Pixy Music on Dartmoor

Posted by Beachcombing

This is a fascinating story from Dartmoor in 1921. A director of orchestra has decided to walk out from a musical boot camp and try his hand at composing in the middle of the heather. It is there that he has a very strange experience: this one is dedicated to all lovers of auditory illusions.

That is what the scene is on the stage. But out on the open moor in sunlight two months before rehearsals began I had to imagine what it would be like; I could not know. The only way of fitting the music and the sense was to work by time and calculation. I had the text, the Family Bible and a stopwatch for tools, and for a guide the memory of Stanford’s harsh voice giving the advice that every composer for the theatre must lay to heart: ‘Pace it, me boy, pace it.’ Pace it I did, to and fro among the heather, conducting to the empty air. That section seemed all trim. Now time it. I got down again flat on my belly, set the stop-watch: go. Solo viola lead at the cue to ‘Will!’ Will’ – thirty one seconds – put repeat bars in for safety; violas again at ‘Let me pass’ – thirteen seconds; Portia’s harp entry – better have a pause at the second bar – four seconds; the ‘St Valentine’s Day’ for Orphelia – seven seconds. And just then I heard my own name called. ‘Tommy! Tommy!’ And once more nearer ‘Tom-my!’ There was no one in sight. I picked up the field glasses to make sure. The moor was as empty as the sky. Picknickers sometimes wanders along the Teign, behaving oddly, but this eyrie was out of their ken, hard to find; and even if the wind had been more than a fitful summer breeze the river was to leeward. And I had not dozed off. I was most certainly and completely awake, with a stopwatch ticking in my hand. Searching for intruders seemed futile, yet I did search irritably. I knew I should find nothing. That voice had sounded quite near. Within twenty yards. It was not the voice of anyone in camp. And no-one in camp called me Tommy. They knew better. Thomas, yes, or Tom; but no diminutives. That was agreed on. And no one I could bring to mind had a voice of this particular quality. It was small, quite clear, faintly mocking, pitched high. Yet it was not a woman’s voice. It might even have been a man’s if he slipped easily into falsetto. Had I been honoured by a visit from a Pixie?

It is a question and intrigued our hero returns to exactly the same spot the next day: the first sentence reminds Beach that there is a study to be made of weather conditions during fairy (and UFO?) sightings.

I went back to the same place next day. The weather was more steamingly hot than ever. Dartmoor was asleep; so were the bees, the hawks, the wind, and the tors filmy against the blue. Everything asleep but me. I kept most brilliantly and tenaciously awake, listening, prone by the rowan bush on top of the family bible and trying to work at the second part of the Masque. An hour went by; an hour and a half. The shadows lifted as the sun moved. No other change. And then I heard the last thing I could have expected to hear – music in the air as faint as breath. It died away; came back louder, hung over me swaying like a censer [inspired image!] that dips and swings, and is withdrawn. In all it lasted twenty minutes, which was a period of time quite long enough for me to settle that no human agency within my knowledge could bring music of that kind into that place; and more mature reflection still leads me to believe that this conclusion was right. Portable wireless sets were unknown in 1921; heather-covered moor will not carry sound far and the day was a roaster; my field glasses again assured me that no picknicker was in sight, still less a gramophone, and what I heard could not possibly have been music of the mind extraverted into music for the ear. Nor was it music that resembled in the least the music that I had just written or even music that I wanted to write. The key, style and scoring of the two had nothing in common. It would be a fine and swaggering claim to assert that I made exact notes of what I heard, but it would be unscholarly and untrue. Taking down an unfamiliar tune at one hearing is not easy, and I have yet to meet the man who can take down a four-part harmony, played at speed, in such a way that he is completely certain of his accuracy. And this music was essentially harmonic. It was not a melody, an ‘air’. It sounded like the weaving together of various tenuous fairy strands. [the rest of the text and the music bars can be found in the image above]

The author then goes through looking for references to fairy music: Joan of Arc, visits to the British Museum, Thomas the Rhymer and Robert Kirk. But nothing on the nature of the music… This is certainly – by far! – the best passage that Beachcombing knows.

‘Chance gave me what research did not. I read ‘Some Irish Fairies’ in John Masefield’s A Tarpaulin Muster. This was the first confirmation I had met with that supernatural music could be harmonic, and not merely a tune; and one day I asked Mr Masefield if he himself had ever heard pixie music. No; but he had talked to those who had, in Ireland. And what, please, did they say it sounded like? ‘A waving in the air’. That was it, exactly! All the proof I needed and better proof than I could have hoped to get.

Any other examples of fairy music described? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com

Related posts

1. Cat Music and Cat Organs
2. Pixie-led in the South-West

Pixie-led in the South-West

Posted by Beachcombing

Beachcombing is back to the fairies. One subject that has intrigued him through this spring is the rare fairy-phenomenon of being ‘pixie-led’, one particularly associated with the south-west of England: hence the name as ‘the pixies’ are the fairies of Cornwall and Devon. To be pixie-led is to be led astray by the good folk while out on the moors or in the woods. Here to start is one eighteenth-century second-hand description:

‘Whitchurch Down (a favourite ride with me and my pony; for it sometimes is a hard matter to get him into any other road) is said to be very famous for the peril there incurred of being pixy-led: for there many an honest yeoman and stout farmer, especially if he should happen to take a cup too much, is very apt to lose his way; and whenever he does so he will declare, and offer to take his Bible oath upon it, ‘That as sure as ever he lives to tell it, whilst his head was running round like a mill-wheel, he heard with his own ears they bits of pisgies [alternative spelling] , a laughing and attacking their hands, all to see he led astray, and never able to find the right road, though he had travelled it scores of times’. And many good old folks relate the same thing, and how the pisgies delight to lead the aged a-wandering about after dark.

Note the sceptical tone here and the idea, one often found in the literature, that pixy-led is actually often whisky-led: though as one early twentieth-century commentator pointed out the experience is not typical of what the drunk actually goes through? Then what about this late nineteenth-century example from Devon? Here you get the chill of the real thing told by a sympathetic voice. It should be noted that turning your jacket or even a pocket inside out was reckoned a way to break the spell.

A few days ago a party of men were ripping bark in a wood about four miles from Torrington. In the evening, when it was time to pick up the tools, one of the men had occasion to separate himself from the party to fetch an iron which he had been using in another part of the wood. He avers, says a correspondent of a contemporary, that in stooping to pick up the tool a strange feeling came over him, and while totally unable to raise himself he heard peels of discordant laughter all around. It flashed across his mind that he was being play led, and though he had many times heard stories of people being in a similar state, his presence of mind forsook him, and he was unable to turn his coat inside out – a sure talisman against the spells of pixies. This was about half-past five in the afternoon. About seven o’clock his wife became uneasy at his non-appearance, and started off to look for him. Happening to meet one of the rippers she asked him whether he had seen her husband. ‘Yes’, replied the man ‘he left work when we did.’ This only added to the poor woman’s troubles, and when ten o’clock came and still no husband, she was greatly alarmed. When she arrived near the place where the man had been working she met her husband dripping wet. ‘Where have you been?’ said she. ‘I’ve been pixy led’ he replied and forthwith told his story. It appears according to his account, that the pixies held him under their spell for nearly five hours, and at the end of that time he was able to crawl away on his hands and knees, and scare knowing where he was creeping tumbled head over heels into a stream. Directly he rose he knew where he was, and made the best of his way homeward. ‘You girt, fule, why didden ‘ee turn your pocket inside out? Was all the comfort he received from his better half: ‘then you would have been able to come away at wance.’ The man firmly believed in pixies, and what strengthens his belief is the fact that a tailor named Short was ‘play led’ in the same wood some years ago, and remained under their magic spell until morning. Cavillers may say that the man was drunk, but is can be proved on the best authority that no intoxicating liquor was drunk that day by any of the party.