by Simon Jackson Tuesday 5 August 2025

Estimated reading time:

7 min read

Citation 🕮

I first came across Butler's bee madrigal Melissomelos when working, like Richard Wistreich, on ideas of music and sociability. I was interested in the different ways in which music was published in the early modern period, and was reading up about table-book format – music printed on the page so that four singers seated around a table can each see their own part. In the Grove entry on table-books, the enticingly brief mention of Butler immediately caught my attention:

The latest sources in table-book format are certain English prints, such as Charles Butler's The Feminine Monarchie (1634) – the first known natural history of beekeeping, Butler transcribed the music of the bees into a four part setting, on a double page in table-book format for performance.¹

'Butler transcribed the music of bees'? It was intriguing – and the intrigue continued to build when I first looked at a copy of Butler's music.

What was remarkable about Butler's bee music, I soon found out, was the accuracy of his musical transcription and the innovative nature of the soundworld his bees produced. You can listen to a recording of queen bees piping here to compare with Butler's musical transcription. Like James Pruett (who wrote about Melissomelos in the 1960s) and I suspect many others, I at first assumed that the 'music of the bees' would be a kind of buzzing noise.² Far from it. Butler's attentive ear was rendering with empirical precision the piping noise bees make before they swarm. Before they swarm, the queens make a 'tooting' or 'honking' type noise when they vibrate their abdomens against the wax of the honeycombs.³

Taking his wind instrument in hand, he accurately recorded the pitches made by the bees – the 'solo' bee initially piping around middle C and F a perfect fourth above, the 'chorus' of bees adding notes around a perfect fifth and an octave higher than middle C. In musical terms, the result is a piece of early modern musical minimalism several centuries before the innovations of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, embedded within a partsong that allegorises the 'feminine monarchy' of the hive in terms of an Amazonian nation. In other words, what Butler was doing was making sense of the bees' music. This is no irrational, senseless buzzing. 'Not to bee animal musicum', Butler was later to write in his Principles of Musik (1636), 'is Not to bee animal rationale' (no pun intended).⁴

In 2017, Simone Kotva and I prepared a presentation on Melissomelos for the Cambridge Interdisciplinary Song Seminar – and naturally, we wanted to be able to play or perform some of this uniquely innovative music to our audience.⁵ But there were no recordings of Butler's piece, so we were driven to make our own. More than this, it was an opportunity to get under the skin of Butler's notes – to explore what happens when you lift the music off the page into the realm of sound, to find out what questions are answered (and, just as interestingly, what problems arise) when actually performing the music. At the time I was Director of Music at Little St Mary's, Cambridge, so was able to draw upon their voices to bring Butler's music to life.

One of the biggest questions that confronts any musician wanting to perform Butler's music is a puzzling silence on the page. Butler was evidently someone who thought carefully about the sonic possibilities of the printed page. In addition to his 'bee music', this is an early seventeenth-century writer who published on rhetoric and oratorical performance; who wrote a treatise on music; who even developed his own phonetic spelling system.⁶ And yet – for all the accuracy of his transcription – Butler neglects to offer any indication of the phoneme to be used when singing the piping sound of the bees. Even in the third edition, when the entire text of The Feminine Monarchie is reset in Butler's new phonetic orthography, he provides the reader with no clues. This is crucial information not just for anyone performing the music, but also if we take seriously Butler's intention to teach the reader of his bee-keeping manual what to listen for within the hive.

There are options here. James Pruett, as mentioned above, proposed '[Zzzz?]' in his edition of Butler's score.⁷ Some performances of Melissomelos choose to use wind instruments instead of human voices (as was the case when Ensemble Pro Victoria performed the madrigal as part of the Bee-ing Human project). With the Choir of Little St Mary's, and more recently when workshopping the piece with members of the Choir of Peterhouse, Cambridge, I was keen to explore the possibilities of the human voice. After some experimentation we settled on a neutral, schwa-like vowel, one that matched best, we hoped, the 'artless' and unaffected sonic qualities of the bees' 'voices'. There is a sense in which Butler, in writing this music, is inviting his readers to inhabit the beehive, to ventriloquise and impersonate the bees: for me, the use of the human voice – rather than a musical instrument – gets closer to the kind of ecological awareness and empathy that Butler is quite radically examining.

All of which brings us full circle to where this post began — to ideas of sociability. It's no accident that Butler's book sets the music out in table-book format. When I revisited the piece recently with singers from Peterhouse, we were able to experiment singing passages from both modern scores and from parts, and even to have singers arranged around a table reading from facsimiles of pages from Butler's book. It produces a kind of music-making far removed from modern ideas of performance in front of an audience. It draws the attention centripetally inwards, towards the centre of the ensemble, and it creates an intimate, sociable dynamic. Just as the bees coordinate their swarming with what Butler perceives as a musical act, singing together in this way is a collaborative, community-building activity. Any auditors present are – like Butler listening to his beehive – on the outside, eavesdropping and listening in.

And this tension perhaps gets to the heart of Butler's ideas about the music of the hive. On the one hand, it is a listening in, hearing the invisible interiority of the hive and interpreting its unseen world. But to sing the piece is also, perhaps just as importantly, an attempt in a sense to inhabit this space with the bees, to resonate with their sociability and harmonise our music with theirs. In this way, it immerses human song in the music of the natural world. Through his profoundly experimental (in every sense) musical composition, Butler seems to blur the boundaries between human and non-human song. As he says elsewhere in The Feminine Monarchie, in the bees' song, human musicians 'may see the grounds of their art'.⁸