Ecomusicology: back to the roots of sound/music and environmental sustainability by Tiffany Chall... more Ecomusicology: back to the roots of sound/music and environmental sustainability by Tiffany Challe Advisor: Professor Sophia Perdikaris We are currently living in the midst of a global warming crisis, and running against the clock to counter the rapid depletion of natural resources in an increasingly technology-run world. The first step toward sustainability is to care for our world that is full of vibrant ecosystems and that we must work together to preserve. While the visual arts have served as a cogent platform for the environmental movement, this paper will argue that sound and music have been vastly overlooked in sustainability topics. Place-making music can capture a place’s unique spirit and connect listeners with their local ecologies. Therein lies the potential of Ecomusicology, an emerging field, which considers the interconnections between music, culture, and nature. It presents exciting potential in raising awareness about critical environmental issues through music’s le...
Ecomusicology is an emerging subfield, which fuses the discipline of ecocriticism with musicology... more Ecomusicology is an emerging subfield, which fuses the discipline of ecocriticism with musicology; it considers the interconnections between music, culture, and nature by exploring the cultural meaning of music in relation to nature and of nature in relation to music. Ecomusicology presents potential in raising awareness about critical environmental issues through music’s lens, bridging the many gaps between arts and sciences, nature and culture, human and nonhuman sound worlds, and considering music and sound in supporting sustainability through the concept of aesthetics. The first step toward sustainability is to care for the world in which we live—a world full of beautiful landscapes that we want to preserve for both the present and future generations. Music has the ability to achieve this step though the aesthetics of a place’s spirit it tries to capture in the aural sphere. In essence, music can give meaning to a place by translating its uniqueness into sound either by imitating—in other words, representing a place’s natural sounds through instrumentation—or incorporating directly its sounds, such as whale songs for example. Philosophers of aesthetics have argued that instrumental music is not representational in the same way as words are. In his book Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment, author Mark Pedelty provides his stance on instrumental music, stating that symphonic compositions are less denotative in nature than popular music with lyrical content and therefore, can present more challenges when used to promote sustainability. This paper will argue that place-making instrumental music can be just as effective in raising ecological awareness as songs referencing environmental issues in their lyrics—and in some ways, more so. Compositions that imitate the sounds of nature with wind and string instruments such as Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and John Luther Adams’ Songbirdsongs, can evoke strong emotions in the listener, leaving ample space and time to access the imagination and draw from one’s individual and cultural memory, while the lyrics in place-making pieces such as Woodie Guthrie’s This Land is your Land and Pete Seeger’s Sailing up My Dirty Stream can be manipulated and interpreted in ways other than the artist’s intention, ultimately undermining environmental advocates’ efforts.
Ecomusicology: back to the roots of sound/music and environmental sustainability by Tiffany Chall... more Ecomusicology: back to the roots of sound/music and environmental sustainability by Tiffany Challe Advisor: Professor Sophia Perdikaris We are currently living in the midst of a global warming crisis, and running against the clock to counter the rapid depletion of natural resources in an increasingly technology-run world. The first step toward sustainability is to care for our world that is full of vibrant ecosystems and that we must work together to preserve. While the visual arts have served as a cogent platform for the environmental movement, this paper will argue that sound and music have been vastly overlooked in sustainability topics. Place-making music can capture a place’s unique spirit and connect listeners with their local ecologies. Therein lies the potential of Ecomusicology, an emerging field, which considers the interconnections between music, culture, and nature. It presents exciting potential in raising awareness about critical environmental issues through music’s le...
Ecomusicology is an emerging subfield, which fuses the discipline of ecocriticism with musicology... more Ecomusicology is an emerging subfield, which fuses the discipline of ecocriticism with musicology; it considers the interconnections between music, culture, and nature by exploring the cultural meaning of music in relation to nature and of nature in relation to music. Ecomusicology presents potential in raising awareness about critical environmental issues through music’s lens, bridging the many gaps between arts and sciences, nature and culture, human and nonhuman sound worlds, and considering music and sound in supporting sustainability through the concept of aesthetics. The first step toward sustainability is to care for the world in which we live—a world full of beautiful landscapes that we want to preserve for both the present and future generations. Music has the ability to achieve this step though the aesthetics of a place’s spirit it tries to capture in the aural sphere. In essence, music can give meaning to a place by translating its uniqueness into sound either by imitating—in other words, representing a place’s natural sounds through instrumentation—or incorporating directly its sounds, such as whale songs for example. Philosophers of aesthetics have argued that instrumental music is not representational in the same way as words are. In his book Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment, author Mark Pedelty provides his stance on instrumental music, stating that symphonic compositions are less denotative in nature than popular music with lyrical content and therefore, can present more challenges when used to promote sustainability. This paper will argue that place-making instrumental music can be just as effective in raising ecological awareness as songs referencing environmental issues in their lyrics—and in some ways, more so. Compositions that imitate the sounds of nature with wind and string instruments such as Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and John Luther Adams’ Songbirdsongs, can evoke strong emotions in the listener, leaving ample space and time to access the imagination and draw from one’s individual and cultural memory, while the lyrics in place-making pieces such as Woodie Guthrie’s This Land is your Land and Pete Seeger’s Sailing up My Dirty Stream can be manipulated and interpreted in ways other than the artist’s intention, ultimately undermining environmental advocates’ efforts.
Uploads
The first step toward sustainability is to care for the world in which we live—a world full of beautiful landscapes that we want to preserve for both the present and future generations. Music has the ability to achieve this step though the aesthetics of a place’s spirit it tries to capture in the aural sphere. In essence, music can give meaning to a place by translating its uniqueness into sound either by imitating—in other words, representing a place’s natural sounds through instrumentation—or incorporating directly its sounds, such as whale songs for example.
Philosophers of aesthetics have argued that instrumental music is not representational in the same way as words are. In his book Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment, author Mark Pedelty provides his stance on instrumental music, stating that symphonic compositions are less denotative in nature than popular music with lyrical content and therefore, can present more challenges when used to promote sustainability. This paper will argue that place-making instrumental music can be just as effective in raising ecological awareness as songs referencing environmental issues in their lyrics—and in some ways, more so. Compositions that imitate the sounds of nature with wind and string instruments such as Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and John Luther Adams’ Songbirdsongs, can evoke strong emotions in the listener, leaving ample space and time to access the imagination and draw from one’s individual and cultural memory, while the lyrics in place-making pieces such as Woodie Guthrie’s This Land is your Land and Pete Seeger’s Sailing up My Dirty Stream can be manipulated and interpreted in ways other than the artist’s intention, ultimately undermining environmental advocates’ efforts.
The first step toward sustainability is to care for the world in which we live—a world full of beautiful landscapes that we want to preserve for both the present and future generations. Music has the ability to achieve this step though the aesthetics of a place’s spirit it tries to capture in the aural sphere. In essence, music can give meaning to a place by translating its uniqueness into sound either by imitating—in other words, representing a place’s natural sounds through instrumentation—or incorporating directly its sounds, such as whale songs for example.
Philosophers of aesthetics have argued that instrumental music is not representational in the same way as words are. In his book Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment, author Mark Pedelty provides his stance on instrumental music, stating that symphonic compositions are less denotative in nature than popular music with lyrical content and therefore, can present more challenges when used to promote sustainability. This paper will argue that place-making instrumental music can be just as effective in raising ecological awareness as songs referencing environmental issues in their lyrics—and in some ways, more so. Compositions that imitate the sounds of nature with wind and string instruments such as Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and John Luther Adams’ Songbirdsongs, can evoke strong emotions in the listener, leaving ample space and time to access the imagination and draw from one’s individual and cultural memory, while the lyrics in place-making pieces such as Woodie Guthrie’s This Land is your Land and Pete Seeger’s Sailing up My Dirty Stream can be manipulated and interpreted in ways other than the artist’s intention, ultimately undermining environmental advocates’ efforts.