Conference Agenda

Young songbirds go through intensive training to learn their song, which ultimately shapes their sonic identity and helps them find a mate. Recent studies of zebra finches, notably at UCLA, Cornell, and MIT, have connected the neural circuitry governing songbirds’ vocalizations with speech-language pathology in children, discovering similar molecular networks crucial for speech formation in humans. Meanwhile, artists of all disciplines continue the longstanding legacy of evoking birdsong for its audible and atmospheric qualities. I suggest that sound art installations, with their immersive and participatory nature, offer ideal environments for avian-human encounters that expand—beyond the pathological or the aesthetic—into a relational realm, in which participants become empathetically attuned to song’s critical role in birds’ self-construction and species survival.

I begin my survey by setting up the avian sonic ecology. By learning, perfecting, and eventually teaching their song, a songbird constructs not only their own “sonic image” but also their own and their generation’s future. I then showcase Catherine Clover’s bird-themed soundwalk in the 2016 event series “Points of Listening,” Jana Winderen’s bird-infused ambisonic sound installation “Ultrafield” in MoMA’s 2013 “Soundings” exhibition, and Christina Kubisch’s immersive multi-channel sound installation “La Serra” from 2017 onwards. In tandem with these bird-themed installations, I explore the continuing studies of birdsong models and their promising implications for speech-language pathology. Ultimately, in joining issues of human speech development to the urgency of songbirds’ sonic quest for survival, I contribute to a larger project of attuning to avian subjectivity within trans-species explorations in sound studies.

This paper hears the pastoral in music through the filter of environmental ideology: projects of Nature thinking where the production of knowledge and order provides the basis for action within the political commons. My case study is a 1927 performance of the operetta The Wild Rose (1915) in the small Hudson Valley village of Millbrook, NY. The operetta’s depiction of its central protagonist, Rose McCloud, as a true “country” woman, imbued with personal beauty and moral authenticity, underlines its thesis that pastoral life is an antidote for the ills of the city. Performing Wild Rose in an area that has often been defined in opposition and contrast with New York City and lauded for its natural beauty seems to confirm the logic of the Hudson Valley as pastoral haven.

I analyze Wild Rose through acoustic community, in which encounters between performers and audiences define the landscape and the people who inhabit it. I highlight acoustic community’s multiplicity and dynamism. For Millbrook’s Italian immigrant community, Wild Rose afforded a racial crossing-over that used the pastoral as one avenue by which Italian-Americans were afforded entry to white society over the course of the twentieth century. In its use of an archetypal country-city narrative, Wild Rose also poses questions about environmental ideology’s textual representations and the seeming gaps with lived reality these can pose. For some Millbrook residents, Wild Rose may have rung true; for others, particularly those with first-hand experience of the travails of rural agrarian life, the idea of non-human nature as “relief / from every sordid care and grief,” may have resonated oddly.

Hearing these multiple configurations of Hudson Valley landscape as they relate to knowledge and order makes environmental ideology audible, particularizing and historicizing the uses of hegemonic power. Music creates landscape, narrates histories within it, and contests and controls access and presence. Hearing dynamic and overlapping communities within the political commons is also a chance to hear commonality through the collective experience of affective logics. Listening to soundings of nature makes audible both points of schism and, perhaps, the foundation for common ontologies in a polarized society.

One of the most important sites for musical performance and musicological thought in the late Ottoman Empire was the Mevlevihane, or dervish lodge of the Mevlevi Sufi order, in the district of Yenikapı, Istanbul. Built in the late 1500s, the lodge played an important role in the musical and cultural life of the Ottoman capital, with many key composers, performers, poets and political leaders affiliated with it. One of those musical figures was Abdülbaki Nasır Dede (1765-1821), who rose to the position of chief ney (reed flute) player before becoming the sheikh of the lodge in 1804. In histories of Ottoman music, he is particularly well-known for his innovative treatises on music theory (Tedkīk u Tahkīk) and on music notation (Tahrīriyye), which offer important insights into questions of mode, rhythmic cycles, and the possibilities of notating Ottoman classical music through an alphabetic (that is, abjad-based) system. In this talk, I also consider his musicological and sonic contributions to Defter-i Dervīşān (Register of Dervishes), a chronicle of the lodge running intermittently from the late 1700s to the dissolution of Sufi orders in the early Turkish Republic in 1925. This register offers a rich combination of music history (including ceremonies featuring music and other sonic practices such as sacred recitation) as well as a striking set of ecological notes about floods, earthquakes and other major environmental issues. Taken altogether, this corpus of texts by Abdülbaki Nasır Dede (as well as some of his fellow sheikhs at Yenikapı) suggests a unique set of practices emerging at this Mevlevihane that explore the possibilities of writing sound through different—and often experimental—uses of alphabetic (again, abjadic) inscription. Drawing upon and also critiquing the limitations of media archaeological approaches to writing, such as Friedrich Kittler’s notion of a (Eurocentric) “discourse network” (or Aufschreibesystem) around 1800 and Sybille Krämer’s notion of writing as a cultural technique (2003), I argue that the Yenikapı Mevlevihane’s sonic writing techniques constitute a unique and significant media ecology in modernity that sits literally just within Europe (in western Istanbul) while also challenging Eurocentric presumptions in writing music and media histories around 1800.