Conference Agenda

This paper combines musicological and art-historical approaches to analyze Sun and Sea (Marina) (2019), an opera that construes international leisure culture as an allegory for humanity’s response to climate change. Conceived by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and composer Lina Lapelytė, the opera has toured across four continents since its English-language premiere for the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Art Biennale. Each performance requires the procurement of between twenty and thirty tons of sand to create an indoor beach that serves as the opera’s set. Also required are local performers who lounge around the faux seashore in pastel-colored swimsuits. Meanwhile, a traveling cast of thirteen vocalists sings a series of arias, songs, and choruses. Lapelytė’s largely keyboard-based electronic score consists of pulsed ostinati and modal chord progressions, each chord often arpeggiated in a manner reminiscent of minimalist composers such as Terry Riley or Philip Glass. Over these instrumental textures, the libretto interweaves stories of the personal and immediate—from sunscreen and overexposure to tourist travel and long-distance relationships—with ruminations on the universal and impending: signs of ocean pollution, warnings from climate scientists, and spring weather in the dead of winter. The hour-long production loops up to eight times. And audience members, who are free to come and go, look on from the balcony—altogether rendering the opera as a hybrid performance-installation that straddles contemporary art and performing arts conventions, discourses, and sites.

The paper thus considers Sun and Sea in a postwar genealogy of site-specific art as well as the history of opera. Emerging out of minimalism (the art movement, not the music one), site specificity strove to break with the autonomous character of the art object, initially, by exhibiting its embeddedness within the phenomenological experience of its surrounding space. For instance, Walter de Maria’s 1960s Earth Room installations consist of entire lofts filled with soil. Such art then turned toward the material and discursive implications of site, for example, in the work of Mark Dion who combined archaeology and marine biology methods in his Tate Thames Dig (1999), which displays the results of combed stretches of beach near the eponymous UK art gallery. The paper suggests that Sun and Sea connects to this trajectory, less in these works’ similarities to its sand-covered set, and more in an artistic lineage that opens up the notion of site, at an extreme, to a planetary scale—hence the paper’s title, “Gesamtkunstwerk Earth.” On the one hand, Sun and Sea can be said to epitomize contemporary art’s pervasive culture of globalization: its traveling, English-singing cast imposing a kind of universalizing sameness over local difference—with productions from Arkansas to Buenos Aires to Helsinki to Jerusalem to Sydney—in its fantasy of a global leisure culture that is both everywhere and nowhere. On the other, Sun and Sea suggests perhaps a further expansion of site to include the history of its forms, including the “total artwork.” Opera began as the invention of a group of humanists in late-sixteenth-century Florence in part as an attempt to revive ancient Greek culture amid the burgeoning world system of capitalism—a system today’s scientists associate with the origins of anthropogenic climate change.

Current Post Rock has been described as “a sonic mode of cartography” using long-form compositions that rely on texture and timbre to evoke richly-textured musical landscapes that balance “an atmosphere of uncertainty…[and] inexpressible fears” with “deliberate uneventfulness” and an underlying element of hauntology (Schott 2023, 150 and 157; Reynolds 1996, 28; Størvold 2018, 382). These images apply to a genre that functions almost exclusively without vocals––though the absent vocals do not suggest that the artists have nothing to say. In this presentation, I explore post-Rock artists’ implementation of field recordings and vocal samples to present critiques on societal concerns including climate change, political unrest, and the human condition. Drawing from ecomusicology and posthumanism, I propose that these disembodied samples intensify the music’s expansive, texture-dependent structures while generating a dire narrative that situates an unvoiced population within a looming post-Anthropocene society.
“We’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death…the flags are all dead at the top of their poles,” reads the sampled voice that begins Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s “Dead Flag Blues” (1997). Similar narratives appear across post-rock repertoire, excerpted from newscasts, (We Lost the Sea, “Challenger Pt. 1,” 2015), political speeches, (Astetal, “Reborn,” 2019), or police radio broadcasts (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, “Mladic,” 2012). The source material is varied, but the topic matter endures: our world is fragile and unravelling, and these vocal samples reflect acute crises that face the planet while creating distinct senses of space within the music (Rehding 2011, 401; Grimley 2006, 57). Using commentary from extramusical sources, post-rock bands address the distress of transforming environments (Albrecht 2005, 44–59) while allowing their music to position the voice in a sonic world that is littered with the artificial noise of feedback, harsh distortion, and cavernous reverb that destabilize natural sonic artifacts (Zwintscher 2019, 16). Using bleak, disembodied samples and music that portrays unexpressed fear, post-rock artists express the human circumstance as we deal with the consequences of the Anthropocene where “the starting point for every tune is that everything is fucked” (Rubsam 2014).

Selected References:
Grimley, Daniel. 2006. Grieg: Music, Landscape, and Norwegian Identity. Rochester: Woodbridge Publishers.
Rehding, Alexander. 2011. “Ecomusicology between Apocalypse and Nostalgia.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 64, 2: 409–14.
Reynolds, Simon. 1996. “The Ambient Pool.” The Wire 123: 28–33.
Rubsam, Rob. 2014. “The Rumpus Interview with Ephrim Menuck.” The Rumpus.
https://therumpus.net/2014/04/01/the-rumpus-interview-with-efrim-menuck/. Accessed 2/10/24.
Schott, Gareth. 2023. “The Sonically Evoked Spaces of Post-Rock,” in Coastal Environments in
Popular Song. Edited by Glenn Fosbraey. New York: Routledge: 150–71.
Størvold, Tore. 2018. “Sigur Rós: Reception, Borealism, and Musical Style.” Popular Music 37, 3: 371–91.
Zwintscher, Aaron. 2019. Noise Thinks the Anthropocene: An Experiment in Noise Poetics. Santa Barbara: Punctum Books.

Discography:
Astetal. 2019. Veliger.1616561 Records DK.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor. 2012. Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! Constellation Records.
–––. 1997. F# A#(Infinity). Kranky Records.
We Lost the Sea. 2015. Departure Songs. Bird’s Robe Records.

With its expansive coastline, dramatic sea cliffs, and lively bohemian scenes, California seduced numerous early twentieth century artists and other assorted outsiders from across the US, promising respite from the trappings of modern life and mainstream societal norms. Whereas the twentieth century “California myth” figures prominently in American cultural imaginings, less known is the intricate social web connecting its historically famous composers (such as John Cage and Henry Cowell) and the significant labor of women whose activities largely formed this network of avant-garde musical scenes. A possible reason for the under-recognition of this creative network in broader music historical discourses could be what philosopher Christine Battersby has described in her book, Gender and Genius, as a narrative that extracts singular actors (most often male) from the supportive labor of their communities. In fact, much of the California-based musicological scholarship hinges on both Cage and Cowell’s public images as self-made musical entrepreneurs who emerged from the purportedly rugged, near-isolation of the West Coast to establish careers in New York.

In response to historiographic approaches that tend to focus on urban-dense areas and their most famous individual creators, I examine the small, yet radical musical life of the Carmel-by-the-Sea and Dunite communities of the 1920s and 1930s. Drawing from first-hand accounts, correspondences, concert ephemera, and the now-defunct publications of these two communities, The Carmelite and Dune Forum, I present the story of a tightly connected musical life on the central coast led by women, who cultivated an avant-garde scene and strategically posited Ultra-Modernism as the musical language of California coastal identity. These women include publisher and cultural critic Pauline Schindler (1893-1977) and musical auteurs Dene Denny (1885-1959) and Hazel Watrous (1888-1954). By adopting the lens of “place,” I reveal the critical, yet frequently neglected, scene-building work historically undertaken by women. Through this lens, we discover how such crucial activities—hosting, organizing, artistic planning, concert management and promotion—held together intricate webs of artistic and social connection.