So in Java, travelers may carry a small bamboo slit drum, partly to signal to the neighboring villages as they pass—both to show that they are not thieves traveling secretly and, from the responses, to hear where the villages are—but also to reassure themselves. So in Russia and Scandinavia, sleighs have bells, partly to make a pleasant noise and partly as protection from the witches and trolls. So, too, babies are given bells and rattles, both because the baby enjoys the sound that may keep it quiet and occupied for a while and also to keep away the fairies who might otherwise steal it for a changeling. So, too, cattle carry bells, both to help locate them and also to prevent the elves from souring the milk.
Bells are particularly powerful in these respects, and so churches have bells to control the ghosts and ghouls in the churchyard as well as to call the faithful to prayer and to mark the hours. So, too, in parts of France some bells are believed to be so powerful that they can avert the summer storms that strip the fruit from the trees and flatten the crops in the fields.
It is not only bells that have this power. In Bohemia, far from the sea, the conch could drive away the tempest, as Vivaldi illustrated in his concerto Conca. This was probably written in the 1730s, and Vivaldi is known to have had extensive connections with the Bohemian nobility, although it is unlikely that he could have written such a work if he were not familiar with the use of conch trumpets in Venice. Confirmation of the Bohemian use is provided by Ludvík Kunz, who cites ten Wetterhorn (storm trumpets of shell) known to him in Bohemian collections, mostly in Pilsen and Prague.
One cannot dismiss these uses as “merely superstition.” When people believe in them strongly, as shown in these and many other examples, they become established uses of instruments, uses that historians cannot afford to ignore, for they are as real to those who use them as are our uses in the orchestra and anywhere else. Certainly they are as real to them as the more mundane use of instruments to protect crops from animals and other marauders.
This last type of sonic protection is even more widespread around the world. Sometimes the instruments are automatic—for example, segments of bamboo or other material hung where they will catch the wind and rattle against each other or produce sounds as the wind whistles across a hole—though these are of limited utility, for birds and animals come to pillage whether the wind is blowing or not. Ingenious devices are sometimes seen where water from a stream or rivulet fills a pivoted section of bamboo or other material, tipping its balance so that it knocks against another piece, but these again may be limited by drought or even flood.
Mostly such noisemakers require human intervention, and it is here that it becomes important to study the instrumentarium of children. Over much of the world, especially where there is no universal education, it is the children who are employed as animal scarers, and instruments that may have more serious uses in the adult world, or that once may have done so, survive among the children both for practical uses such as this and also simply as toys.
Ratchets, which once were used by watchmen in our streets, are more powerful and make a louder noise. A frame carrying thin blades of wood is swung around a handle shaped as a toothed cogwheel, and if each blade is very slightly shorter than the previous one, they slip off the edge of one tooth to clack on the flat of the next in succession, providing a more continuous clatter than when there is only one blade or when all are the same length. This is an instrument that in the fields is sometimes automatic, driven by wind or a waterwheel, but more often it is held in the hand. As well as a scaring birds, it has many other uses, most familiar perhaps around the soccer field. In Britain, it was widely distributed during World War II to all air raid wardens, to be used as the signal of a gas attack, but fortunately these were never needed. These are easily recognized in collections both by their size and because there was a khaki-painted iron resonator attached to the side.
Ratchets are used occasionally orchestrally: Beethoven scored them to represent musketry in his Battle Symphony. Percussionists in the pantomime or music hall use them when the comedian suddenly bends over. They are used in the synagogues at the festival of Purim, when the book of Esther is read, to drown out the name of the hated villain Haman. They have a serious use, as well, in the church. During Holy Week, the bells are silent (tradition says that they go to Rome to be blessed, although of course they do not actually leave the tower), and instead the ratchets are used. Children run about using the small ones, similar to those used in the fields, but the sexton may have something the size of a wheelbarrow or even bigger, great wooden blades like floorboards, and a cogged wheel turned with a handle like those that once were used to crank a car. The sound can be deafening, especially when more than one is used, echoing through the vaults of the church.
Arnold Schoenberg
