For many residents and visitors to our region, a day at the beach means fossil hunting. Here at Interlochen Arts Camp, fossil hunting is a favorite activity.
So several summer ago, when the young musicians in Interlochen’s Junior Orchestra program were rehearsing "Carnival of the Animals," they were excited to tell me that there was a movement about "Fossils."
Should I tell them? Yeah.
Saint-Saëns intended the piece as a musical joke. Critics of his day quipped that some familiar melodies had been "played to death" until they had practically petrified into fossils. So he buried snippets of those well-known tunes in the score.
And there is a connection to real fossils.
Most fossils begin as the remains of plants or animals buried beneath mud, sand or volcanic ash. Soft tissues disappear, but shells, bones and corals skeletons may survive.
Over millions of years, minerals carried by groundwater can preserve or replace those hard parts, turning them to stone while preserving their shape.
Then came the Ice Age. Glaciers scraped away younger layers of rock and carried ancient fossil-bearing limestone across Michigan, leaving coral fossils along our beaches.
In Saint-Saëns's "Fossils," those old tunes survive, too. The melodies and rhythms are still recognizable, but they've been transformed — almost fossilized — by the dry clatter of the xylophone.
The young musicians understood the joke immediately and recognized several of the familiar tunes.
But then they pleaded: "Can we pretend it's about Petoskey stones?"
