It’s happening again. The cicadas of Brood X are set to return this spring, 17 years after they burrowed underground.
Nature can evoke both fear and wonder, and so it is with this brood of cicadas. Fear, in this case, of hordes of these five-eyed, scary insects descending on farmland and leaving behind a wasteland. (Locusts do that but not cicadas.) And wonder at how they time their emergence from the ground precisely at 17-year intervals. And wonder, too (or is it aggravation?), at how millions of the male of the species, only an inch-and-a-half or so long, can sing so loudly to entice a mate.
This spring, these cicadas will offer something more, a lesson we can all use about now: how to emerge from the darkness.
The very existence of these cicadas is a true thing of wonder. Their genus isn’t named Magicicada for nothing. They spend 17 years in a subterranean world, feeding off succulent tree roots and slowly maturing. The nymphs are able to register the yearly fluctuations in temperature reliably enough to know that after 17 years, it’s time to crawl up to the surface and emerge at the proper time.
It’s a mechanism no human understands — somehow their bodies and nerves track and log winters, initiating among their billions a synced countdown to ecstasy. They rise from the soil, shed their exoskeletons, rustle up their wings and prepare to fly. Then the mating party begins. And it is quite a party — the music, to us, raucous, but to the cicada, it’s Frank Sinatra on a first date. No sound system is required.
They are one of the world’s longest-lived insects. They are able to register one of the longest beats in the world of synchronized animal sounds. That’s probably harder for a bug than it is for a timpanist who must wait 696 bars before coming in for the Act II finale of “The Marriage of Figaro.”
Many animals feel rhythm quite differently than humans do. Songbirds can hear extremely fast rhythms that are indistinguishable to us. Fin whales can sing one subsonic whoop every few minutes in exact regularity and feel that as a steady beat. But 17-year cicadas can feel 17 years of silence with astounding accuracy and manage to know just when to come in and start making sound. On the day when the soil reaches 64 degrees about a foot below ground, it’s as if a conductor is raising the baton to signal that the concert is about to begin. Then cicadas step onto the stage and prepare to sing.
We have been learning during this past year of the pandemic to count rises and falls in Covid-19 cases, to alternately feel hope and fear, to count and be counted, to wonder if things are improving or declining. There’s even the one-two, one-two of ours and our loved ones’ vaccinations. And still we are not sure whether it’s safe to come out. Would that we had a cicada’s certainty about life and love!
When cicadas emerge, they create a
grand wash of sound, a complex
thrumming drone that at first sounds
like just noise to humans. When cicadas emerge,
they create a grand wash
of sound, a complex
thrumming drone that
at first sounds like
just noise to humans.
John Cage may have said it’s music
if you think it is, but more accurately, it’s music
if you take the time to truly listen. John Cage may have
said it’s music if you think it is, but more accurately, it’s music if you take the time to truly listen.
Then you will hear three distinct species of 17-year cicadas, each making different sounds in a grand magic insect symphony. The biologists John Cooley and David Marshall took time to listen closely in the 1990s and figured out that it’s not only the male cicadas who make song.
Only the males can vibrate a section of their abdomen called the tymbals to make either phaaaaaroah drone sounds or chchchchhwhhhs noise waves, depending on the species. For any mating to happen, though, the females must respond with a quiet but audible flick of their wings, leading the males on to successive sounds only if this flick happens at exactly the right time after the male stops vibrating. The orchestration is incredibly precise.
Why did this unique situation evolve? Presumably so that only the males and females of the proper species would find each other and get together, unerringly.
Cicadas may also have this prime-number thing going to evade more regular cycles of predators. It’s more like an onslaught than evasion: Periodic cicadas (other broods emerge every 13 years, as opposed to those who show up yearly) overwhelm their predators by their sheer numbers, not their lengthy absences.
But that’s only one of several hypotheses. A2015 article in the journal Scientific Reports suggested the periodic emergences may have to do with the Ice Age. The phenomenon could evolve only in a situation of very uneven glaciation, as the Ice Age waned, leaving just a few patches of snowless earth, resulting in conflicting cycles of cicada populations competing mainly against the others.
The scientists ran the data through an ecological computer model and suggested that the cicadas following the prime cycles were the ones most likely to survive. The only places in the world with the right conditions for this are the Eastern and Central United States.
This past year, the sudden emergence of another bug overwhelmed us by sheer contagion. We have fought back, and now some of us are beginning to emerge into a world not only of reclaimed safety but also of wonder, of joy.
This sheer joy is why I like to make music with cicadas on my clarinet and share in their celebrations. Insects have perhaps the longest-running musical gig on the planet. Theirs is an idiom full of overlapping sounds and forms.
The author with his B-flat clarinet at his home in the Hudson Valley of New York on April 30.Karsten Moran for The New York Times
I invite musicians who play various electronic sounds, sometimes with accordion or percussion, and I join in on my clarinet. We perform live with the cicadas in the field, where we become humble members of an orchestra of millions. We try to tune in to the surrounding thrum, and as with jazz, we use some themes and sounds we have previously prepared but leave room for the improvisation that happens in the moment.
Is it crazy to bring human instruments and voices together with millions of thrumming and wing-flicking cicadas? Does the mix need any more sound? Every musician should try at least once to add his or her own small voice to the millions.
It’s a profound experience. Far from crazy, it’s necessary. Human sounds must fit into and around the callings of nature if we are ever to construct a surer, more promising way to survive on this complex and beautiful planet.
There are so many things we don’t yet know about 17-year cicadas. To get closer to their world, we’ll need to combine all human forms of knowing: music, science, pure speculation and sheer feeling. These cicadas teach us a deeper way to experience time, and a deeper way to listen. When they arrive, I’ll be out there finding new ways to join in.
Let’s celebrate their rise from a darkness of years spent waiting, as we find our own human way back to the light, climbing up from despair toward the sky, letting it be known that we too have, finally, arrived.
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May 08, 2021 at 10:09PM
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Opinion | The Sound of Cicadas Is Music If You Take the Time to Listen - The New York Times
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