Supernatural Music: Fairy Bagpipers, Phantom Fiddlers, and The Choir Invisible

***This episode has been our Jonah and has been cursed from the beginning! We are re-releasing it because the first version had fuzzy audio***

Chris and Simon wind up the old gramophone and share some numbers from angelic choirs, the nodding ones beyond the grave, and from the rarely good people in the hollow hill. Sing along with a banshee! Trill to a phantom air from Dartmoor! Rhapsodize over an orca’s mermaid song! And shake your tambourine at yellow bats, breeding foxes, Dolly Parton and finger-chewing nereids! Are our listeners in harmony with the Music of the Spheres or are these mysterious melodies something more mundane? Kudos also to our organ player from Ohio and to the poltergeist who follows us through the recording 

Bibliography

Paracoustics: Sound & The Paranormal, edited by Steven T. Parson s & Callum E. Cooper

Music from Elsewhere, Haunting Tunes From Mythical Beings, Hidden Worlds, and Other Curious Sources, Doug Skinner, 2024. Has music notation. “anomalous music”  including fairy, trow [troh or trouw ow and troll music, Spiritualist music, “music of the sky people”

No Earthly Sounds- Faery Music, Song & Verse, John Kruse
Music and the paranormal : an encyclopedic dictionary

Melvyn J. Willin (Author)

Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoeckhlin and the Phantoms of the Night

By Wolfgang Behringer chapter on unearthly music in the Alps

The Music of “An Adventure”, Ian Parrott, 1966

Barbara Hillers: “Music from the Otherworld: Modern Gaelic Legends about Fairy Music” in Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, Vol. 14 (1994), p59

Ríonach Uí Ógáin: “Music Learned from the Fairies” in Béaloideas Bay la Gish 60-61 (1992-3), pp197-214 

Chapter on fairy music in The Peat-Fire Flame: Folk-Tales and Traditions of the Highlands & Islands, Alasdair Alpin MacGregor 1937

https://archive.org/details/peatfireflamefol00macg/page/30/mode/2up?q=gigha&view=theater

Lovely and Mysterious: The Music of Fairyland, Chris Woodyard, Fortean Times October 2014

NAD A study of Some Unusual “Other-World” Experiences, D. Scott Rogo

NAD Vol. 2 A psychic study of the “Music of the Spheres”, D. Scott Rogo

Musica Trascendentale, E. Bozzano, 1943

Transcript

Supernatural Music: Fairy Bagpipers, Phantom Fiddlers, and The Choir Invisible

Chris and Simon wind up the old gramophone and share some numbers from angelic choirs, the nodding ones beyond the grave, and from the rarely good people in the hollow hill. Sing along with a banshee! Trill to a phantom air from Dartmoor! Rhapsodize over an orca’s mermaid song! And shake your tambourine at yellow bats, breeding foxes, Dolly Parton and finger-chewing nereids! Are our listeners in harmony with the Music of the Spheres or are these mysterious melodies something more mundane? Kudos also to our organ player from Ohio and to the poltergeist who follows us through the recording!

CHRIS: Simon, so, in keeping with our theme for today, which we'll announce in just a moment, what are your musical tastes? 

SIMON: Well, I was a child of the 80s, and as a result, most of my vices involve 1970s prog rock. And I feel awful admitting this, but also a bit of country music. Don't tell anyone! Many years ago, I had a brief but intense friendship with a Scottish woman, and she used to say that 5% of humanity cannot live without music, and 95% of humanity pretend to like music, but they don't really care. And I wonder whether you are in that 5%.

CHRIS: Passionate? I'm not sure that is the correct word, though. I have been a professional musician since I was 11, and it's a job, but it's also an important job for me when I was doing it, in terms of everything had to be perfect. Because I'm playing in church, I'm a church organist, and if I'm making mistakes, I'm distracting people from worship. And it seemed to me very important that it be right. So, I find that I cannot actually listen to music as background music. I'm either listening to it, or I'm playing it, or I can't hear it. If I'm reading, for example, if there's music in the background, my brain just shuts off, and I don't hear it. I certainly enjoy music, but I have to actually consciously listen to it.

SIMON And so, what kind of music do you enjoy? 

CHRIS I would probably be putting on something by Bach, or I'm a big fan of 17th century organ music from the Iberian Peninsula. A little niche there. But it's mostly classical music, Requiem. 

SIMON And so, if I invited you to a Dolly Parton concert, would you come? 

CHRIS I might. I like Dolly Parton, because she's such a lovely person. And I do like her music, but I'm not sure I would listen to an entire album. 

SIMON Well, with this, Chris, why don't you kick us off on today's topic?

CHRIS Today, we're going to be talking about supernatural music. 

SIMON And can we perhaps have a reading? 

CHRIS Of course. This is a story from 1895, about a farmer named James Hodge, of Portsmouth, Ohio. Every night for about two weeks, he and his wife were awakened by the music of a violin. For several nights, they didn't pay much attention to it, except to wonder who was the minstrel abroad at such an unseasonable hour. Hodge himself was at one time considered to be a violinist, so the excellent playing of the unknown excited his admiration. About a week ago, they were surprised and wondered, discovered that the music was in their house. They made a careful search, and for more than two hours, they pursued the music over the house, searching every room for the supposed intruder, but without success. The same scene was repeated the succeeding night. Wednesday night, Mr. Hodge, who'd become exasperated, shouted to the unknown violinist, Break the damn thing! Instantly, the music sounded louder and with a harsher tone, followed by a resounding crash in the closet in the room the farmer was occupying. He and his wife immediately ran to it, but could find nothing that would give a clue to the solution of the mystery, but the music ceased. Yesterday, Mrs. Hodge, in searching a chest in the closet, discovered that Hodge's old violin, which had for years laid undisturbed at the bottom of the box, was smashed, as if struck by an axe. The violin had not been used for so long by the owner, he'd forgotten its existence, but he cannot explain the music.

SIMON Well, suitably creepy there. I'm very interested to see how you're going to try and tie together different types of supernatural music, but just before, I wanted to give you a historian's reflection on music. I grew up in a world where music was practically on tap. It was possible to go to the record store, get a disc, then a CD, and yet now I see with my kids that music is just not on tap, it is absolutely everywhere. All they need is Spotify, and they can get almost any tune that they desire. I think it's worthwhile remembering that most of the accounts we have are pre the Second World War. It's a very, very different world where music is in relatively short supply, particularly before the radio. Basically, if you want to listen to music in that world, there are two things you can do. The first is you can play music yourself, or the second is you seek out someone or a group of people who are playing music. For example, going to church on Sunday, something you've already mentioned, or going to a cameo, or just turning up at a neighbour's. Music appears in a completely different light. Today, music, for my kids, seems often to be a way for them to retreat. It's something that they listen to in the privacy of their own rooms, or while they're doing jobs about the house. It's quite an intimate thing. And yet the music that we'll be looking at today was something very difficult. First of all, it was really quite magical because it was in short supply. Music was special. It wasn't everywhere all the time. And then the other thing that's going on there is that music is social. It's something that people generally did together. And I think it's worthwhile keeping at the back of our minds these two things as we're looking at descriptions of special, supernatural music from, say, before the Second World War.

CHRIS That is a really good point. Music was ubiquitous. For example, in the medieval period, you would have town bands and town trumpeters and town drummers. The king's court would always have special musicians. It was in the air, as it were, but it wasn't in every single household, and it certainly wasn't in anybody's earbuds as they went around herding sheep. That's what I find a little unnerving, is everybody's listening to music while they're doing something else. And just, as you say, it's isolating. 

SIMON So tell us a bit more about your idea of supernatural music because, again, I'm ever so slightly scandalised that you're putting together different categories here. 

CHRIS Well, I think of supernatural music as music not made by human hands, human lips, human instruments. There's different categories. You've got ghostly, you've got fairy music, you've got angelic music, you've got demonic music, music on deathbeds, music that just seems to be recording from history, like you have the chanting of monks is quite a popular category in supernatural music. So those are some of my categories of supernatural music.

CHRIS Why don't you start us off with fairy music? Because I know we're just dying to do that. 

SIMON Ah, Chris, how well you know me, yes. And I'm really excited today because we're actually taking things up a level in our constant and never-ending improvement drive and we're actually going to play some fairy music in a few minutes. And there is a strong rumour that we may be ending our performance today with the Banshees and a Banshee recording, but more of that later. As to fairy music, there has long been this notion that fairies are social creatures. Remember what I said about music being very social. And there are isolated accounts of seeing fairy musicians, or even in some cases, I think in Majorie Johnson's accounts in seeing fairies, a couple of fairy bands. But what really interests me isn't fairy instruments but fairy music in as much as it exists. And there there are a couple of legends about songs that are played in folk culture, and this is true of Ireland and Scotland and Wales, where there are songs that are specifically pointed to as songs that fairies gave humanity. And then there are also these strange experiences, often, for instance, of night-time walkers or people who are perhaps lying in bed trying to get to sleep, of hearing strange and unaccountable music outside. And I think I'll give you my absolute favourite example. There was a Lancashire composer, Thomas Wood, who was involved in the music scene between the two wars. In 1922, he went with a group of friends to Dartmoor to prepare a musical on Shakespeare, of all things. And he was working on the music, and to do so he wanted to be in a solitary state. So he walked off onto some high ground and lay down and began to try and create the music in his head and actually to write annotations. And he had a couple of pixie experiences in the two days he tried to do this. One was that at one point someone shouted out, Tom! Even though there was absolutely no one in sight anywhere. And then the second thing that happened was that he heard what he described as fairy music. Now, the reason I like this account is because it comes from someone who was, A, a trained musician, B, who was not sleeping, or it was just the middle of his workday as far as he was concerned. He was sitting in the heather trying to create, and suddenly he heard this extraordinary noise. And he wrote these notes down. And so we're now actually able to share with you what Thomas Wood heard…. So there we are. This is Wood's notation, played by a talented Ohio organist. and this may be as close as we get to a genuine supernatural musical experience. Any thoughts on this? 

CHRIS I wouldn't call it exactly ethereal, but it's difficult to replicate what was scored for a violin on a keyboard, so that was a slow version of what he actually rotated. It was much faster, more trilly, and I think we have a little bit of an excerpt we might play later.

SIMON Yes, we don't want to do it too early. We'll hold this back for the grand finale. Yeah, the fairies were second only to the devil in being notable composers of pipe tunes, for example, and songs that they would give to people.

CHRIS So I always find that fascinating that they were ready to share their tunes or even share actual bagpipes or with humans. But when I listen to those songs that they gave to humans, the songs sound, forgive me, very human, and yet when I listen to that music there I think, what the heck? And the fact that it was up in the air.

SIMON Right, and this is something that Thomas Wood specifically said that several years after, he was clearly obsessed by this incident and he did a lot of research on it, and several years after he met someone who'd heard fairy music in Ireland in similar conditions and the person used the phrase, and I think it was waving in the air, that Thomas Wood jumped on and said, that's it, that's exactly what it felt like. One of the things that I find fascinating is just how many fairy accounts, and here I'm also thinking of the two fairy censuses, have this sense of the music just being there in the air and coming through in waves. And I've got a little quotation here, apart from the sound of bells and wavy air, and here's another, there seemed to be a wavy movement in the air. You would have expected perhaps fairies elves to be underground, but these musical experiences seem to be almost dispersed around the person, and I suppose what they're saying is it's not coming from any real direction, it just seems to be there generally.

CHRIS What I find interesting too, is that early accounts of fairy music, people are walking by a fairy mound, and they hear the noise coming from underneath the earth, and yet a lot of the later accounts, 19th century accounts, and the fairy census accounts, the music is in the air, it's over our heads, so that's a very different change. I'm not sure how to account for it really. No, the only thing I would guess, but it doesn't even begin to answer your question, is that when night-time revellers returning home heard music under the fairy hill, they were hearing the fairy band putting on a dance, and I imagine that it was some kind of a mirror of the inn or tavern party they'd just been to, and yet this later music, we don't actually see anyone, in fact this is one of the key elements, that it's just an audio experience.

SIMON Right, it is an audio experience, and also the instrumentation has changed, as it were. You don't hear bag pipes. Do you have any examples of people hearing bell pipes from the fairy census?

CHRIS I don't think so. It's all flutes, it's all chiming bells, aeolian harps, it's all very light and airy music. Maybe it's just that the fashions in fairy music have changed, or human fashions in music have changed, perhaps.

SIMON So they're moving on to a fairy baroque, a dolly parton, god forbid, a fairy dolly parton. Could be. Again, these accounts often come up. I've been struck by several of them that involve people lying in bed, and this of course brings up a number of problems with perception. I was very aware I was going to do this podcast today, and as always, Chris, before our podcasts, I have a little siesta. And when I woke up, as often happens, I had a very light, let's say tinnitus in my ears. It was a little bit scratchy, and it was just me coming back to my waking self, but I thought as I was waking up, could this be music? If I woke up in this condition in the middle of the night and was worried about the supernatural, could this be music? Now, it wasn't very beautiful, but there was a kind of a scratchy, Stravinsky-esque order to the thing. And then I was properly woken up, and it was just chaos. It was just this noise that then slowly tailed off. And I just wonder sometimes if people in fugue states, well, people a little bit extracted from themselves, hear something in the environment that they make conform to a pattern. And if you are conforming sounds to a pattern, it becomes music. 

CHRIS And that's a good point, where, you know, our brains want to make sense of the world. So we've had stories of people seeing things that they thought were ghosts, and, oh, it's just a robe hanging on the chair, but boy, it sure looked like a face. Because my brain is trying to make sense of what I'm seeing, and I don't see why the ear wouldn't do the same. I've had incidents where there's something sounding in my ear, and I'm like, is that outside, or is it the music playing, or is it just a rhythmic, whatever it is, tinnitus going on. So it's hard to tell what some of these people were experiencing.

SIMON Recently I was talking to someone who had an unusual hallucination, let's say, and I'll justify this word in a minute. He woke up several times at about 2 or 3 in the morning, and just heard this very light, heavenly music. And it was just in the background, it was very, very slight. And this went on for 2, 3, 4 days, and then one day he was actually just very late to bed, and suddenly his old clock radio turned on for something like 40 seconds, because there was a secondary alarm or something. And it wasn't heavenly music, it was a badly tuned-in radio station, so it was a mix of static and, again, probably Dolly Parton. But for him, his waking mind managed to create Spark and the Angel. Whether that explains Thomas Wood in the middle of Dartmouth, in the middle of the day, in the middle of 1922, I'm not so sure. 

CHRIS Well, I can give you my own story of misapprehension of music. I was driving along on a section of highway where they'd just recently been added, and suddenly there was just the most exquisite music. It was ethereal, woman's chorus, stunning tones of purity. I couldn't catch the words, so I reached for the radio to turn up the volume. The radio wasn't on, so my mind just is reeling.And then my car passed from the new road onto the old, and the music stopped, and I realized that the Angel Chorus had been my tires making harmonics on the grain grooves of the new road surface. So, yes, things happen.

SIMON Auditory hallucinations are always a possibility. Now, you, in your introductory spiel, dared to put the fairies next to the devil, and I thought that, coming from an organist, these were strong words. So, can you justify this notion that the devil has to do with music?

CHRIS What we usually find is the devil and his fiddle. He seems to be a notable fiddler, and he shows up at dances when people say, you know, if something goes wrong, the original fiddler doesn't show up, and there's not going to be a party unless we have a fiddler. Oh, I'd sell my soul to have a good fiddler right now, and of course he shows up with his clothing hoof and his fiddle, and fiddles like crazy, and people dance until they die. But the devil seems to have a preference for the fiddle, for the bagpipe, which I can understand as sort of a hellish instrument, and for the banjo. In the United States, if you were a banjo player, it was considered that you might be in league with the devil. Personally, my own idea of a hellish instrument is the accordion, but never heard of  the devil playing the accordion.

SIMON  Or the flute for that matter. (0:04) No, no, the devil does definitely not play the flute. (0:07) Of course the other legends that you get about the devil are those great stories that we find in many corners of the world where a talented musician does not consider themselves to be the best, they want to be better.

(0:20) Right. (0:21) And so they go to the crossroads at midnight and they talk to the local supernatural community, who often is the devil, and they sell their soul or they give something in return for just immense musical talent. (0:36) And of course the most famous version of this is Robert Johnson, who was supposed to have gone to the crossroads at midnight and sold his soul to the devil to be able to play the guitar in the most extraordinary fashion. (0:51) And I recently was reading accounts of this about the Nereids in Greece, that talented musicians there will go to the crossroads at midnight, draw a magical circle around themselves to give them some protection. (1:05) And the Nereids come and they listen to the music and they're able to offer talent to the person, but usually the climax is that the person has to give them, not their soul, which is I suppose something, but part of them. (1:20) And my memory is it was a chewed off end of finger.

(1:24) They want a little bit of blood to wash the deal down.

CHRIS What I think of when I think of Robert Johnson, you know, he supposedly sold his soul and he became a fantastic blues guitar player when he was sort of indifferent before, but he didn't have much commercial success in his lifetime, so what good was it? (1:46) The devil didn't seem to be fulfilling this part of the bargain, because only after he died was he acclaimed as a master of the blues.

SIMON (1:54) But this is always the way of selling your soul, isn't it? (1:57) You're made to regret it even before the day for collection comes. (2:03) Now, talking of the time for collection, you mentioned before that music is sometimes associated with the deathbed.(2:12) And of course, the deathbed is another of these experiences like sleep, where sometimes the brain does very unusual things. (2:20) So I'd be fascinated to hear some of these accounts.

CHRIS (2:24) We would think that it would be the dying only that hear the music of the spheres or the angelic chorus. (2:32) But in fact, people watching by deathbeds also hear the music. (2:37) And one study of supernatural music suggests that about 11% of those who've had a near-death experience say they heard music at the time. (2:47) And it was practically de rigueur at a Christian deathbed to have an angel choir when you had a holy man dying. (2:53) For example, in a monastery you would always hear the angel chorus. (2:57) And again, the music is always heard from above. (3:01) It's high-pitched. (3:02) It's wordless. (3:04) Only rarely do they recognize tunes, although some people recognize hymn tunes, which I find kind of unusual. (3:13) Only rarely are tunes recognized, and sometimes they're sort of banal hymn tunes, such as Shall We Gather at the River or Peace, Perfect Peace. (3:23) So that suggests to me that somebody's having aural hallucinations, because I can't believe that angelic choruses are really doing music by Sankhya Moody. (3:36) Thank you.

(3:36) Horrible.

SIMON (3:39) Let me just throw in another sceptical bomb here. (3:43) You talk about people in their deathbeds having these aural hallucinations, and you also then mentioned that sometimes those accompanying them on this journey were very, not just emotionally distraught for clear reasons, but also often absolutely exhausted. (4:05) And I remember reading an account of the British engraver and poet William Blake.

(4:10) I think Blake spent five days at the deathbed of his brother without sleeping. (4:16) And just to say that deathbeds for not just emotional, but also for physical reasons, are places where not only the diers, but the mourners to be, could quite reasonably have rather extreme experiences. (4:33) That's a good point.

CHRIS (4:35) Sleep deprivation certainly does it. (4:39) So let me give you an example of one of these. (4:43) A deathbed said they were overlooking an area of green hills surrounded by family, and they heard a stream of melody more divinely sweet than any earthly music they'd ever heard. (4:54) It was the moon-collar roar of a woman's voice and accents betoken in a depth of way not to be described in words. (5:02) It lasted several minutes, then appeared to melt away like the ripple of the wave, and as the last note became inaudible, the child's spirit passed away. (5:13) There are multiple, multiple reports like this, where it's not just people who are sleep-deprived necessarily, but people who've just freshly come in and they're all hearing the same thing.

(5:27) There's also stories of, I remember one in particular, where the master of Eaton's mother died, and the next night, the woman who had sat with her heard women singing outside, and they couldn't place it, they looked outside, they couldn't find anything, and everyone who had been present at that deathbed heard this noise. (5:51) What does that mean? (5:53) I have no idea. (5:54) Another person said, when my cousin died in the hospital about two years ago, my great-aunt was sitting by her bedside. (6:02) Someone said to my aunt, isn't that beautiful music? (6:05) My aunt said, why honey, I don't hear any music. (6:08) And the other person said, well there it is, it sounds like angels out there in the hall singing. (6:13) And then in a very short time, she died. (6:17) So it just seems to be a pattern at some deathbeds. (6:24) I'll be interested to see what happens when I get there, if somebody's going to sing me into my rest.

SIMON (6:30) Many, many years from now. (6:33) I hope it will be better than tyres going rapidly over the road surface. (6:40) Seriously though, you know far, far more about death and the supernatural than I will ever. But I know another phenomenon that's associated with deathbeds is where people who are dying start to see loved ones who have already died. (6:58) And this is sometimes actually something that happens in the weeks before death, when someone has a serious condition. (7:04) It's almost as if they're preparing themselves psychologically for their disappearance. (7:11) And I know that a couple of times there's supposed to be leakage with those who are actually very much still alive and are looking after the person, that they may too see someone. (7:23) And I just wonder if we have a kind of psychological collective here.

CHRIS (7:28) That is what it sounds like. (7:31) I mean, you could also just say faux-adieu.

SIMON (7:36) I'm scared to pronounce the French, Chris.

CHRIS (7:38) These are very fraught moments, and who knows what we're capable of in those times.

SIMON (7:48) So with this, I think it's only right if we pay tribute, not to music from angels, but rather from the other side of the ledger. (7:58) If we travel to Ireland and talk a little bit about the banshee, because of course, she is also associated with noise before death. (8:11) Now, I thought the banshee was just about these screeches, but apparently some people have heard, is it banshee singing or banshee music?

CHRIS (8:23) Yes, I've got a little example here. (8:25) One of them was attached to the Bailey family of Loch Gour, and one night, a dead of night, when Miss Kitty Bailey was dying of consumption, her two sisters, Miss Anne Bailey and Miss Susan Bailey, who were sitting in the death chamber, heard such sweet and melancholy music as they had never heard before. (8:44) It seemed to them like distant cathedral music. (8:47) The music was not in the house, it seemed to come through the windows of the old castle high in the air. (8:53) But when Miss Anne went downstairs with a lighted candle to investigate, she found nothing. (8:57) She thought the music came from above the house, and very frightened, she returned. (9:03) But both sisters were also on record as having heard fear music previously in their lives.

SIMON (9:11) Yes, that of course comes from one of your favorite authors, Chris. (9:15) This is Sheridan LaFanu, who actually knew these two women.

CHRIS (9:20) There's a debate as to whether the keening at old Irish funerals inspired the legend of the banshee, or it was the other way around. (9:29) It was keeners who imitate the banshee's wail. (9:33) There are also hints that if the keener doesn't do their job properly, then she has to return and become a banshee.

SIMON (9:41) Chris, I'm a little bit taken aback by this idea that banshees also produced music. (9:46) This wasn't really something that had properly registered before. (9:49) And I just wonder, could we listen to an example? (9:52) Because you informed me that here too, some notes were taken down. (9:58) Is that right?

CHRIS (9:59) Right. (9:59) I consider banshees singing to be a real rarity. (10:04) I think they really mostly shriek, but let's see what we have in the way of musical notation. (10:15) This was supposed to have been heard on 1867 near Libertad, Central America. (10:23) A man was riding through deep forest and said that the banshee was dressed in pale yellow and raised a cry like a cry of a bat. (10:31) I'd suggest that it came actually from a southern yellow bat, but no, no, no. (10:36) And the banshee came to announce the death of his father. (10:39) Waite says this is her cry written down by him with the help of a Frenchman and a violin.

SIMON (10:44) So this is one of these fascinating examples where the banshee crosses the Atlantic. (10:49) Yes. (10:50) Can we listen to it again, Chris, because it's very brief. (10:53) So depending on your point of view, this could be the mating call of a yellow bat or a banshee very far from home. (10:59) Let us know in the back of postcards, please. (11:02) Here we go. (11:09) Wow. (11:10) Well, I think I'm with the bat here. (11:12) I don't know about you. (11:14) I've come across references saying that the banshee's cry can actually be explained by mating foxes in Ireland. (11:23) So perhaps this yellow bat is not to be despised in that way. (11:28) But do you think there too that the cry can become a kind of music? (11:35) 

CHRIS Hmm. (11:36) I'm not quite sure what you mean. (11:38) 

SIMON Well, I suppose that the banshee's going to scream. (11:41) There's going to be some kind of screech. (11:45) And I just wonder if somehow that screech is modulated.

CHRIS When I hear people talking about it, writing about the banshee call, it's almost like sonic warfare. (11:55) It pierces their very body. (11:59) It goes through their brain and it's very unsettling.

(12:05) So I don't know whether I would really call it music or not.

SIMON (12:08) Fair enough. (12:09) I love sonic warfare. (12:11) Let's move on now, Chris, to the fun bit of trying to explain some of this. I mean, where do we even start? (12:18) Can we agree that we want to focus on these actual supernatural experiences rather than folk songs where people hear some notes together, often out in nature or in the cases you described at the deathbed of a loved one?

CHRIS (12:34) There were reports of banshee shrieks and heavenly music caused by snails crawling on glass, for heaven's sake. (12:42) And that would be really weird.

SIMON (12:46) One that you introduced me to that was a Canadian fairy tune being explained by whale music.

CHRIS (12:54) Yes, orca whales, because they sing. (12:58) And apparently the people who were out in their fishing boats would hear this noise and they thought it was perhaps mermaid music or fairy music. (13:06) A lot of the accounts from like Marjorie Johnson's Seeing Fairies, they hint at the call of a wild creature. (13:15) There was one from a lady named Stella Watson, tiny hand bells. (13:21) And then there was another Miss Walpole, had a repetitive six note strain. (13:26) And I wonder if we had, you know, forensic ornithologists or entomologists, if they got the location, the time of day and type of call, we'd be able to identify some of the makers of these fairy musics. (13:40) I mean, it just seems like there's, you know, tuneful amphibians out there, birds and frogs and things.

SIMON (13:47) So your thesis is basically someone in a heightened state, listen to something in nature and misconstrues it as music.

CHRIS (13:58) That would be one theory. (14:00) As I say, a lot of the stars in Marjorie Johnson's are later in the 19th, early 20th century, and even mid 20th century. (14:11) These are not necessarily people who've spent a lot of time in nature. (14:16) Perhaps they're just in their garden and what are they hearing? (14:19) There's plenty of bird calls I can't recognize. (14:22) So I would think that if there was something unfamiliar, or if a bird was trying out a different call, you might just not recognize it for what it was. (14:30) There are also stories about out in the sea, the wind gusting over holes in an iceberg that sounded like a tune. (14:40) That would be extremely unsettling. (14:42) There was a funny one from Harry Price, ghost hunter Harry Price. (14:45) He reported hearing a piano playing in the room below him on New Year's Eve, and he was wakened by the church bells ringing in the New Year, and then he could hear this weird arpeggios coming from below him, and he discovered that certain notes from the piano recurred during a particular appeal from the bells, because the wires of the piano were just vibrating with the bells. (15:10) So yeah, there's lots can be explained, but there's also lots that can't be explained.

SIMON (15:15) Let me just reintroduce Thomas Wood on Dartmoor in 1922. (15:20) A trained musician, pretty level-headed guy generally, and he has this experience where he's actually able to write down the music, and we have lots of similar accounts where similar terms are being used. (15:34) This idea of in the air, and I think you've explained this brilliantly, as being a certain kind of instruments. (15:42) Is it harps, bells, chimes? (15:45) And he also uses this term of it coming in waves, waving in the air. (15:50) How on earth do you explain these experiences?

CHRIS (15:54) Don't, don't. (15:57) And there's another one from a musician, a trained musician that ended up in the soundtrack to J.M. Bowie's Mary Rose. (16:09) This was in the late 20s perhaps. (16:12) This woman had had a friend with her who'd come in contact with the fairy world and has heard chords and musical sounds in lonely places. (16:19) At the point where the pass is now, a great rock overhangs the approach, and here they both stop dead, halted by a tiny stinging note like a silver trumpet. (16:30) Music seemed to be coming from somewhere inside the rock, and her friend quickly drew out a notebook lined for musical notation and jotted it down, and the phrase repeated itself over and over and over, and they were able to memorize it and put it down on paper. (16:45) So that's the fairy call in answer to which Mary Rose disappears in J.M. Bowie's play. (16:51) So peculiar.

SIMON (16:53) I mean perhaps another bit of mystery I can dollop on without giving any explanations is something else that we've seen in fairy lore is people hearing fairy laughter, and there's often this idea that the laughter is quite high-pitched, and that's something that we do occasionally find in accounts of fairies, this idea that for whatever reason the fairy's voices are high-pitched. (17:19) There's one account from the fairy census that I'm just going to read a sentence here because it just starts to show how categories I think can blend a little bit. (17:28) This person doesn't see fairies but hears them, and quote-unquote, their laughter was felt in my whole being like a babbling brook or rustling leaves or tinkling bells. (17:42) And I think that's a very rich sentence because it gives you a sense of actually how different sounds in the natural world, be they supernatural or natural, start to just combine and weir.

CHRIS (17:54) Right, and there's actually some famous waterfalls where fairies have been heard, and it's very possible that it's just the acoustics of the waterfall. (18:06) Now when I was, I wrote an article on fairy music for Freudian Times, and when I was discussing acoustics with an engineer of my acquaintance, he pointed out that little people must have very small eardrums and very little larynxes, so perhaps he said they can only hear and make high-pitched sounds. 

SIMON (18:28) So are you saying that fairies are squeaky? (18:31) 

CHRIS Could be. (18:32) Could be. 

SIMON (18:33) Interesting. Well, Chris, I think we've come to the end of this beautiful cul-de-sac. (18:38) We've failed to break through the brush and actually find any convincing answers for some of the accounts, so they retain their mystery. (18:49) Well, let's turn from here to talk a little bit, if we can, about any reading that people can do in this area. (18:57) 

CHRIS I have quite a list. 

SIMON Oh, I was expecting almost nothing.

CHRIS (19:02) Oh, really? (19:03) Okay, hang on, gotta find it. (19:05) 

SIMON Now, I have one book, and so I'm praying that it won't be on Chris's list.

CHRIS (19:10) Okay, I've mentioned this one before, Paracoustic Sound in the Paranormal, edited by Stephen Parsons and Callum Cooper. (19:20) Now, this is a new book to me that I just got, Music from Elsewhere, Haunting Tunes from Mythical Beings, Hidden Worlds, and Other Curious Sources by Doug Skinner. (19:31) It has musical notation in the back. (19:34) It's got troll music, it's got spiritualist music, it's got alien sky people, it's got fairy music, and all kinds of unusual things, but he's actually got the musical notation in the back, so if you want to play things, you can actually play it. (19:52) There's No Earthly Sounds, a fairy music song and verse by John Kruse, Music in the Paranormal, an encyclopedic dictionary, which I desperately want to get, by Melvin Willen, W-I-L-L-I-N, my article in 14 Times of October 2014, and of course, D. (20:10) Scott Rogo's MAD, N-A-D, A Study of Some Unusual Otherworld Experiences, and his volume 2, A Psychic Study of the Music of the Spheres. (20:21) There are several articles, The Music of an Adventure by Ian Parrott, 1966, that the ladies at Versailles heard 18th century music, they thought, and Barbara Hillier's Music from the Otherworld, Modern Gaelic Legends about Fairy Music and Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium in 1994. (20:44) We'll put these on the page.

SIMON (20:47) And so if I can pull out from that list, Rogo, this is two books, I think, from the 1970s, is that right? 

CHRIS  Yes, yes.

SIMON (20:55) So what's going on there? (20:57) 

CHRIS He was, he collected quite a few instances, he's got all of his music at the deathbeds, he also had a theory that they were involved with near-death experiences and outer body experiences. (21:11) He felt that there was a certain element of trance in most of these experiences, so he really did a good job of compiling a lot of experiences.

SIMON (21:21) I have nothing life-changing to add to this, but I do have, I'm proud to say, one book that Chris didn't get her hands on. (21:31) This is called The Otherworld, Music and Song from Irish Tradition, and I bought this about 10 years ago. (21:39) You can hear the pages turn, and it's a little bit stiff because in the back, there are two discs that I'm afraid to say I've never removed from the package. (21:50) And then it's concentrating overwhelmingly on various songs that are about fairies, or that in some cases are supposed to come from the fairies. (22:01) But clearly, for someone interested in this area, if you can get your hands on a copy, I remember it was quite difficult a decade ago, that would be a really great book. (22:12) I also want to say that I've recently been in contact with a young man who should be starting a doctorate soon at Durham University, fingers crossed, on supernatural music, and so maybe we'll have some more answers, Chris, in four or five years.

CHRIS (22:30) There is a book in Italian, which if you wanted to see if you can find it, Musica Transcendentale by Bozzano, 1943. (22:41) Good luck. (22:44) 

SIMON Okay, I was just playing my card, my one book, and you have to hit me with a wartime book from Italy that would cost 400 euros a copy. (22:55) Okay, I'll have to look for that and report back. (22:59) Now, with this, we come to the end, and we thought that as our second reading today, we would actually return to Wood's piece of music, and we thought that perhaps we would play two slightly different versions. (23:14) Now, remember what Chris explained before, that really the notation was for a string instrument, particularly for a violin. (23:20) She heroically did this on the organ, and she did one going more slowly than Wood would have liked, and that's what we played before. (23:31) I'm going to play this briefly again, and then I'm going to play you the second version where Chris breaks all the rules and plays the organ version at the speed that Wood wanted, that reflects his experience.

CHRIS (23:45) Well, maybe a little less, but it was faster than the other version.

SIMON (23:49) In that direction, but as you listen to them, remember here we have the echo of the Pixies of Dartmoor. (24:17) It's beautiful. (24:19) I could fall asleep to that if I put 20 of them together. (24:22) Okay, here we go. (24:24) Now, this is the sped-up version. (24:27) This is goodbye from me and Chris. (24:28) We hope your headstones explode. (24:31) One, two, three, go. (24:41)