From the Garden to the Sea: Sonic Worlds of Race and Ecology
Chair(s): Rachel Mundy (Rutgers University - Newark)
Philosophers, geologists, and environmental historians have stressed the necessity to engage with the interconnected realities of fighting for racial justice and environmental justice (Taiwo 2022, Yusoff 2018). Indeed, musicologists are invested in these dynamics, albeit approaching questions of identity and environmentality from separate scholarly terrains. Recent years have seen increasing attention to the complexities of race, difference, and indigeneity as brought to bear on musical encounter. Scholars have also interrogated how music and sound studies figure in the face of environmental crisis, spurring debates around the utility of a sub/interdiscipline such as “ecomusicology,” which has often set its analytical lens at the intersection of “music, culture, and nature” (Allen 2013). Our panel is motivated by calls to reevaluate the racial and colonial ontologies that underpin binaries between nature and culture (Ochoa Gautier 2014, McMurray 2021). We do so by attuning to the auralities produced by ongoing environmental change, and the ensuing epistemological shifts amidst climate crisis and racial reckoning.
Working toward both an anti-racist and livable Earthly future requires alternatives to capitalist systems of extraction that directly contribute to present-day experiences of the world. In this panel, we bring ideas of ecological entanglement, materiality, and spirituality into this (eco)musicological conversation, especially those theorized by Black and Indigenous folks. This panel explores how music figures in cultivating a deeper awareness of intersections among always-already multiracial and multispecies environments. Across all three papers, we explore how music and sound shape communal experiences of more-than-human environments. The first paper is oriented around improvisation as a mode of exploring porous notions of intimacy in outdoor garden concerts. The second paper considers how Blackness resonates with planthood, listening for alternative understandings of racial-species identifications. The third paper considers how Haitian Vodou uses song devoted to more-than-human animals to record ecological history. By prioritizing non-extractive relationships through intimate collaboration, this panel rethinks how music shapes perceptions of “natural” spaces, and how more-than-human experiences shape what it means to be music-makers.
Presentations of the Symposium
“All Green Plants Swing”: Sonic Porosity in the Improvised Garden
Elizabeth Frickey
New York University
Formally founded in 1996 by Patricia Nicholson, Arts for Art (AFA) is, per their website, a New York-based nonprofit organization dedicated to the “promotion and advancement of FreeJazz -- an African American indigenous art form in which improvisation is principle.” The organization is perhaps best known for their flagship annual Vision Festival, one of the longest continually running experimental music festivals in New York City. However, AFA has also emphasized their musical and political mission through the development of other public outreach and educational programs, including their annual InGardens concert series: a program of free concerts held from September to October in a variety of Lower East Side community gardens. These concerts feature a panorama of the city’s most prolific improvisers, generating a heterophonous cacophony of collective free improvisation, perhaps contradictory to conventional, colonially-derived expectations of the garden as a “silent refuge.” However, by immersing oneself into the holistic soundscape, it becomes possible to hear the garden not merely as a passive backdrop to the performance, but itself an active contributor to the collective improvisation.
In this paper, I consider the implications of constitutive human and more-than-human musical improvisation within the context of the AFA InGardens concert series. Throughout this paper, I use the framework of porosity in order to examine the layers of entanglement present in this series, and free jazz more broadly. Porosity carries with it connotations of intimacy, of blurred boundaries. It questions the solidity of the Lockean, liberal humanist subject, acknowledging marginalized cosmologies of self. Drawing upon the musical-philosophical theories of the longtime AFA-affiliate bassist William Parker amongst other Black feminist scholars such as Tiffany Lethabo King, Amber Musser, and Jayna Brown, I critically examine this confluence of human-centered performance and Black ecological intimacies. I explore the landscape of the InGardens series through the lens of Parker’s music-theoretical “Tone World”: a uniquely embodied form of utopian, and even fugitive, sonic porosity grounded in a lifetime of botanical fascination (Parker 2007, Moten 2003). As such, I present the community garden environment here, itself a collectively improvised production, as not a site of silence, but radical sonic relationality.
“Please Hold Me in the Green”: Blackness, Planthood, and Critical Botanical Listening
Cana F. McGhee
Harvard University
As bioacoustics researchers grapple with how plants cannot conform to human forms of noisier sonic practice (Blande and Glinwood 2016, Gagliano 2018), plants continue to be nudged into realms of audibility. Often, this sounds like electrochemical signals being translated via bio-sonification into ambient melodies, which composers have recently used to argue for music as bridging species divides in a time of environmental crisis. Acknowledging the anthropocentrism of translating plant experiences into human musical language, this paper asserts that audible human-plant relations illuminate new ways of accounting for musicking as relationality. I demonstrate how plants foster the development of a “critical listening positionality” (Robinson 2020) that encourages us to interrogate the identities we bring into musical experiences, especially with those identified as nonhuman, and to probe the limits of musicological discourse and meaning.
To do so, this paper focuses on how planthood becomes entangled with Black sonic practice and claims to racial identity. I situate this conversation within ongoing posthumanist critiques oriented around humanness within a spectrum of animality, wherein scholars expose how white heteropatriarchal structures dictate how one’s perceived proximity to nonhuman animals determines one’s standing in human categorizations of race, class, and gender (Jackson 2020, McKittrick 2015). By highlighting performers who explicitly link their Black identity with botanical life, I listen for their alternative formations of Humanism at work. I begin with Christopher Griffin, whose online presence as @plantkween whimsically transgresses boundaries between species, ability, and gender. As a very public figure in the online plantcare movement, @plantkween consciously uses speech, song, and dance to transform plantcare into a lively performance of life itself. I also discuss multidisciplinary artist JJJJJerome Ellis, who plays with sound in their poetry and performances to voice multispecies histories of diaspora, movement, and categorization. Griffin and Ellis find kinship with botanical life using an acoustic form of critical fabulation (Hartman 2019) that seeks out subterranean, under-examined histories of plants and humans in community. This reclamatory practice asks us listeners to consider: Whose Humanness is at stake? What environments are we making through creative acts? And how are we to listen with such more-than-human collectives?
The Mermaid and the Whale: The Ecological Memory and Knowledge of Haitian Vodou Songs
Christelle Jasmin
Rutgers University - Newark
Haitian Vodou is a religious system that engages nature, community resistance, and the middle passage violences. Its musical traditions often serve as warnings or calls to action concerning Haiti’s fragile ecosystems. This paper examines four Haitian Vodou prayer songs documented by Brooklyn Mambo Mama Lola dedicated to the closely linked lwa’s La Sirène (the mermaid), and La Balenn (the whale), to demonstrate how vodou uses music and sound to name, engage, and document environmental violence. La Sirène and La Balenn embody different yet interconnected dimensions of the ocean’s power—La Sirène governs the ever-shifting threshold between land and sea, while La Balenn, dwelling in the ocean’s depths, symbolizes ancestral memory and the unseen forces shaping marine ecosystems. Together, they preside over the souls of those lost in the Middle Passage, transforming the ocean into both a sacred archive of history and a site of ongoing environmental reckoning.
Drawing on the ecological metaphysics of Vodou, visible and invisible worlds remain in constant dialogue, I analyze how these songs encode what Rebecca Dirksen terms traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) systems and act as sonic mediations on environmental crises. Songs dedicated to La Sirène and La Balenn voice concerns about oceanic degradation, overfishing, and the violence of colonial and neoliberal extractivism. Vodou’s practitioners understand Haiti’s environmental struggles as not only material crises but also spiritual disruptions that sever the sacred relationship between people, land, and water.
Through the Vodou concept of konesans (spiritual knowledge), these songs function as both acts of ecological mourning and sites of resistance, preserving ancestral wisdom while guiding practitioners in navigating environmental change. By invoking La Sirène and La Balenn, Vodou practitioners reaffirm the sanctity of Haiti’s waters, the sanctity of water to the black diaspora more broadly as a vehicle of life and freedom-making, and assert alternative modes of environmental engagement—one rooted in reverence for the past, reciprocity, and healing. Through lyrical analysis and ethnographic insights, this paper explores how Vodou’s ecological commitments offer a powerful framework for understanding and resisting environmental violence, situating music as a crucial tool in Haiti’s ongoing struggle for ecological justice.
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