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2015, Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature (Routledge)
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315752938…
7 pages
1 file
Critical theory is an endeavor born of crisis. In the historical materialist tradition, which emerged in response to nineteenth-century social crisis, the critical theorist begins by taking account of the material conditions and mode of production that enable society to reproduce itself. She then moves outward to interrogate both the institutions that preserve this mode of production and the cultural practices that dissemble its inequities. The contemporary ecocritical theorist faces an even more multilayered undertaking. Whereas historical materialism has long recognized social and ecological problems as intertwined effects of the “human metabolism with nature,” we have only recently come to realize the complexity and enormity of the “epochal crisis” that we have set in motion (Foster 2013). Ecomusicology is critical reflection upon music and sound, set against the backdrop of this epochal environmental crisis. My aim is to situate ecomusicology within the broader critical theory tradition, which I trace from the Frankfurt School to neo-materialist social theory and contemporary Marxian political ecology. In this essay, I explore intersections between these fields and recent work in ecomusicology, and I propose a hybrid mode of critical listening informed by my own research into listening practices in early modern Japan.
Ecomusicology and the critical pedagogy of music share a common concern for music and environment. Using social systems theory this paper draws out Freire's pedagogy for critical consciousness—the practice of bringing immanent epistemologies into awareness—and its importance for critical ecological literacy in the new epoch of Anthropocene. This discussion is grounding in an applied ecomusicology project called Sounding the Sacred Headwaters that suggests a central place for Critical Multiliteracies Pedagogy (CMP) in a critical pedagogy of music.
In this article, the author analyzes the work of two artists, Miki Yui and Jana Winderen, who respond to unprecedented ecological change by using nature field recordings as the foundational element of their compositions and installations. Their works replicate environmental dissolution and dislodge listeners from the habits and assumptions of everyday life. The author draws upon the work of sociologist Henri Lefebvre, defining rhythmanalysis, the everyday, and, in Lefebvre’s words, the “dialectical dynamic between tragedy and daily life.”
Music and Politics, 2014
This paper is an edited and footnoted version of a trialogue discussion at the AASHE conference in 2013, among co-authors Jeff Todd Titon, Aaron S. Allen and Denise Von Glahn. Allen wrote in the introduction that "Our trialogue begins to outline some of the ways that practicing ecomusicology (or, more appropriately, practicing ecomusicologies) is political. In the early1990s, Philip Bohlman argued that practicing any musicology is a political act, regarding both what we choose to study and the "others" we exclude. Among those others that musicologists ignored, I propose that we should include the Earth itself. The “Earth as other” is not just a postmodernist or new-musicological anthropomorphizing of the planet. By saying that the Earth has been “othered,” I would like to suggest that we need a paradigm shift in order to include the Earth—the planet itself (or Gaia herself), the biotic life and abiotic contexts of the biosphere, the environmental insults humans have inflicted on it and each other, and the upheavals among human communities that result from such environmental and social exploitations—among topics now in the realm of study that were once excluded from the musicological enterprise (as were Bohlman’s “women, people of color, [and] the disenfranchised”). In a true pluralistic sense, practicing ecomusicologies can comfortably encompass, on the one hand, our studies of appealing representations of idealized nature and human reflection on nature (à la Beethoven’s Symphony Pastorale.) On the other hand, ecomusicology can, and must, also engage with the profound environmental crises that threaten civilization. Musicologists have the capacities to understand those crises from alternative viewpoints and make some contributions, however small, to ameliorating them."
2018
In recent years, ecological issues have grown to become some of the most significant sociopolitical concerns of our time – something which has been reflected by an explosion in engagement with such issues across every area of arts and culture. Across most major art forms, this trend has been identified, analysed and promoted both by critical studies in the growing field of ecocriticism, and by the curatorial recognition of new ‘ecological’ genres; however, to date there has been no equivalent ecologically-focused engagement within sound art. This can be recognised as the product of two significant gaps in sound art scholarship: the first critical in nature, regarding the lack of ecocritical engagement with sound art; and the second curatorial, regarding the failure to recognise the growing number of ecologically-engaged works of sound art as a distinct genre in their own right. The research detailed within this thesis will address each of these gaps by conducting a comprehensive investigation into ecology and environmentalism in contemporary sound art. The critical gap will be tackled by coupling a thorough analysis of the field of ecocriticism with an investigation into the ways in which ecological principles manifest within sound as a medium and listening as a means of engagement. This will then be used to develop a new ecocritical framework specifically designed for sound art, which will be employed to conduct ecocritical listenings to a selection of canonical and contemporary sound works. To address the curatorial gap, meanwhile, a new genre of ‘ecological sound art’ will be proposed, with a second set of ecocritical listenings focused upon a selection of ecological sound works in order to determine the precise nature of their ecological engagement, and to develop both a comprehensive definition and an initial catalogue of works for this important and timely contemporary movement.
Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 15/1, 2011
Modernist musicological discourse is flush with talk of “the musical material,” a rhetorical figure which imbues sound with enigmatically self-inherent tendencies, while simultaneously prefiguring its subjugation to compositional agency. This trope echoes the broader Enlightenment cultural program of establishing mastery over the unruly energies of nature. The noise compositions of Masami Akita, better known as Merzbow, challenge such conceptions of meaningful musical experience as mastery over sound. Twisting the hum of electronic instruments into self-oscillating feedback loops, Merzbow unbinds the inherent momentum of sound, forestalling its subsumption into mere compositional material. Such explorations of the 'natural right' of sound to be something other than music have important forebears in late 20th century Western aesthetic thought, most notably John Cage. Despite his professed impartiality toward traditional Japanese music, Merzbow's ambivalent aesthetics also recall the much older classical Japanese poetic tradition, as exemplified by Tokugawa period philologist Motoori Norinaga's concept of mono no aware. In this paper, I interpret Norinaga's aesthetic thought as a riposte to Enlightenment nature-culture dualism, and listen for its echo in Akita's noise. In the final instance, however, I conclude that Akita eviscerates traditional Japanese assumptions of the mutual amenability of culture and nature, music and noise. Following Akita's recent writings on ecology, I maintain that his compositions reflect a pained awareness of the deterioration of the natural sound-world before the onslaught of human culture and its sonic detritus, and advance a still more radical critique of the inability of either Western modernist or classical Japanese aesthetic thought to address the ballooning potential of humanly organized sound to do violence against human and non-human life.
Sounds, Ecologies, Musics (Oxford University Press), 2023
Preprint of a book chapter, it was removed in Sept., 2023 on account of copyright restrictions when the book in which it appears was published. The book (Sounds, Ecologies, Musics, edited by Aaron S. Allen and Jeff Todd Titon) is available from Oxford University Press and the usual online sources, but don't forget your local independent bookstore -- they can order it for you or your public library. This essay is a response to Keogh and Collinson’s challenge to music ecology. I take issue with their characterization of the “balance of nature” eco-trope in ecological science and music ecology. In distinguishing between ecology as a Western scientific field of inquiry and ecology as a holistic philosophy, I propose that, like ecological science, ecomusicologies can be holistic without being teleological. I attempt to assuage the concern that music ecology is utopian and risks maintaining the unjust legacy of racism, colonialism, and the neoliberal socioeconomic order. On the contrary, I claim that music ecology’s ecojustice framework embraces a more comprehensive and equitable revisioning of the global political and economic power structure, one that is a multiracial, multiethnic, multigender, and multispecies pluriverse.
In recent years, questions regarding music, sound, and nature have intensified. This intensification is visible in various domains of musical practice, such as the increased audibility of composers involved in acoustic ecology as both practitioners within and theorizers of the field; the global presence of sound collectives employing audio recordings and music scholarship for the purpose of denouncing environmental problems; and the emergence of what are considered "new fields" of study, such as ecomusicology, biomusic, and zoomusicology. This coincides with a growing interest in listening and in sound as phenomena and the institutionalization of sound studies as a disciplinary field.¹ Finally, it coincides with a renewed I thank Julio Ramos, Jairo Moreno, and Gavin Steingo for helpful critical and generous conversations and comments, and Margaret Havran for her editorial work on this essay. I would also like to thank Arturo Escobar and Enrique Leff for their help and encouragement, even though a deeper engagement with the specific elements of their work has inevitably been left for another moment. The responsibility of the content of this essay is, of course, mine. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 1. Jonathan Sterne, ed., The Sound Studies Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Michael Bull, ed., Sound Studies (London: Routledge, 2013).
Recent years have seen an exponential increase in the number of composers and sound artists directly responding to global environmental issues, such as biodiversity loss, pollution and climate change, through their creative practice. The philosophical concerns and practical methodologies of these composers and sound artists build on the established field of acoustic ecology, and the related genre of soundscape composition, but also venture well beyond them, setting them apart as a distinct new movement in music and sound art. However, as yet no new terminology has been found to define and describe this movement, either as an academic field of study or as an artistic genre. Two composers who are at the forefront of this movement, David Monacchi and Matthew Burtner, have each independently adopted the term “ecoacoustic” in reference to their work: a term which this paper will propose as the most suitable to describe this contemporary movement of environmentally-concerned music and sound art. Although some significant differences exist between the artistic philosophies and creative practices of the two composers – which also, therefore, inevitably carry through into differences between their uses of the term – it will be argued that the similarities between them are significant enough for these differences to be regarded as variations upon a core set of principles and methodologies. Through an investigation into what the term “ecoacoustic” means in the context of the work of Monacchi and Burtner, this paper will identify these core principles and methodologies, employing them as the basis for an initial “definition- in-progress” of ecoacoustic music and sound art. Finally, a selection of other composers and sound artists will be proposed whose work embodies the fundamental characteristics of this new field of “ecoacoustics”.
Organised Sound, 2015
The ever-increasing focus on sound in recent creative practices has ideological implications and seems to reframe and problematise ontological perspectives on music. Today it is possible to contrast notions of music as identical with sound (as in the discursive framework of ‘audio culture’) with artistic practices where sound and music arenot at allidentical, and the usually implicit hierarchy between them is probably twisted. This article discusses such matters from a methodological position that weaves together issues usually discussed in different areas of concern: it understands ecologically informed notions of sound and auditory experience as strictly intertwined with critical and inventive attitudes on technology, particularly as their intertwining is elaborated through performative practices. It suggests that, in music as well as in sound art, what we hearassound andinsound is the dynamics of anecology of situated and mediated actions, as a process that binds together (1) hum...
Musica e Cultura: revista da ABET, 2013
In this keynote address for the Brazilian Society for Ethnomusicology, published in their annual yearbook, I define ecomusicology as the study of music, sound, culture, nature and the environment in a time of environmental crisis. I review the field of ecomusicology and its attitudes toward nature, suggest that its proponents need to come to terms with the postmodern critique of ecology, and urge a reorientation towards a relational ontology and epistemology. Also reprinted, with a new introduction, in my book Toward a Sound Ecology: New and Selected Essays (Indiana University Press, 2020).
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