“Dear SEM”

Dr. Jim Sykes

University of Pennsylvania

If the division between nature and culture is not “in nature,” then we are all ecomusicologists now. But I define the Anthropocene as intimately linked to capitalism—as the Capitalocene—so I come to the question of the role of ethnomusicological research in the wake of the climate crisis in what may seem to some a sideways fashion. I believe the challenge of the Anthropocene requires us to move from the mere documentation of capitalism’s corrosive power to finding a way out of reproducing its values as an ecosystem, including its concepts of the human, consumption, and what constitutes a “real job.” In particular, musical labor outside of or at a distance from capitalism —often derided as “unproductive” (what Bataille called “the accursed share”), indeed, ethnomusicology itself—has much to contribute to this endeavor. Despite getting paid less than investment bankers, this musical-otherness to capital (I like to call it “the musical otherwise”) is a real job because it tends to value sustainability over disruption, connection over isolation, and solidarity over competition. Given the climate crisis, expanding extractivist labor isn’t all that productive.

In his 2001 book on values, David Graeber remarks that Marxists who are “too rigorous” and “single-minded” about their projects tend produce “a view of social reality so cynical, of a world so utterly creased with power and domination, that it becomes impossible to imagine how anything could really change” (xiii). The teleology is a downward slide into, well, a feeling of hopelessness in the Anthropocene (though he didn’t use that word). A comparative anthropology, on the other hand, holds out hope for “envisioning possible alternatives,” but too often romanticizes the Other, becoming “a naive relativism utterly blind to power” (ibid.). The trick, in Graeber’s view, is to mitigate between these extremes. While his book is a comparative anthropology, I think his advice works for those of us undertaking fine-grained ethnographic research. As Marilyn Strathern (in ibid. 38-40) famously showed, the individual in Marxist thought tends to be construed around a universalistic definition of individual rights. Rather than conceptualize personhood as arising through relationships and the duties and cultural beliefs about duties these relations imply, the individual is construed as a whole person first, before relationships form. There is, in other words, a Eurocentrism inherent to much Marxist writing, while Strathern shows that ethnography can denaturalize concepts we take for granted, giving us a glimpse of an outside to Eurocentrism, and a different understanding of capitalism. This allows for imaginative possibilities—the notion that our global narratives of power (indeed, capitalism itself) might be rethought by (or in virtue of) the terms and values encountered in ethnography. Here a comparison can be made with Weber, for how you feel about this probably depends on whether you think ideas have the ability to change actions and thus capitalism itself. This does not mean capitalism is not everywhere, it does not mean rejecting Marxist critiques of capital, but it does mean committing to the possibility that ideas guide actions, from policies to day-to-day living. If we don’t believe this, I think, we won’t survive the Anthropocene.

Ethnomusicology long ago ceded the global to disciplines like the philosophy of music, neuroscience, and perhaps even historical musicology. We had good reasons to do so: the legacy of comparative musicology, namely its smuggling in of European musical concepts and notions of the human under the banner of science, looms large. But when we discuss the global nowadays (in teaching and research) it is usually to highlight pervasive ills intimately linked to global capital, e.g. colonialism. We’re not wrong to do so. But cumulatively, the possibilities for different modes of thought and living that emerge through ethnographies add up. We should not ignore the history of global forces that alter or destroy what we find in the field, but I think we can also find a place for the potential counterforce of imaginative possibilities. Indeed, the persistence of difference despite the ubiquity of the capitalist ecology is a global narrative that is under-recognized.

While a previous generation of musicologists celebrated musicians escaping “service” and performing art for art’s sake, we are at a point where some people think music is valuable only for developing cognitive skills in children that will be useful when they get a real job. If musicians in some places were also village doctors, or if they performed rituals that conjured up deceased ancestors who legitimated one’s right to land (e.g., Povinelli 2002: 187-233), such “extra-musical” services were siphoned off into modern medicine and the law. Music students would do well to reconnect music with these and other forms of labor as part of “the music itself.” If capitalism tends to professionalize and isolate, our aim should be to expand the values of the musical otherwise by reproducing its performance—in tandem with myriad needed day-to-day activities—of the labor that sustains life.

So my advice for students engaging in ecomusicological research—which is to say, in ethnomusicology—is to know you are doing a real job.

References

Bataille, Georges. 1988 [1949]. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. New York: Zone Books.

Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Dr. Lee Veeraraghavan

Tulane University

What is the role of ethnomusicological research in the face of climate change and environmental disaster?

First off, I’m honored to be asked to contribute to this feature. Thank you for inviting me. I answered these questions more in the voice of an organizer than that of an academic because I don’t want graduate students to interpret my comments as subtle professional pressure. (To that end, I have tried to be unsubtle.)

We should seriously consider the possibility that there isn’t much of a role for institutional manifestations of ethnomusicological research in the Anthropocene as it is currently unfolding. I don’t mean this as a jeremiad, I simply think that to assess the crisis in its full historical and political context, we cannot view the institutions that fund our work—those of us who are getting funded/paid, that is—as separate from the systems, processes, and relationships that constitute the Anthropocene. On one hand, our disciplinary methods helped to further the colonization and colonialism that produced the Anthropocene in the first place (dated to the Orbis Spike of 1610), so we should seek to reproduce social relations otherwise. On the other, colonization and capitalist expansion led to the neoliberalism that threatens to shut down ethnomusicology lines and programs, which affects all of us but graduate students most of all.

I do think our work has value, and it is worth determining what our individual and collective roles as ethnomusicologists will be in this geological epoch. When it comes to collective action, I suspect that the mechanisms and processes we have in place do not allow for much change, even in the face of disaster. What gets glossed as “the ethnomusicological community” is a diffuse and unequal assemblage whose purview for group action is limited mostly to the presentation and publication of research—with some light disciplining on social media for those so inclined. At our most functional, we draw on the communal pot of knowledge to further individual research products and localized group projects. This is not a bad thing, but it is not the same as collective debate and action, and we shouldn’t forget it. I think when it comes to ideas the discipline does “advance” collectively in fits and starts, but it is worth noting that the processes that produce this sense of consensus are themselves the result of unequal and problematic distributions.

Ultimately, I believe attempts to preserve ethnomusicology within the amber of a cruelly optimistic formation (including by changing it) won’t go so well. We can see that today in the shrill, panicked tone that has crept into some state-of-the-field dispatches of assorted genres—books and articles, social media posts, job descriptions.

How do you train graduate students to be mindful of the climate crisis and sustainability concerns while conducting research?

I don’t have to train graduate students. Ha! Take that, my much-better-remunerated colleagues!! Seriously though, I think that to face this crisis with a level head one must have a reasonably high self-esteem—precisely what our professional socialization degrades at every turn. Put bluntly, insofar as you are fixated on what your superiors think of you, everything you do will be filtered through the lens of your own advancement. This is not a good spirit to bring to problems of this magnitude.

I want us to treat one another non-instrumentally, as though we were more than means to an end—and that is a two-way street. This will be obvious to anyone who has occupied a liminal position in the academy, but brilliance in research does not necessarily translate to consistency or rigor in one’s personal conduct. One of the saddest things I’ve learned over the course of my work, though, is that when people say “solidarity,” they often mean “as long as there is no risk to me.” I hope graduate students who read this will support one another with kindness in the painful process of learning to see all the ways we justify our own positions on the lifeboat. I believe this is essential to seriously engage any crisis.

How does a shift in focus from humans to the environment alter our methodologies and the questions we ask in our research?

I don’t want to make a blanket statement here because I think the power to surprise is one of the fruits of dedicated inquiry, but I suspect that simply switching out objects won’t get us anywhere new. I will say that if your goal is to contribute to a solution, it’s better to start with the problem than to shoehorn in your object of study, whether that’s music or the environment. But also: scholarship is about more than solving immediate problems, weird as that feels in a crisis.

These days I’ve been trying to cultivate a habit of treating everything I encounter as if it were as agential as I am. I don’t write about this (yet) because I don’t want it to start and stop at the lips—that is, I don’t want to write about it, I want to write like it, and I’ve a way to go to get there. I hope this habit engenders a radical inclusion, sure, and helps refract the liberal condescension of today’s identity politics, but I also see glimmers of a capacity for wonder and space for inquiry that has not already been foreclosed.

Dr. Mark Pedelty

Professor Emeritus, University of Minnesota

What is the role of ethnomusicological research in the face of climate change and environmental disaster?

In addition to the traditional goals of ethnomusicological scholarship—documenting, analyzing, and theorizing musical life—the sixth mass extinction and climate crisis call for a renewed emphasis on praxis. When we put our theoretical understandings into embodied and instantiated practices we can, in turn, develop more meaningful theories of environmental musicianship. Plus, we might be able to contribute more directly to dealing with these crises.

How do you train graduate students to be mindful of the climate crisis and sustainability concerns while conducting research?

My students tend to come in with a heightened awareness of environmental crisis. Given that they come from mostly humanistic and post-humanistic areas of study, they tend to be focused on the symbolic realm. Working with me they might become more mindful of the material dimensions of environmental issues as well. As artists, organizers, and cultural researchers, I think that it is important that we also become reasonably proficient in reading and understanding environmental science. Just as scientific reductionism can lead to limited understandings, reducing complex matters of environmental justice to purely cultural, symbolic representations can cause our work to lack significant insight and social relevance. I find critical and “deep” ecological orientations useful and meaningful: holistic, relational, and critically focused.

Instead of a top-down model of training, I try to use a more Freirean approach to graduate co-learning, a pedagogy focused on collaboration and collective meaning-making; the same emphasis is applied in my arts-based action research and musical media production. If I am learning from my students, they are probably learning as well. A recent grant collaboration involving graduate students and my amazing Co-PI, Rebecca Dirksen, seemed to be a good model. The grads involved in the Field to Media project were fully enfranchised team members, and they produced amazing work.

How does a shift in focus from humans to the environment alter our methodologies and the questions we ask in our research?

I’ve dealt with this question in my books and articles, yet still struggle to answer concisely. In addition to central ethnomusicological traditions, I’d point the reader to intersecting, transdisciplinary fields such as ecomusicology and acoustic ecology. We have been decentering humans for some time, and there is a solid tradition of that in ethnomusicology as well. My colleagues did a wonderful job of chronicling the “tributaries and distributaries” (Pedelty et. al 2022) of research concerning music-and-environment. It was published in Music Research Annual, a new peer-review, open access journal that has an interdisciplinary Editorial Board. They are publishing excellent pieces across the board, but I have noticed that MRA articles are thus far not being indexed well in the databases and Google Scholar, so I hope this can bring attention to MRA and, for the purposes of answering your question more completely, to our collaborative article. It is perhaps the most complete, multi-disciplinary review of the field and I think that graduate students interested in research concerning the more-than-human world would benefit from reading it.

To delve a bit further into your question, there are challenging conundrums involved in trying to decenter “us” (humans) given that we are the ones speaking, researching, writing, in dialogue, etc. It is thus far more of a poetic hope at this point than anything like an instantiated reality. Work done in that vein often leads to a sort of patronizing, anthropomorphizing representation of animal others—animals as quasi-human music makers—or Latourean projections of human-like agency onto more-than-human beings. That is not a criticism, it simply demonstrates how difficult it is to decenter. Again, an ecological orientation can assist somewhat, as does attention to art. For example, music often does the artful work of decentering better than musical scholarship. One of the most difficult decisions in the academy is to decenter, to think otherwise in a system that encourages us to think likewise. One recommendation would be to move away from the tendency to “apply” X theorist to Y subject. That is almost by definition an anthropocentric methodology and makes for a fairly weak epistemology. We can start centering on the more-than-human subject by actually focusing on the more-than-human subject rather than a given set of human theorists. That could help break down the patron-client structure of the academy as well. Instead of genuflecting to central figures in the field, we can collectively focus on the exigencies of our day. Interesting theory and theorists travel well for a reason, so I am not saying to ignore others’ work (in fact, we should be more collectively oriented), but rather to become a bit less focused on replicating a few well-placed researchers’ theoretical frameworks.

However, your question was more specifically about methods, and it is a good one. First, I think that the ethnographic focus of ethnomusicology serves us well. Decentering allows us to think more broadly about music, sound, and musicking, to place them in a broader context of time and space. A few stats really jump out at me when thinking about the broader contexts of our ethnographic research: the total collection of human-made “things” now outweighs all life on earth and only 4% of mammalian life lives in the “wild.” Our bodies, our pets, livestock, and things are replacing more-than-human, living communities, and the same processes that led to those stark realities also produce inequity in the human world. We need to get better at confronting those basic realities, including through music and sound research.

What advice would you have for students interested in conducting ecomusicological research?

After ending the above answer with a bit of dystopian prose, I will shift positions here and ask students to remember what brought them to the task, including the joy and pleasures of music and musical research. Music is integral to environmental organizing, not just because of its instrumental value to movements, but also because it expresses and produces hope, inspiration, and a sense of esprit de corps. One of the reasons I became a musical organizer was that it seemed like a sensible, useful, and potentially creative role for a music scholar to perform as a participant observer and part of the community. My continued hope is that new generations of scholars will find ways to widen the space for ecocritical research, pedagogy, and engagement, regardless of their disciplinary affiliations.

Thank you for asking these important questions. I hope that my answers are helpful.

References

Pedelty, Mark, Aaron S. Allen, Chiao-Wen Chiang, Rebecca Dirksen, and Tyler Kinnear. 2022. “Ecomusicology: Tributaries and Distributaries of an Integrative Field.” Music Research Annual 3: 1–36. https://doi.org/10.48336/y84g-7n30.

Dr. Alexander Rehding

Harvard University

The hardest challenge when it comes to writing about ecomusicological topics, I find, is to explain to others what it is that you are doing. For most people, music and climate change are worlds apart. But I just returned from a semester in Berlin, where I was working on a project on Music and the Anthropocene, and it turns out Berlin is a place where music and the environment are both taken very seriously. Over there, they have been working on an Anthropocene curriculum for years, and workshops and festivals on the topic take place on what felt like a weekly basis. In other words, it was the ideal staging ground to practice my elevator pitch. I found that the best way to explain my project is what in the military they call an escape forward—with the boldest claim possible: “I examine how music can help solve climate change.” As my colleague, the ever wonderful Alexandra Chreiteh, told me at the time, that claim really made her prick up her ears.

My own answer to this conundrum approaches the Anthropocene as an issue of temporality. An event such as climate change, what Tim Morton calls a hyperobject, exists on such a vast timescale that standard temporal mechanisms as mundane as “cause-and-effect” don’t seem to apply. Our individual action today cannot be related in a straightforward way to climate effects until many, many years later. That’s why climate polluters keep getting away with it. As Morton puts it, we continue to shovel our dirt into the future. When framed in this way, as an issue of temporality, music—the temporal art par excellence—suddenly has a lot to contribute to the discussion. What can music do to help turn our collective attention to the future, to the unborn generations who will inherit the world as we leave it? Or, put more incisively, following Roman Krzanic, how can we decolonize the future?

When we consider music over vast timescales, questions that normally don’t require much thought suddenly demand an answer. I have been quite interested in Longplayer (1999), an ongoing performance of a composition that lasts one thousand years. At that timescale, mundane issues like keeping instruments in tune or writing a score that future musicians will be able to read and, last but not least, keeping the performance going beyond the average human lifespan, must urgently be solved. Longplayer is, in the first place, an exercise in sustainability.

Sustainability questions are also at the forefront of such monumental projects as the Global Music Vault. (A big shoutout to Kate Mancey with thanks for alerting me to this.) Nestled between the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and the Arctic World Archive in the permafrost close to the North Pole, this planned archive of world music aims to preserve our world’s musical heritage—for future humans or, failing that, for other civilizations. It appears that the archive has solved the most fundamental technological problem of identifying a suitable long-term storage medium: the music will be stored in laser-engraved glass developed by Microsoft for long-term data storage. But it appears that many other issues are still open questions. Storing music is not like storing seeds—what does it even mean to store music over these vast timescales? What exactly is being preserved, and to what end precisely? Does it make sense to keep music for future denizens of our planet without instructions about its social and cultural meanings? The Arctic World Archive houses an instruction panel in five world languages in hopes that it might function like a Rosetta stone. But regardless of the language question, how do you explain music to a civilization that may not already have a similar concept in their culture? (It’s apparent that these questions converge with those raised by the Voyager Golden Record, which is probably why my co-author Daniel Chua and I find them interesting.)

Will this line of inquiry actually help us solve climate change through music? Maybe not by itself. A solution will probably require both a technological breakthrough and a fundamental change in our collective behavior—plus, it must be a response that accommodates the needs of the Global South. But it’s all a piece within the larger puzzle. Music can play a part as a sustainability exercise, as cultural memory—or as protest, as commemoration, as consolation, as celebration. There are no limits to the ways in which music may be employed to combat climate change. We don’t know as of yet what works, and on whom. The answer must be to try it all.

References

Chua, Daniel, and Alexander Rehding. 2021. Alien Listening: Voyager’s Golden Record and Music from Earth. New York: Zone Books.

Krzanik, Roman. 2020. The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking. London: The Experiment.

Morton, Timothy. 2012. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Morton, Timothy. 2009. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.