Harold and the Wolf

Apart from the jocular jottings of Columnist Russell Baker, the New York Times is not noted for its humor. Some delightful deadpan gave a lift to its front page last week, however, when Music Critic Harold Schonberg was, as it were, thrown to the wolves.

The man responsible was Metropolitan Editor Arthur Gelb, who spotted an offbeat story in the monthly magazine of Manhattan's Museum of Natural History; the article concluded that wolves howled not to frighten people but to communicate with other wolves. Gelb assigned Schonberg to write a professional critique of the calls of the wild. After listening to nearly an hour's worth of howling, Schonberg issued his straight-faced findings, complete with notational diagram:

> Wolves sing. > There are lupine vocal registers--soprano wolves, contralto wolves, tenor wolves, even a bass wolf or two. > Wolves have a characteristic call in which the interval of the major sixth (C to A) predominates.

Schonberg further observed that "when one wolf starts howling, like Franco Corelli in Verdi's 'Di quella pira' from 11 Trovatore, the rest of the wolves join in, as in the choral sections of 'Di quella pira.' " He found that the best wolf virtuosos "start pianissimo, swell to a messa di voce to the sixth above, hold it sweetly and purely, then perhaps embellish to the upper partial before going down to a pianissimo and trailing off on an inconclusive microtonality near the tonic." Although some wolves have a range of more than an octave, Schonberg noted that "they try to trill, poor things, but do not really have the technique for it."

Story finished, Schonberg treated startled staffers in the Times city room to a few tenor and bass wolf howls of his own. Not bad,Gelb noted.

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