Tremor’s Ethos of Sustainability: Theorizing Sonic Eco-cosmopolitanism

Abigail Lindo

University of Florida

Ursula K. Heise (2008) coined the term “eco-cosmopolitanism” to describe a framework for understanding how an individual’s sense of place shapes environmental imaginations and how local systems and structures of ecological knowledge exist globally. She is concerned with an idea of global environmental citizenship that acknowledges the unintentional results of globalization to produce a sort of place-less-ness. Thus, Heise complicates the understanding of geography that tethers specific cultural groups to a particular region. She does not state whether this reality is adverse, but instead, calls for a realization of this change in environmentalist discourse. Her reference to the resulting global communities as new cultural forms, untethered by place, potentially signals that there are different realities associated with how social groups develop and maintain traditions. This consideration meshes with Kay Kaufman Shelemay’s idea that community as a localized concept “has cast doubt for some as to the utility of the word in an era of increasingly mobile and cosmopolitan populations” (2011, 356). 

How can we understand eco-cosmopolitanism in musical or sonic engagement? 

Ideas of mobility and cosmopolitanism are seemingly separate from the natural landscape or the fixed identifiers that distinct areas carry, allowing them to complicate Heise’s thoughts on the nature of new cultural forms as movable realities with diverse meanings. I posit “sonic eco-cosmopolitanism” as a developing idea embodied in musical practices that are similarly movable, acknowledging a mélange of ideas associated with cultural knowledge blanketed by the performance of citizenship within the collective of humanity concerned with environmental sustainability. This quality of movability is embodied in the music festival, along with temporality and specific ideas of spatiality that provide distinct meanings of a particular region. I will discuss one festival in the Azores and address how I have observed aspects of “sonic eco-cosmopolitanism” in the region and during the festival. 

Tremor is a boutique, alternative music festival held annually on the Azorean Island of São Miguel. Since its beginning in 2013, the festival has recruited a diverse collective of performers and attracted local and international concertgoers to an eclectic, sonically focused experience that promotes a spirit of free expression while maintaining an intentional awareness of ecotourism and conservation efforts on the island, with special attention to the capital city of Ponta Delgada. It guides participant engagement through assorted landscapes, using different venues over the course of the five-day festival to control the sonic material encountered and, subsequently, shape a particular sonic understanding of the island. Patronage is largely Portuguese and European, with fewer visitors from the Americas. There is not a specific genre that the event caters to, though many artists from past festivals have been rock, EDM, metal, jazz, and experimental performers, connecting with audiences in repurposed spaces throughout the island—a practice that challenges the often-patriarchal mapping of city spaces (Jarvis 2014). 

Luis Banrezes, one of the Tremor’s organizers, explicitly stated that attendees “don’t come for names,” meaning that those attending Tremor do not come for performances by mainstream musical celebrities. The festival welcomes and encourages attendance from individuals seeking unique musical experiences, providing a safe environment for a spectrum of ages, queer attendees, and anyone in the local community or from the island. This musical mélange is a sort of cosmopolitanism, intentionally catering to listener’s desires to encounter something “otherwise or otherworldly,” as one festival goer explained it to me. 

During the 2021 iteration, festival attendees experienced a sonic installation by Portuguese performance ensemble Sonoscopia entitled Phobos: Dysfunctional Robotic Orchestra, which attendees could participate in after a concert. The instrument, which was composed of miscellaneous items spread across numerous tables, was made from recycled objects wired together and played as a percussive body: breathing, singing, tapping, and thudding (see Figure 1). It embodied ideas of collectivity in its being and application as it simultaneously existed as a whole for improvised composition by individuals and groups. On three different days, a chartered bus took festival attendees to the hills outside of the municipality of Ribeira Grande, where a hike and sound walk (created using a guided path through the hills to a playlist of electronic pieces mixed with natural sounds) were followed by a brief concert above a flowing river. Audience members using pieces of metal roofing and industrial materials accompanied performers along with the sounds of the churning water. During this performance, a musician with a tenor saxophone could be seen playing his instrument as he floated down the river on a wooden raft, before dismounting and playing along with festival goers (see Figure 2). 

As mentioned above, attendees could actively participate in the performance, a practice that is described as “the most democratic, the least formally competitive, and the least hierarchical” form of performance and engagement. The highly participatory format makes it difficult to fit into the “broader cultural values of the capitalist-cosmopolitan formation, where competition and hierarchy are prominent and profit-making is often a primary goal” (Turino 2008, 35). Giving participants the opportunity to actively engage in the creation of distinct musical experiences and providing access to the artists themselves allows Tremor to effectively blur the line between performer and audience member while challenging European cultural values and allowing attendees to be greater invested in the natural spaces they occupy. 

Performances like this do not exist merely for spectacle but act as agents in producing a distinct experience during the festival and satisfying attendees’ expectations for something unconventional in live music engagement (Holt 2020). Since “different anthropogenic ecosystems produce dramatically different soundscapes” (Pedelty 2012, 118), the way music is made in these spaces reflects and affects how individuals make decisions about their interactions with the living world. Within the boundaries of Tremor, “musicians transform geographic regions into living myths,” offering new ideas of being, belonging, and becoming through sonic engagement (ibid, 83). 

Tourist spaces, like the pineapple plantation in Ponta Delgada and pier in Rabo de Peixe, were sonically transformed from their typical transience for musical reflection as sounds echoed out over roads, homes, and other businesses. Individuals lingered. Some spaces where events took place were protected for conservation efforts (limiting building and agricultural labor), which can benefit individual lives and impact the potency of political messages, encouraging people to work in communion with nature. Although not plainly stated, this is an ambition of festival organizers and something attendees appreciated as performance spaces shaped understandings of the land through musical experiences. 

Heise’s approach to understanding environmental knowledge through a “sense of planet” does not neglect the nuance of a particular place or the value of cultural knowledge in global thinking, yet does not posit distance between regions as a strength, which is also a reality of the cultural programming in Ponta Delgada. The tropical quality of the island promotes ecotourism while the cultivated ethos within each event communicates a desired global collective appreciation. Sound is a tool to enforce this. Tremor, in building ties to space and place, evokes Heise’s idea of “planetary ‘imagined communities’” (Heise 2008, 61). The festival features events that use the natural landscape as an active environment for attendee engagement rather than just as an affectively invigorating accompaniment to musical stimuli. However, Heise’s concept of eco-cosmopolitanism has not been employed to engage with artistic creation and consumption, two things that have often been connected to cosmopolitanism as music and art act as sonic and visual identifiers of human creative agency to communicate the complexities of lived experiences. 

The freedom and flexibility patrons are afforded at Tremor does not negate their political or environmental involvement, which are dimensions of identity that are acknowledged in festival spaces (Cummings 2014; Heise 2016). Attendees make use of Tremor’s recyclable cups sold for beverages like beer to limit single use glass or plastic bottles. They buy digital tickets instead of paper ones and flock to the event even though promotional materials are only offered online to limit printing. They utilize ride shares and buses offered for venues and activities outside of the city center. They ride their bikes and walk to other events on the island. 

Tremor’s organizers avoid late outdoor performances to limit noise pollution, and, most importantly, they limit the number of festival attendees each year to accommodate the small size of Ponta Delgada and the island, so as not to overextend resources and spaces that need to be used by locals. These values are not unique to Tremor but reflect the ecological awareness and environmentalism of the Azorean population, with many residents acknowledging the landscape and challenging traditional critiques of festival culture as a market and commodification-driven pursuit through their planning, execution, and participation in festival events (Richards 2007). 

These eco-sensitive practices from attendees and locals reflect a prioritization of global climate change, an attention towards the global. With this focus on the global, Neel Ahuja (2012) frames Heise’s critique of localized thinking (especially within American environmental activism) as a way to articulate how political and nationalist conflicts, the local, often supersede environmental issues on a planetary scale. Thus, sustainability and other environmental concerns should take precedence over nationalist conflicts as a global issue. 

“Sonic eco-cosmopolitanism,” a term I am actively defining and refining through and beyond this project, could be applied to Tremor as a reflection of the ideals and attitudes of festival organizers and attendees as they actively shape the spaces of the festival. This term acknowledges Heise’s planetary imagined communities as more fixed and mobile (in the forms of the Azorean residents and temporary collective of Tremor and other sustainable festivals on the island) and considers Ahuja’s perspective in the intentional curation of artists and events to reflect a collective sonic and ecologically minded gathering. 

This term reflects a shared humanity that goes beyond human social experience to consider nonhuman species connected in exchange and influence in the natural environment. It is a concept that recognizes sonic stimuli and sonic material outside of human-made sounds, whether they are intentionally musical or experimental. This sounding—from and of the natural environment and human interaction—is inherently tethered to notions of spatiality and temporality that are distinct to the festival spaces in and around the natural environment and are uttered or captured with a knowledge and respect for the non-humanness within each experience. 

As I continue to theorize the sonic application of eco-cosmopolitanism, I acknowledge that “the act of making music does not, by itself, make us more environmentally aware or active” because “music does not automatically set the world right, no matter how it is performed” (Pedelty 2012, 30). In the context of Tremor, this assessment is especially true since the performances are not inherently focused on environmentalism or sustainability. In bringing performers and audience members into these spaces with reverence, the regions become hallowed in powerful ways that can manifest in the adoption of more environmentally aware behaviors and attitudes, removing thoughts of an imagined nature-culture binary to elevate the plight of multiple species. Those in attendance also can begin to consider how their music-making and engagement fit into the natural soundscape while recognizing other sounds and entities present as being connected to their engagement and to their lives. Their enjoyment is potentially made richer by this acknowledgment of interconnectedness, furthering the pursuit of a more globally-minded, eco-touristic sonic engagement. 

References

Ahuja, Neel. 2012. “Species in a Planetary Frame: Eco-Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and The Cove.” Tamkang Review 42 (2): 13-32. 

Banrezes, Luis. 2022. Interview by Author. Audio recording. Ponta Delgada, April 6, 2022. 

Cummings, Joanne. 2014. “The Greening of the Music Festival Scene: An Exploration of Sustainable Practices and their Influence on Youth Culture.” In The Festivalization of Culture, edited by Andy Bennett, Jodie Taylor, and Ian Woodward, 169-188. Surrey, England: Ashgate. 

Heise, Ursula K. 2008. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford University Press. 

Heise, Ursula K. 2016. “The Environmental Humanities and the Futures of the Human.” New 

German Critique, no. 128: 21-31. 

Holt, Fabian. 2020. Everyone Loves Live Music: A Theory of Performance Institutions. Chicago: 

University of Chicago Press. 

Jarvis, Helen. 2014. “Transforming the Sexist City: Non-Sexist Communities of Practice.” Journal of Gender and Feminist Studies 3 (17): 7-27. 

Pedelty, Mark. 2012. Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 

Richards, Greg. 2007. “The Festivalization of Society and Socialization of Festivals? The Case of Catalunya.” In Cultural Tourism: Global and Local Perspectives, edited by Greg Richards, 257-280. Binghamton: Haworth Press. 

Shelemay, Kay Kaufman. 2011. “Musical Communities: Rethinking the Collective in Music.” 

Journal of the American Musicological Society 64 (2): 349-390. https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2011.64.2.349.  

Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.