generations of Americans as a common musical quotation in cartoons ranging from Looney Tunes to Spongebob Squarepants, appears first traded back and forth between cor anglais and flute. The B section shifts into a more distinctly contrapuntal texture with the cattle call in the cor anglais and a nimble 16th counterpoint above in the flute, all accompanied by a new voice - the triangle. The triangle remains a part of the texture through the second A section, which retains the B section’s woodwind texture. Hector Berlioz, in his 1844 Grand traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes, argues that the triangle be understood as a programmatic representation of an animal bell, and how intriguing words on the topic are worth quoting in full. “The triangle is here extremely appropriate, with its little pianissimo ting sounding at intervals. It is the little bell attached to the sheep grazing quietly while their shepherds exchange their merry songs. ‘Ah!’ someone will say, ‘so you see some dramatic purpose in this use of the triangle? In that case, kindly tell us, what do the violins or the violas or the cellos or the clarinets etc. represent?’ To which I reply that the latter musical instruments are the fundamentals of the art, while the triangle, being merely a simple piece of iron whose sound does not belong with the recognisable sounds of the orchestra, should not be heard in the middle of a soft, gentle piece without very good reason, otherwise it will seem absurdly out of place.”42 Berlioz identifies the triangle in the Guillaume Tell overture as a sheep bell, rather than a cowbell. This is a curious choice, in light of the fact that a ranz des vaches is a cattle call. It may be explained by the fact that Rossini appears to not have personally used the phrase ranz des vaches, or it may be linguistic quirk or bias of Berlioz’s own. Indeed, sheep and shepherds being Berlioz’s “default” image of pastoralism is perhaps illustrated by the fact that when in Symphonie Fantastique he sought to express it 42 Hector Berlioz and Hugh Macdonald, Berlioz's Orchestration Treatise: A Translation and Commentary, Cambridge Musical Texts and Monographs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 292. 32 in music himself, he wrote a musical figure - a dialogue between English horn and offstage oboe - which he termed “two shepherds piping a ranz des vaches in dialogue.”43 At any rate, Berlioz’s comments about the triangle above merit a deeper consideration. His antipathy towards an array of percussion instruments is clear in this treatise, but in the case of the triangle he goes so far as to question whether it could be an instrument at all. Rossini does not appear to have ever identified the triangle as standing in for a cowbell, or animal bell of any kind. Berlioz’s argument is not concerned with the composer’s intentions. He is simply concerned with the sonic characteristics of metal. If the triangle here is to be an instrument, Berlioz says, it must be an instrument that portrays a real-world noise, because it is an instrument of noise - a “simple piece of iron” – not one of music. Berlioz, of course, was not entirely opposed to the triangle on the basis of its noisiness. In his commentary on the Berlioz orchestration treatise, Hugh MacDonald notes Berlios “casts” the triangle as an “Italian peasant instrument” in Harold en Italie and as the metallic color of sword-thrusts in the opera Benvenuto Cellini.44 But these uses, we can surmise, are appropriate in Berlioz’ eyes because they stand in for either ethnic color or the presence of metallic sounds in the drama the music conveys. Accordingly, Berlioz chooses to leave out percussion entirely from the “Scène au champs” – the pastoral third movement of Symphonie fantastique - until the rolling thunder portrayed by the timpani at the movement’s conclusion. This is a chilling moment - a bleak shattering of the countryside’s peace - and such a moment, we can surmise, is a “very good reason” of the sort Berlioz deemed necessary for the usage of a percussion sound in a “soft, gentle piece,” to use his words. The phrase “a simple piece of iron,” interpreted as a sonic description, is at odds with the sound of the triangle as modern percussionists are familiar with it. But this creates an interesting possibility. Berlioz’ words are suggestive of a triangle sound different from the modern one - one affected by 19th- century manufacturing processes, and indeed by the standards of sound production among early 19th century percussionists. In a modern recording of the Guillaume Tell overture, the triangle is a shimmer, a dainty and delicate sound that, if it has a real programmatic effect, is suggestive of dewdrops or butterflies. But perhaps the triangles Berlioz heard used in this repertoire were duller, and lower in pitch, and therefore closer to the sound of an animal bell. This is difficult to say for certain, as scholarly 43 D. Kern Holoman, Berlioz (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), 101. 44 Berlioz and MacDonald, Orchestration Treatise, 291. 33 documentation of historical triangle sound quality is not readily available. But if true, it does provide evidence that Rossini’s ranz des vaches is, in an indirect sense, the first cowbell in the classical canon… not to mention an intriguing opportunity for historically informed performance. The Sound of Mahler’s Cowbells The first unmistakable use of cowbells in a symphonic setting - not a programmatic allusion to their sound, but the physical presence of cowbells making noise onstage - came in 1906, in Gustav Mahler’s 6th symphony. Mahler’s cowbells (he calls them Herdenglocken or “herd bells”) have clappers in them; they are agricultural cowbells, presumably straight from the factory or from the dairy farm, though the exact provenance of the bells used in the premiers of Mahler’s 6th and 7th symphonies does not appear to have been recorded. By way of technical direction for the player, the following German direction appears in the 1906 published score when the herdenglocken first enter. “Die Herdenglocken müssen sehr diskret behandelt werden in realistischer Nachahmung von bald vereinigt, bald vereinzelnt aus der Fern herüberklingrenden (höheren und tiefen) Glöckchen einer weidenden Herde. Es wird jedoch ausdrücklich bemerkt, dass diese technische Bemerkung keine programmatische Ausdeutung zulässt.” In English: “The herdenglocken must be treated very discreetly in realistic imitation of the (higher and lower) bells of a grazing flock ringing out from afar, now united, now isolated. However, it is expressly noted that this technical note does not allow for any programmatic interpretation.” The notation of these instruments (shown in Figure 6) in all of Mahler’s uses, is large note values accompanied by trill markings. The smallest note value marked in any of Mahler’s cowbell parts is a quarter note in the second movement of the Seventh; most of the figures come in half notes or larger. 34 Figure 6: Herdenglocken as notated in the first movement of Mahler’s Symphony no. 6. Though no photographs of the “original Herdenglocken” have survived so far as I can determine, it does appear that Mahler selected them himself. In a letter to Oskar Fried, who conducted the work’s second performance in Berlin in October 1906 (the work had been premiered in Essen in May of that year), Mahler promised to bring the cowbells along with him. This seemingly meant that the hapless percussionist who had to play them on this performance seemingly saw them for the first time the morning of the performance - a situation tragically familiar to modern percussionists as well.45 The herdenglocken appear in the first movement, the Andante (variously the second or third movement in different editions), and the fourth movement. In the first movement, they are placed offstage, and form part of a foggy, mysterious texture that crops up in the movement’s development - a marked contrast to the driving, earthy march that opens the movement and recurs throughout it. Lasting from 45 Henry-Louis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 503. 35 figure 21 to figure 25 in the first movement, the passage features the cowbells and near-inaudible high string tremolos accompanying such material as a quotation of the movement’s second them, horn call- esque perfect fourth motives traded between solo winds and timpani, and a half-note celesta figure that “emerges” from the bells - a ghostly and mysterious effect. In the Andante, the cowbells come out onto the stage and are given a more prominent (albeit brief) role in a lush passage, accompanying a choral horn figure as well as a pentatonic-adjacent melodic motif carried through the woodwinds and the trumpets. The cowbells retreat back offstage in the last movement, and are once again dictated to be heard at a distance. In their first appearance, they join with celesta (again) as well as harp to provide a ghostly yet mechanical backing for a solo horn. In this movement they are also alternated with “deep ringing of bells” (tiefes glockengeläute) - a marking indicating cast bells, larger and completely different in tone from the cowbells. At figure 145, the glocken first form a backdrop alongside quarter notes in low clarinets, tremolo violins, and the harp; in the fifth bar, the herdenglocken enter over top of them along with a higher octave of harps and the bassoons, English horn, and flute. The glocken then stop, and the cowbells continue under fragmented wind solos. The effect it creates - the ringing of one type of bell seeming to transition into another type - it is almost a crossfade, created using simple orchestration. It is another eerie, plaintive little moment, less comforting than either of the cowbell’s earlier appearances. The Herdenglocken in the Seventh are written for in much the same way as those in the Sixth. Once again they begin offstage. They first appear in the nachtmusik second movement at rehearsal 84, alongside a solo horn accompanied by thumping, haunting low strings. Texturally, this is somewhat unlike the sound worlds the cowbells inhabited in the Sixth - there is no celesta or harp to provide a glassy compliment to the bells’ tinkling. They are alone in their register and timbral space, though are still associated with a horn as the melodic voice, as was often the case in the previous work, and the somber, mysterious character is similar to that which accompanied the cowbells in their first appearance in the Sixth. The cowbells are then, near the end of the movement, played onstage. Here they once again accompany a mechanical 8th-note figure on the celesta, though this one is unmistakably light and jovial. Alongside them is a sweeping melody in the horns and long tones in the strings. This is another “pastoral” soundscape, but it is a brief moment of warmth and color in what is often a dark and brooding movement. 36 The cowbells appear only once more, at the conclusion of the fifth and final movement - onstage, a tinkling metallic color underscoring the wildly exuberant conclusion. Like in the finale of the Sixth, they appear in conjunction with the glockengelaute - the “ringing of deep bells.” This time, instead of a transition, the two sounds occur in prolonged conjunction. The effect is simply a denser, more clangorous metallic backdrop that would have been created by either set of bells alone. The Intent of Mahler’s Cowbells It is possible, then, to hear all the cowbells in these two Mahler symphonies as simply sounds among sounds - found sounds taken out of the world, and placed into orchestrated musical contexts. Insofar as Mahler in his scores specifically disallows a “programmatic interpretation,” this appears at first to be his intent. Contemporary audiences, however, were at times unwilling to hear them thusly - to, in a sense, separate the cow from the cowbell. Listeners were at times surprised and confused by the presence of cowbells - a sound so clearly indicative of a specific, real-world environment and all its implications that one critic, Hugo Daffner, accuse Mahler of “the crassest and most superficial naturalism.”46 An unnamed critic in the Berliner Zeitung, commenting on the work’s Berlin premiere, described the cowbells as leaving a “taste of milk - but pasteurized milk.”47 Writing in the March 9th, 1923, New York Times, music critic Richard Aldrich complained that in the Seventh, “there are cowbells for no reason stated - can it be for a musical reason?” Even when elevated by being associated with such an established composer as Mahler, cowbells are still marked for laughter. Such laughter is expressed in Figure 7 below, a widely reproduced cartoon that initially appeared in the cover of German men’s magazine Die Muskete in January 1907. In it, a distraught caricatured Mahler declares that he will write a new symphony to feature a percussion sound he has only just conceived of: the car horn. Behind him on a rack (of a sort the cowbells in his then-recent Sixth symphony might have been hung from) are other visual reminders of the noise to which Mahler has subjected his listeners - a ratchet, a ruta, sleigh bells from the Fourth symphony, extra timpani, a hammer, and of course, a cowbell. 46 Quoted in Thomas Peattie, “Mahler’s Alpine Journey,” Acta Musicologica 83, no. 1 (2011), 85. 47 de La Grange, Mahler, vol. 3, 505. 37 Figure 7: A caricature of Mahler and his percussion sounds, from January 1907 Die Muskete. Theodor Adorno in his Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, describes the cowbells (specifically in the first movement of the Sixth symphony) as being involved in an allusion to the “elemental [and] mythic” and to “primal nature,”48 albeit a melancholic one. This musical moment “pauses to draw breath,” says Adorno, “knowing the way back to be blocked, rather than feigning to follow the way.”49 For Adorno, the cowbells carry an implication of a regression to a pre-modern state, which, insofar as time travel is not possible, is an ephemeral dream for Mahler. Thomas Peattie, speaking of this same episode, calls it a “pastoral that is at its core fractured and broken,”50 symbolic of Mahler’s inability to find his hoped-for spiritual fulfillment and peace in a late 19th century Switzerland which had been wholly commercialized and was filled with tourists on similar would-be journeys of self discovery. This particular reading is supported by Mahler’s remarks recorded by Edgar Istel in 1908. While again denying a programmatic association for the Sixth’s cowbells, Mahler conceded that the sound of 48 Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. E. F. N Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 37-38. 49 Ibid. 50 Peattie, “Mahler’s Alpine Journey,” 83. 38 cowbells did carry a specific implication for him: it was a representation of the “changing or fading of nature sounds.”51 Mahler envisioned himself, he told Istel, “on the highest peak, facing infinity,” and the cowbells symbolize “loneliness and disengagement with the world, just as the sounds of grazing herd float upwards, symbolizing the last farewell to existence for the one who walks alone on the mountaintop.”52 This is a scene that Mahler, a frequent traveler in the Alps, may well have experienced quite literally. Mahler, it seems, is contradicting himself. He intended these marks to dispel accusations of programmaticism, but in practice they simply correct the programmatic intent. The cowbells still represent a particular scene with specific emotional implications. They are programmatic in this sense. Rather than a portrayal of cows, Mahler’s cowbells portray the absence of cows - they can be heard, but they are simply out of view down the mountain. Note that some - but not all - of the musical moments where Mahler writes for the cowbells mirror this by placing the cowbells offstage, where their sound can be heard but its mechanism cannot be seen. Furthermore, recall that Mahler characterizes the cowbell, in this statement, as “nature sounds.” Adorno, as noted, heard a pastoral implication in them; Julian Johnson identifies them as evoking “a pastoral space where the lines between man and nature are blurred.”53 This lines up with Mahler’s particular association outlined above; the lonely, distant mountaintop is a kind of pastoral, if a lonely and bleak one, far from the warmth and cheer of Rossini’s ranz des vaches. I, however, would suggest a slightly different interpretation of “nature sound.” They are nature sounds - the scene that Mahler describes them as implying is one of nature - but they are not natural sounds. They are manmade. The sound of a cowbell implies the presence of a cow, but more to the point it implies the domestication of a cow - someone put the bell around its neck, after all. When Mahler envisions himself alone on a cliff facing infinity, with the sounds of distant cowbells wafting up from below, he describes a situation where the furthest he could get from the modern world was a sonic space that remained filled with metallic noise. If the sound of cowbells really implies a pastoral space - an escape from modernity - it does so through a sound that implies modernity’s, and humanity’s, inescapability. In this reading, the sounds of 51 Quoted in ibid., 86 52 Ibid. 53 Julian Johnson, Mahler's Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 54. 39 cowbells tinge the pastoral scene with a chilling irony, and support Mahler’s assessment of the whole scene as lonely and apocalyptic. The Meaning of Mahler’s Cowbells Let us postulate that Mahler’s usage of the cowbells in these two symphonies exist, for the sake of argument, on a gradient of possible interpretation. At one end is pure programmaticism: the cowbells are there to indicate that the piece is presently portraying a landscape where one might hear cowbells. At the other end is pure sound: the cowbells are simply a sound which Mahler can orchestrate with, just as he can any other sound which an instrument in the orchestra can produce. Though Mahler’s disavowal of a programmatic reading might seem to suggest he utilized the cowbells as pure sound - as absolute music without connotations - his comments to Istel suggest otherwise. The cowbells are, for Mahler, a non-programmatic sound with specific emotional implications - derived in a programmatic manner, by portraying a specific scene - which he utilizes in the development of the first movement of the Sixth Symphony, to name the most-written-about example. At other times in the symphonies, however, Mahler uses the cowbells in music at odds with these emotional implications. The dividing line is the physical location - and accordingly the visibility - of the bells. Whenever Mahler uses the cowbells offstage - in the first and last movements of the Sixth and the first appearance in the second movement of the Seventh - they accompany dark, introspective music. Their onstage appearances, conversely, consistently accompany music in a major mode, of either a lighter character and sprightly tempo (as in the Andante from the Sixth and their onstage appearance in the second movement of the Seventh) or, in the unique case of the Seventh’s finale, bright and muscular bombast. From this, I venture to suggest that Mahler placed the cowbells offstage specifically in order to invoke the solitary, disengaged emotional state he attached to the image of hearing unseen cows from a mountaintop - as those cows are not visible, so too he directs the cowbells to not be visible. When by contrast he uses the cowbells without intending this association, they are played onstage, and the sound is rejoined to its visual component. In doing so, a subtle mystery is dispelled. The audience can see a percussionist shaking and jangling the bells. 40 On the other hand, it is possible that these upbeat onstage uses are themselves an ironic tint on the music they accompany. If Mahler found the lonesomeness of that sound inescapable, his placement of the bells alongside the triumph of the Seventh’s finale or the lovely pastoral in the Andante from the Sixth could be an effort by Mahler to place doubts within their triumph or serenity, respectively. This is, however, conjecture based on an excessively granular psychological reading. It is, I suspect, more likely that these cases are instances where Mahler intended onl