THE LORD OF MISRULE, KNOWN ALSO as the Master of Merry Disports, ignited the Christmastime festivities from the late thirteenth through the early seventeenth century in England’s grand households. These mock officials were voted into service or chosen by the head of the household, and charged with delighting one and all during the winter season, arranging “fine and subtle disguisings, masks and mummeries, with playing at cards for counters, nayles and points, in every house, more for pastimes than for gain,” a reveler noted. There were feasts, concerts, silly plays, and dancing.
And with great pomp, the Christmas lords made it their duty to incite chaos. Dressed in fool’s baubles, and riding canvas hobbyhorses, they commanded all residents of the house. In 1551, courtier George Ferrers (1500–1579) played Lord of Misrule for Edward VI’s lavish holiday parties. Wearing a gold robe trimmed with fur, he rode into London with a troupe of trumpeters, then thundered on to spend more than £500 on entertainment, which included a Drunken Masque, a joust, and a mock Midsummer Night party. In the early seventeenth century, Sir Richard Evelyn gave his friend and trumpeter an equally free hand as Lord of Misrule, drafting a document to ensure that the temporary regent would hold sway in Evelyn’s house, insisting “every person or persons whatsoever, as well servants as others, to be at his command whensoever he shall sound his trumpet or music, and to do him good service, as though I were present myself, at their perils.” No one was spared the man’s merriment. “I give full power and authority to his lordship to break up all locks, bolts, bars, doors, and latches,” Evelyn went on, “and to fling up all doors out of hinges, to come at those who presume to disobey his lordship’s commands.”
Beyond castle walls, villagers elected their own Christmas lords, who seemed especially prone to interrupting church services, usually accompanied by a raucous band of partiers dressed in scarves and laces, with jangling bells tied to their legs. The merry crew would storm in, “their pipers piping, their drummers thundering, their stumps dancing, their bells jingling, their handkerchiefs swinging about their heads like madmen, their hobbyhorses and other monsters skirmishing amongst the throng.” Then they danced—a tradition that dated back to the ancient Roman Saturnalia, when similar rituals turned the everyday world upside down, with masters acting as servants while the servants ruled the day. Zealous seventeenth-century Puritans were appalled, of course, railing against the “reveling, epicurisme, wantonesse, idlenesse, dancing, drinking, stage-plaies, masques, and carnall pompe and jollity,” as one grumbled, and against all else that accompanied the fanciful season of “Christmas disorders.” Everyone else had a fine time.
Harlem’s jazz musicians of the early 1940s traveled downtown to play West Fifty-second Street’s nightclubs, but that big band swing didn’t leave a lot of room for experimentation, and midtown’s uptight bandleaders didn’t suffer showy solos. At closing time—3:00 a.m.—virtuoso musicians such as trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, drummer Kenny Clarke, pianist Thelonious Monk, and saxophonist Charlie Parker rushed back uptown for some fun. Bebop was the new style that emerged during their late-night jam sessions, as each flaunted an inimitable personal flair, warping traditional tempos and tweaking old techniques. It wasn’t about entertainment or danceability. Bebop was strange, aggressive, and intentionally hard to play.
In the wee hours, they met at Minton’s Playhouse on West 118th Street, a swanky supper club owned by Henry Minton, who, luckily, was also a delegate to Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians. The 802 tried to keep musicians from playing in venues where they weren’t getting paid, such as after-hours clubs. Wandering delegates shadowed musicians leaving work, trailing them to any place where they might jam. “There were big fines for playing jam sessions,” Gillespie (1917–1993) remembered. “So we were taking a big risk.” Those caught were charged a $100 to $500 fine. Minton’s union position kept his club off-limits, so the musicians could do their thing.
As the night rolled on, if Monk (1920–1982) fell asleep at his piano, Gillespie mashed his finger and woke him up quick. It wasn’t time for bed yet. When Minton’s closed, the whole gang headed over to Monroe’s Uptown House on West 134th Street, a hole-in-the-wall basement hangout that got going around four in the morning and kept rolling until nine. The scene was competitive, with each musician showing up the one before, and with old-school soloists pitted against eager up-and-comers. “The musicians used to go there and battle like dogs, every night, you know, just playing for nothing and having a good time,” one patron remembered. Clark Monroe, a former tap dancer, made sure the musicians ate something. They’d need their strength. “When those guys came in to play, they wouldn’t play one number or two numbers and get up and go,” a Brooklyn saxophonist remembered. “They’d be there all night long.… And when they’d finish, man, they’d be soaking wet.”
All the while, they were creating a musical revolution. “What we were doing at Minton’s was playing, seriously, creating a new dialogue among ourselves, blending our ideas into a new style of music,” Gillespie explained. “You only have so many notes, and what makes a style is how you get from one note to the other.… We invented our own way of getting from one place to the next.” Their new music didn’t have a name in the early 1940s. They called it “modern,” and musicians such as Gillespie and Monk dressed to match, not in cheesy swing band dinner jackets, but in berets, dark glasses or horn rims, and wide-lapelled suits. Their slang—“hip” and “cool”—infiltrated the mainstream just as their music did. When bebop traveled south from Minton’s and Monroe’s after 1944, and moved from late night to prime time downtown, its new fans called the music “bop.”
Their work in the laboratory was done. “We needed to play to a wider audience,” Gillespie said simply, “and Fifty-second Street seemed ready to pay to hear someone playing something new.”
Living in Arizona as a teenager in the late 1920s, Eastern scholar Theos Bernard (1908–1947) could learn only so much yoga from books. Yet, anticipating the day when he’d be able to travel to India to study with the masters, Bernard slowly built up his stamina, locking himself in his room to practice various esoteric exercises and purifications, such as nasal cleansing, and swallowing long pieces of surgical gauze to clean his digestive tract. His favorite practice was the yogic headstand. He started slowly. For a week he stood on his head for only a minute at a time, three times a day. Slowly and gradually, he increased the time.
Then, in 1936, Bernard set off for an extensive trip through Asia and India, delving deeply into yoga, and encountering itinerant holy men and gurus, as he related in his book Heaven Lies Within Us (1939), one of the first explicit yoga texts written in English. His exuberance and rigorous preparations paid off when he undertook a three-month training with an exacting Indian maharishi. “I had scarcely sunk into sleep, when four o’clock came and I had to be up,” he wrote. After his cleansing rituals and breathing exercises came the first of three one-hour headstands executed during the twelve hours of his practice. He didn’t find it strenuous, though. While resting in a headstand, “it is possible to experience a peace of relaxation unavailable in any other form,” Bernard wrote. “There is no other practice which enables one to experience such complete relaxation. The inner consciousness floods the mind; this is its greatest advantage. With this practice comes a strong tendency toward philosophical inquiry and perception which brings joy in its wake.”
After India, Bernard pressed on to Lhasa, where Tibetan monks initiated him as the first “white lama.” He returned to New York to write his PhD dissertation at Columbia University, and he became one of America’s foremost authorities on Eastern spirituality. (His glamorous second wife, opera star Ganna Walska, complained of his constant headstanding when she filed for divorce.) Though Bernard disappeared during a return visit to the East in 1947, his writing influenced a growing number of yoga devotees. In those days, even Eleanor Roosevelt liked to start her day with an invigorating headstand.
BERNARD’S INSTRUCTIONS
Start slowly, wrote Bernard, and know when to stop. “When you first go up on your head, you will experience a feeling of complete relaxation, but as you begin to approach your capacity you will inevitably feel a nervous tension creeping over the body.” As soon as small beads of perspiration begin to appear, it’s time to come down.
Use the headstand to enter deep meditation. “Forget everything and try objectively to watch the mind,” Bernard explained. “At first, you will hear sounds and find the mind racing in all directions. Let it race. Now try to follow some line of thought.… After I developed the practice I found that all time was banished, yet some little inner mechanism kept track of its passing.
“If the student desires to discover the unsteady state of the mind in which he is living, there is no better way than to stand on the head and observe what takes place. You will be amazed,” he wrote. “Try it and see.”
“Insomnia is the main cause of death in Rome,” the poet Juvenal declared in 100 CE. “The thunder of wagons in those narrow twisting streets, the oaths of the draymen caught in a jam, would shatter the sleep of a deaf man—or a lazy walrus.” Centuries later, not much has changed. City-dwellers still complain about street noise, the roar of the traffic, the sounds of garbage collection and construction work, but few characters figured more centrally in the noise debate of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than the milkman.
“Every morning before 7 o’clock ten milkmen yell frantically,” an English writer protested, detailing the morning racket on his London street in 1880. “Then come two milk-carts, who drive as if milk were the proper fluid with which to extinguish the distant fire to which they seem hastening. Three strange milkmen follow, who shout on alternate sides of the street as if the residents of Marlborough road did nothing but drink milk.”
The same was true in New York City, where milkmen started their rounds at 3:00 a.m., the sound of their clanking bottles and rattling carts competing with early-morning church bells and car horns. To anyone who might propose that milk deliveries begin later, one New Yorker suggested that the whiner “go to bed at a reasonable hour instead of playing the piano, screeching, and banging the door till midnight.” In doing so “he would confer a great favor on those who like to sleep at night and get their milk early in the morning.”
Medical professionals over the centuries have agreed with Juvenal that the noisy onslaught is bad for health. “The injury to nervous and sick people resulting from unnecessary noises, and especially annoying and exciting noises, cannot be measured in the form of damages,” a doctor explained in 1911. “There is a nerve waste; there is a lowering of tone; and there is a susceptibility to alcoholic stimulant and a desire for it.” New York, deemed the noisiest city in the world, was so loud it could drive you to drink. “Nowhere can the clanging and clashing, the scraping and the shoving, the grinding and tooting and the whistling and the screeching of this city be duplicated,” the city’s commissioner of health huffed in 1920. “It is little wonder that we are a people of nerves and temper. Lack of sleep and lack of rest are the ideal conditions to bring on a state of neurasthenia.”
The city’s milk companies eventually refitted steel-wheeled delivery wagons with rubber tires, their horses with rubber shoes, and their milk bottle baskets with rubber shock absorbers. But the debate went on. Their efforts didn’t go far enough for those who woke up to the sound of milk bottles rattling in the dumbwaiters. Others, though fewer in number, defended the deliverymen. “Just why is it necessary to pick on the tiny and not at all obnoxious noise made by the milkman, when absolutely nothing is done to stop the fiendish and perfectly useless shrieking of auto horns which goes on all night long and robs thousands of people of their needed rest?” a concerned citizen wrote to The New York Times in 1932.
In 1940, New Yorkers still drank 3,500,000 quarts of milk daily, 2,000,000 of which were privately delivered by a fleet of seven thousand milkmen, employing some two thousand horses. But the convenient new cardboard milk container had just been introduced, and antinoise campaigns had all but succeeded in turning the milkman—who now arrived almost silently in the dark—into “somewhat of a mystery man,” according to the Times. Already, people waxed nostalgic for the old days when the milkman jingle-jangled through the predawn streets. He’d become, as one reporter noted, just another “phantom figure of the night.”
Waking to the dawn chorus is heavenly. “The birds sing at dawn,” wrote Henry David Thoreau. “What sounds to be awakened by! If only our sleep, our dreams, are such as to harmonize with the song, the warbling, of the birds, ushering in the day.” In many cases, the birds’ message is aggressive, though it might charm the human ear. Male birds sing to ward off rivals and to woo females in the early morning, trilling as many as thirty songs in a half hour, rather than the usual five or six.
Still, since long ago, we’ve been entranced and have tried to imitate the birds’ morning sounds. The earliest piece of English secular music is a thirteenth-century song in which the cuckoo welcomes summer. German scholar Athanasius Kircher first transcribed complex birdsong as music in 1650, scoring the tweeting of a nightingale he’d heard. Beethoven mimicked the songs of the cuckoo, nightingale, and quail in his Pastoral Symphony, while Bartók’s Piano Concerto no. 3 was inspired by the birds the Hungarian composer heard singing in the mountains of North Carolina.
Likewise, poets through the ages have lauded songbirds in verse, and no bird more so than the nightingale, whose trill was at the heart of English peasant-poet John Clare’s work. As a country boy, Clare (1793–1864) was shy to reveal his love of poetry, but listening to the birds gave him the courage to lay claim to his literary “right to song.” He wrote:
And so it cheered me while I lay
Among their beautiful array
To think that I in humble dress
Might have a right to happiness
And sing as well as greater men;
And then I strung the lyre again
Clare transcribed the song of a nightingale perched in an apple orchard outside his window while living in Northborough in 1832, later inserting a flurry of pretty squawks into one of his poems. “I attempted to take down her notes but they are so varied that every time she starts again after the pauses seems to be something different to what she uttered before,” he explained, “and many of her notes are sounds that cannot be written in the alphabet having no letters that can syllable the sounds.” Yet, without a doubt, his deft attempt is both cheery and strangely hypnotic when read aloud (and please, do try it). It went like this:
