Despite current scholarly attention to promise of a “multispecies ethnomusicology” (Silvers 2020), the concept of the biological “species” continues to be taken for granted within music studies. Whether through the species concept’s biologically essentialist and taxonomically exclusionary overtones, its prioritization of settler-scientific knowledge practices, or its implicit emphasis on collective life as object of care and conservation at the expense of the individual animal, invocations of “species” prematurely resolve urgent ethical, political, and existential issues posed by the advent of the Anthropocene. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork at the Gibbon Conservation Center, an animal facility in Southern California devoted to caring for gibbons (endangered, arboreal apes endemic to the shrinking rainforests of Southeast Asia who maintain their monogamous pair-bonds through the daily bouts of coordinated vocalization), I discuss conservationist listening practices and analyze recordings of the Center’s multispecies soundscape to argue that both captive gibbons and the humans who care for them are engaged in auditory strategies that complicate and resist endangered species conservation’s biopolitical emphasis on the species as unit of care and attention (e.g., Chrulew 2011; Parrenas 2018). Instead, those actors invested in maintaining sonic and social continuities make audible the ontological unruliness of the species concept and reframe it as a more-than-human ethical conundrum whose various attempts at resolution perpetually (re)configure bodies, concepts, technologies, and scales. Taking advantage of the meeting’s virtual format, this presentation will feature immersive ethnographic recordings made in an experimental 360-degree, omni-binaural format. The use of headphones is recommended but not required.

An iconic collaboration penned for Animal Liberation, the 1987 PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) compilation album, Lene Lovich and Nina Hagen’s “Don’t Kill the Animals” raised global awareness about animal rights, and also secured the divas’ prominent visibility as forward thinking and eccentric mainstream “avant-pop” artists. Unapologetically wacky and over the top, Lovich and Hagen’s performance of “Don’t Kill the Animals” captures the spirit of “new wave,” a wildly heterogeneous and colorful genre that arose out of mid-to-late 1970s punk rock and underground scenes, characterized by its campy garb, gender subversion, and insatiably frenetic energy. While Theo Cateforis’ influential study, Are We Not New Wave? (2011) contextualizes the movement in terms of a pervasive affect of “nervousness” arising in response to Cold War anxieties, there has yet to be a substantial exploration of the feminist meanings carried by the genre. In this presentation, I will move to interpret Lovich and Hagen’s new wave animal rights protest song as exemplifying an ecofeminist, new wave energy that harnesses the Zoe force — what posthumanist philosopher Rosi Braidotti theorizes as an all-encompassing life force resistant to the anthropocentric destruction of the planet. Unmoored from harmful structures of power and hierarchical, speciesist identifications, Zoe-powered feminists are nomadic, global subjects in motion. Following Braidotti, this presentation will present a hermeneutic analysis of Lovich and Hagen’s new wave eco-feminist romp, attending to the performative strategies with which they mobilize a new wave, Zoe-powered resistance to speciesism and late capitalist patriarchy.

This paper broadly examines the intersections between animal rights activism and ethnomusicology. I am specifically interested in music’s—and by extension, music scholarship’s—utility in advocating for non-human animals. I argue that ethnomusicologists are uniquely positioned to engage with animal rights through ethnographic research of activist music scenes and through frameworks developed by zoömusicology and related subdisciplines. I posit that animal activism is relevant to ethnomusicology’s discursive engagement with decoloniality; there is a strong relationship between Western European colonial projects—which ethnomusicology ostensibly aims to reject and dismantle—and animal industries. Many animal activists, particularly those in the hardcore punk scene I highlight in this paper, see their fight for animal liberation as part of a larger critique of global capitalism. I first argue that a lack of ethnographic work on animal rights activist music scenes has contributed to a misunderstanding of them; as such, I believe that ethnomusicologists can amplify the voices of such activists through ethnography. I then turn to an examination of discourses in zoömusicology to show how ethnomusicologists may contribute to these discourses and more specifically align their goals with animal activism. Finally, I tie these threads together with a consideration of applied ethnomusicology and its use as a framework for participating in animal activism inside and outside of the academy.