Conference Agenda

Organized by the AMS Ecomusicology Study Group

The AMS Ecomusicology Study Group presents research dealing with music, sound, and the making of eco-cultures from the past, present, and future. Our panel consists of five papers (20min with Q&A each) followed by a moderated roundtable. The speakers include:

• Kirsten Barker (University of Illinois) - “More than Topography and Landforms: Musical Depictions of Southern Utah’s Wilderness"

• Megan Murph (University of Missouri) - "Surface Reflections: Hearing the Eco-History of Town Branch in Lexington, KY"

• Dimitris Gkoulimaris (University of Texas at Austin) - "The Re-Purposing of Folk Culture in the Struggle Against Resource Extractivism in Contemporary Greece"

• Jamie Meyers-Riczu (University of Alberta) - “Goin’ to the Big Oil Show: Celebrating Oil in Song"

• Alex Rehding (Harvard University) - "A Playlist for the Anthropocene: Elements of a Music-Ecological Aesthetics"

These scholars use a variety of methodologies (primary source document analysis, ethnographic narratives, cultural criticism, and aesthetic activism) to not only enrich our understanding of conceptualized space and eco-cultures, but also ecomusicology in the broadest sense.

Landscapes have served as inspiration for composers across time. For instance, southern Utah’s red rocks and deserts have affected Olivier Messiaen, John Duffy, Michael S. Horwood, Nico Muhly, and others over the past fifty years. As Denise Von Glahn demonstrates in her book The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape, considering music inspired by specific places in relation to the cultural context surrounding that location can be revealing. This is especially true of Western art music based on southern Utah’s wilderness spaces, where consideration of culture needs to include ecology due to the prominence of the region’s protected areas and how they are impacted by drought and water overuse. My paper establishes the region as a compelling musical subject because of how it embodies the accumulated connotations of “wilderness,” which includes an emphasis on “pristine” and “sublime” spaces perceived as devoid of human influence or inhabitants. In the case of southern Utah, these wilderness ideals do not take into account the dispossession of the Indigenous peoples by early Mormon settlers or the effects of the creation of certain land protections. With Duffy’s Symphony No. 1: Utah (1989) and Horwood’s National Park Suite (1991) as case studies, I use literature on wilderness and conservation to argue that compositions inspired by southern Utah reflect and explicate the problematic aspects of the “wilderness” myth and prevailing narratives about the region in ways that reinforce the representations of the place and its ecology idealized and exploited by Western
settlers.

Bill Fontana’s Surface Reflections (2012) is a sound sculpture nestled in a walkway between the Fifth Third Bank and a parking garage in downtown Lexington, KY. Amplifiers along the walkway project hidden sounds of the local Town Branch, a tributary of the Kentucky River and on whose banks the city was founded in 1775. Due to decades of eco-crisis, namely mass flooding and cholera outbreaks, the branch has been confined in a barred brick vault underground since 1934. Until recently, few downtown pedestrians were aware that a water system flowed beneath their feet, and since, the city has made plans to uncover parts for the public. Fontana included a video component to his work that captures the “geological time” sounds of the branch reflecting off the “mechanical time” sounds of the Old Courthouse bell, in Cheapside Pavilion. This paper will consider the deeper meanings of Surface Reflection’s location across from Cheapside Pavilion, originally known as the Cheapside Auction Block, where thousands of people of color were bought and sold as slaves during the 19 th century. Through newspaper articles and conversations with local activists and stakeholders, it will also consider how the work’s sounds co-exist with “Take Back Cheapside,” a campaign that negotiated to have a confederate statue removed from the area in 2017. This study addresses how the environmental, sonic, and circumstantial implications of Surface Reflections not only cause the listener to question time and where the sounds are originating but also the ecological and political history of Lexington.

In the interdisciplinary realm of ecocriticism, a growing number of scholars are contemplating the renewables industries not as a clean move toward a sustainable future, but rather as a continuation of the extractive logics of capitalism. A similar mentality underpins the struggle against resource extractivism in contemporary Greece, wherein grassroots activists vehemently oppose diverse forms of extraction, including hydrocarbon exploration, wind farm construction, and gold mining. In this light, the present study aims to enhance scholarly understanding of the use of expressive culture within eco-political activism, through an examination of how anti-extractivist protestors make use of orally transmitted forms of poetry, music, and dance. In an example of détournement (“rerouting,” “hijacking”), Greek activists are re-purposing widely recognizable traditional forms, a practice which not only serves the movement’s popular appeal, but also reflects a philosophical position regarding the significance of the commons as non-exclusive property, or even as non-property. I will illustrate this argument through a hybrid ethnography of the anti-extractivist movement, blending a survey of online content found on activist social media profiles and open-ended interviews with the activists themselves. This paper will focus on two case studies: the women’s collective “Vrysoules,” who perform the iconic Dance of Zalongo to protest hydrocarbon exploration in the Pindus mountains of Epirus; and the use of mantinádhes (improvised rhyming couplets) in Crete, whereby anti-oil and anti-windfarm activists on Greece’s largest island wittily critique neoliberal policy and express their solidarity with eco-activist struggles across the country.

The community of Devon, Alberta, once hailed as “Canada’s model town” (Argyle 1952), developed shortly after the discovery of oil at the nearby Leduc No. 1 wellsite in 1947. The event ignited Alberta’s oil boom, irrevocably changing the province’s economy and culture. The subsequent influx of oilfield workers led the Imperial Oil company to purchase land north of the wellsite to build accommodations. Within three years, Devon was incorporated as a town. Similar to other single-industry boom towns (Bowles 1982), Devon’s identity was linked with resource extraction. To celebrate its economic abundance, Devon hosted Oil Shows throughout the early 1950s. Although largely forgotten, these multi-day events included a midway, sporting competitions, and musical productions. The Devon Oil Shows provide a case study for how popular entertainments participate in the cultures of oil extraction by trumpeting the new wealth made possible by that extraction while ignoring concerns of its consequences. Little research exists that explores the role these Oil Shows played in shaping oil boosterism in the early years of Alberta’s economic transformation. To fill this gap, I will examine archival songs and paraphernalia from the Digital Museums Canada and the Walder G.W. White Sheet Music Collection that valorize Devon’s oil industry. My analysis draws on discourses in petrocultures (Wilson et al. 2017) to critique the environment created by the oil industry and the resulting resistance to ecological perspectives. Through this framework, I will address the tension between local celebrations of oil extraction and the global ecological crisis we currently face.

As the Working Group on the Anthropocene closes in on defining the new geological epoch, with 1945 as the favored starting point, one point becomes ever more obvious: the Anthropocene is as much about the past as it is about the future. When framed as an issue of temporality, music emerges as a largely untapped resource that has a tremendous contribution to make in our quest to understand the time spans of the Anthropocene. The outline of an activist aesthetics of music that I offer here draws lessons from a wide range of recent ecological writings. It is addressed primarily – though not exclusively – to listeners in the Global North, who benefited the most from the combined forces of industrialization and colonization that have historically contributed the most to climate change, and who bear a particular political and historical responsibility to become agents of climate justice. Music can help us meet the challenge of being “good ancestors” (Kznaric 2021) to future generations, specifically to decolonize the future. It is not necessary – indeed, not even desirable – for such music to be explicitly concerned with ecological issues: as Bould 2021 argues for literature and films, many musics have an “Anthropocene Unconscious” that can be harnessed in the struggle for our planet. Using a range of examples from diverse musical genres, from Pharrell to Jem Finer, I explore how music(s) may help us tackle the ecological and temporal challenges of the Anthropocene.