Windbags and Skinsongs 5: Windbags

Windbags and Skinsongs

5. Windbags

As we have seen, there seems to be a memory of the Medusa in the distortion of Athena's face as she puffs at what will become Marsyas's pipe. We should note, though, that it is not so much the wryness as the bulging of the face that represents ugliness or the loss of decorum. A number of classical sources retain this curiously specific detail in accounts of Athena’s invention and discarding of the pipe. Ovid has the goddess herself say in the Fasti ‘I was the first, by piercing boxwood with holes wide apart, to produce the music of the long flute. The sound was pleasing; but in the water that reflected my face I saw my virgin cheeks puffed up [vidi virgineas intumuisse geneas]. “I value not the art so high; farewell, my flute!” said I’ (6.697-701; Ovid 1951, 372, 373). In one late retelling of the myth, by the fifth century Latin anthologist Nonnos of Panopolis, Athena’s engorged cheeks seem to carry over into Marsyas’s flayed skin. Nonnus images the skin of the flatulent flautist resounding, not like a sympathetic string to Phrygian melodies, but by being inflated by the wind.

Another Seilenos there was, fingering a proud pipe, who lifted a haughty neck and challenged a match with Phoibos; but Phoibos tied him to a tree and stript off his hairy skin, and made it a windbag. There it hung, high on a tree, and the breeze often entered, swelling it out into a shape like him, as if the shepherd could not keep silence but made his tune again. (19.316-29 Nonnos 1940, 2.113)

What kind of instrument is it that causes the cheeks to be puffed out? Some brass instruments, which require the air to be forced through the compressed lips, produce this effect. But a flute, as the term is understood today, requires no such pressure. Indeed, it would be quite impossible to get any sound out of a flute played this way, for it requires a thin and steady stream of air to be directed transversely across the top of a hole. Anyone who has ever blown across the top of a bottle knows how carefully this has to be done. The faces of flautists are not made rotund but puckered and retracted by the effort to produce this carefully-aimed and modulated stream of air. The historian of the bagpipe, Francis Collinson, offers some interesting evidence for considering the Greek aulos to have been a transitional instrument between the flute and the bagpipe. He considers that players of the aulos may very well have used a technique which he calls ‘nasal inhalation’, but which is more commonly known among players of wind instruments as ‘circular breathing’. This involves the production of a continuous stream of air through the instrument by using the inflated cheeks as a reservoir while topping up the air supply through the nose. Collinson argues that the references to Athena’s puffed-out cheeks which recur in tellings of the story of Apollo and Marsyas, as well as in the story of the fastidious Alcibiades, confirm that this method was in use for playing the aulos from ancient times.

In other words, what characterises the playing of the aulos is that it may require the cavity of the mouth to be employed like the bag of a bagpipe. Collinson breaks off his account of the story of the context of Apollo and Marsyas just at the point where I find it most interesting, namely with the flaying, but he has already make in passing a significant connection between skin and the sound of the aulos, in remarking that the empty skin of Marsyas may be regarded as ‘presaging in a sort of way the bagpipe yet to be discovered’ (Collinson 1975, 21). It is not clear whether any such instrument as the bagpipe was known to the Greeks. There is a Greek word askaules which literally means bagpipe (askos, bag and aulos, pipe), but it does not appear to have been used until long after the Classical period (Landels 1999). Nevertheless, part of the Greek suspicion of wind instruments that is articulated in the story of Apollo and Marsyas is the fact that they highlight the bellied, baggy animality of human beings. This may be confirmed by what seems to be one of the earliest references to bagpipes in the Roman world, the remark of Dio Chrysostom that Nero was able to play the pipes ‘both by means of his lips and by tucking a skin beneath his armpits, with a view to avoiding the reproach of Athena’ (Dio Chrysostom 1951, 173). The reproach referred to here may be the curse that falls on anyone who picks up the pipe she has angrily discarded, or may be a more general disapproval of amorphia, or the loss of facial composure. Not that the bagpipe offers any permanent guarantee of staying in countenance. In his 1635 book on musical instruments, the philosopher of music Marin Mersenne wrote that some musicians preferred the cornemuse, which was operated by a small attached bellows, to the traditional bagpipe, ‘inasmuch as the inflation by players is the cause of facial deformities’ (Mersenne 1957, 356). The apparatus of the pipe and the bag are just too reminiscent of the stomach, the womb, the bladder, the bowels and other cavities in the human (and animal) body, and the biological functions they perform: pregnancy (Athena is the most militant of virgins), digestion and excretion.

The pipes and flutes associated with rustics and shepherds modulated during the sixteenth and seventeenth century into the varieties of the bagpipe, and Marsyas begins to be represented as a bagpiper. The bagpipe is associated with what might be called an inflationary body image. This is the image of a body, not knitted together as a fabric, but as a simple bag, blown up and let down, lurching between a blocked or distended condition and the sudden, intemperate trumpetings of illegitimate speech. The bagpipe is like a prosthetic lung, or belly, the inner cavity of breath slung on the outside of the body. It can easily suggest an alimentary or excretory function too; indeed this exchange of functions is embodied in the bag, which was often made of an animal’s stomach.

Bakhtin’s evocation of the grotesque body of medieval carnival may have some relevance here. The grotesque body ‘is unfinished, outgrows itself’, and draws attention to those parts ‘through which the world enters the body or emerges from it, or through which the body itself goes out to meet the world… the apertures or the convexities, or on various ramifications and offshoots: the open mouth, the genital organs, the breasts, the phallus, the potbelly, the nose (Bakhtin 1984, 26). Skin has a large part to play in this process of going out to meet the world. The skin marks a barrier between inside and outside, but is a barrier that can be breached or warped in many ways. The obesity of the body that is figured in the bagpipe is a perfect image of the sound or potential vocality of the skin. A skin that bulges or is stretched resembles a drum, but also gives promise of sonorous eruption, whether in the belch or the fart, or in the vagitus that is the immediate product of childbirth. (All children know how shiveringly full of sonorous catastrophe a balloon is.) The bag of the bagpipe alternates between the conditions of full and empty, life and death, like the lungs, the belly, the bowel, the womb. The sound that it makes is the sound of the skin emptying, passing between the conditions of cuticle and pelt. Its sound is excremental, not only in metonymic fashion, in that it is associated with the voiding of excrement, but also in the sense that it is a metaphorical excretion.

The arousing and disturbing sounds of the pipes involve a certain sonorous image of the body, a body that is able to produce sound, not because it is full of life, soul, self-presence, desire, intention, but because it is half-dead, or intermittently dead, able to be and needing to be repeatedly pumped up and deflated like a bag or a balloon. The bagpipe is the image of the pseudo-life of the body that is simply a bag of winds, a lung, or belly, or scrotum, and nothing more. Such a body is a kind of body formed of skin alone, for even the air that plumps it out is not its own, and its liable to leak away bathetically.

In such a body, attention is focussed on the skin as the straining membrane unstably holding together and apart the inside and the outside, which are constituted as such only topologically, and not by any permanent principle. The fact that strings produce sympathetic resonance suggests that they are self-sustaining and self-multiplying, even though they do require their sound to be renewed; pipes, by contrast require constant and conspicuous reapplication of air, and corresponding effort. Not only do wind instruments use waste products, they also exhaust the body, by drawing the body into their workings.

Almost from its inception, the bagpipe has been thought of as the most copulative of instruments. In the most elementary of metaphorical systems, the tube of the pipe connects together two equivalent organisms, both of them made up of pipes and bags: the body of the player and the body of the instrument. Both player and instrument have intake and outlet, both are receptacles that rhythmically fill and drain. The fact that the bagpipe is so like an external lung or bladder means that the possibility of inversion or blowback is always there: given sufficient pressure, the bag can inflate the blower. The many images of bagpipe monsters in psalters and Books of Hours, such as the Luttrell Psalter, play elaborately with this possibility. The bagpipe suggests a body made up, not of parallel structures, but of mutually-encapsulated skins, and therefore provides opportunities for topological fantasies of literally conflated bodies. These inversions only superficially resemble the reversibility of Apollo’s lyre. For the bagpipe is entropically inversive; at each exchange of breath, energy is being depleted, and the taut life of the bag is collapsing. The animal origins of the bagpipe, which has customarily been made form the stomach or skin of an animal, and the conspicuous orality of its manner of playing can suggest that a nutritive function is conjoined with a musical one. (‘The dog who eats a bagpipe has meat and music at once’, as a bizarre Gaelic proverb has it.). The baby-like wail of the pipes also seems appropriate for the one playing the instrument can indeed appear to be at suck upon it. Of course, it is the bag that is nourished by the breath of the player, and so is an image of a Kleinian ‘bad breast’.

Marsyas is of course, not just a foreigner, a Phrygian, from the area now occupied by Turkey, but also half-animal, in the way that many conquered races have been thought to be nonhuman, or of indeterminate species by their invaders. An important part of the humiliation inflicted by Apollo upon Marsyas is that it is acts to remind the presumptuous satyr of his animal condition. Bernadette Leclercq-Neveu makes out a distinction between the lyre and the pipe in terms of their use of the bodies of animals. Because the lyre is formed out of the transformed bodies of animals, it stands for inversion and exchange, the body transformed in technique. The pipe, by contrast, is not made, but found (invented by Athena, picked up by Marsyas - Leclercq-Neveu 1989, 261-2). The bodies of animals, bones, hair, skin and guts, are traditional sources of musical instruments. To skin Marsyas is to remind him in the most forcible way possible that he is now matter rather than form, the plucked victim and not the virtuoso. This is the counterpart of the virginal Athena’s anorexic horror at her bloated cheeks, which seems provoked in part by the idea that the pipe she invented is turning her at once into an instrument and an animal.

This is given an extra purchase by the animal origins of Apollo’s own instrument. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes tells how the newborn Hermes steals 50 of Apollo’s herd of cattle. Apollo sets out in search of his animals. In the meantime, Hermes has invented the lyre, by stretching strings of sheep-gut, or in some versions of the myth, cowhide from Apollo’s own animals, across a frame formed from the shell of a tortoise. The first half survives of a satyr play known as the Ichneutae (The Trackers) in which Sophocles dramatises the Hymn. Apollo employs a group of satyrs to assist him in his search for the lost cattle. The satyrs come to a standstill, terrified by the sound of the lyre being played invisibly from deep within a cave. Cyllene, the guardian of the cave, appears and explains to the satyrs that what they hear is the sound of the lute which Hermes has recently invented. The Homeric Hymn to Hermes speaks of Hermes teaching the tortoise to sing, and this theme is enlarged in Sophocles’s play. The instrument, which will eventually be offered to Apollo by Hermes to reconcile him to the loss of his cattle, is a dumb animal given voice by being eviscerated and skinned. The satyr chorus asks ‘How shall I believe that the voice of that which is dead can roar thus loudly?’ but receives from Cyllene only the dead-bat reply ‘Believe: for in death the beast has gotten a voice, but in life was speechless’ (Sophocles 1919, 473, ll. 290-1). The chorus persists, altering the focus of its questions: now it asks, what part of the animal is it that sings after death, ‘whether it is the part that is within or the part that is without’? This seems to be the right question, for Cyllene’s answer - ‘It is, as it were, his coat’ – means it is both the animal’s inside and his outside (Sophocles 1919, 473-5, ll. 300-1).

The shell of the tortoise is neither precisely part of it, nor precisely apart from it, and thus, perhaps, analogous to the voice. Creatures who have voices are able to go beyond their bodily selves, and so, in a certain sense, live beyond their deaths. The skin is ventriloquial, its doubling of the body a doubling of the way in which the voice shadows the self. The voice is both inside and outside the self, just as the skin faces both ways, into the body, and outwards to the world. The focus on the relation between skin and sound continues in the discussion between the chorus and Cyllene. Where, the chorus is curious to know, does he keep this instrument – ‘enclosed in a coffer or, perhaps, in a basket as a pipe?’ ‘Nay’, replies Cyllene, ‘but the skin of an ox or a hide well covereth it’ (Sophocles 1919, 475, ll. 304-5). The point of this exchange is hard to make out precisely, but it seems to revert to the concern with where the voice comes from. A skin does not appear to have the power to originate voice, because a skin is merely surface. The chorus keeps wanting to know about the inside of things (what is inside the cave, what is inside the instrument, what is the instrument itself kept inside). Cyllene’s reply, which seems to say that the instrument doesn’t need covering because it is itself covered (the tortoise shell is doubled by an ox’s hide), implies the possibility of a voice that comes from the skin alone.

Ovid's account of the flaying anticipates the unflinching realism that will characterise later renderings of the myth, a realism that seems to acknowledge the fact that the smooth, silent patina of beauty that paintings share with Apollo's white and marmorial flesh is contradicted by the grisly surgery that is required to teach Apollo's lesson to the animal, the foreigner. Only Titian seems to have allowed the surface of his painting to be agitated and interrupted by the 'sound over vision' of the violent scene it depicts. The Marsyas story therefore becomes readable as the defeat – or ‘purification’ of music by the surgery of harmony and metre. Tony Harrison's sardonic rendering of the Ichneutae draws out the politics of this suffering:

Wherever the losers and the tortured scream
The lyres will be playing the Marsyas theme..
The Kithara cadenza, the Muse's mezzo trill
Cover the skinning and the screaming still…
Some virtuoso of Apollo's Ur-violin
Plays for the skinners as they skin (Harrison 1990, 64-5)

But the tragedy of Marsyas only produces more music: the music of the liquid cries which emerge as the clear-running water of the river which inherits the name of Marsyas. In fact the instrument formed in the cave is a copulative commixture.