Animal Rights and the Sound Commons

Animal Rights Demonstration

     I have argued in favor of a sound commons for all living beings, not just humans. All species, I claim, ought to be able to exist and communicate in their acoustic niches. On what basis might I make such a claim? Is it necessary in this case to claim that animals have rights? And if so, of what kind?
    I have observed three main lines of argument in favor of animal rights. One, which is many centuries old and is generally accepted in the West, is the argument that because animals have feelings and can suffer pain, they must not be treated cruelly. Indeed, in Europe and North America laws against animal cruelty have been enforced since the 17th century. The second line of argument makes a more radical claim, that animals (at least, the higher ones) are like human beings in that they can think, learn, feel joy as well as pain, and act altruistically as well as selfishly. Therefore, the argument runs, like humans, they possess natural rights to be able to live their lives to the fullest extent possible. This more radical argument gained momentum in the past forty years or so, as the environmental movement has embraced “wildness,” and animal rights groups have formed to advocate on their behalf. A third argument claims that animals should be granted rights because the consequences of doing so are beneficial to all living creatures, including human beings.

Animal cooperation

     Of course, many people oppose extending rights to animals. Some of these arguments are familiar: animals are dangerous to human beings; humans need to use animals for food and medical experiments, and thus our need for animals trumps any rights they may have; or domestic animals are property and property cannot possess rights. Some philosophers argue that animals cannot possess natural rights because they lack moral agency. “Rights and liberty are political concepts applicable to human beings because human beings are moral agents [who act in a] sphere of moral jurisdiction where their authority to act is respected and protected so it is they, not intruders, who govern themselves and either succeed or fail in their moral tasks. . . No animal rights theorist proposes that animals be tried for crimes and blamed for moral wrongs.” (Tibor R. Machan, “Do Animals Have Rights?” Public Affairs Quarterly, Vol. 5, no. 2, April 1991, pp. 163-4). Yet, humans sometimes punish domestic animals when they misbehave, as if they did know right from wrong. And some scientists have questioned the assumption that animals lack moral agency, citing instances of animal altruism and cooperation as evidence that animals can understand the difference between right and wrong, and therefore they are moral beings and have natural rights.
    Another argument against natural rights for animals is made on the grounds that rights carry duties or obligations. A tenant in an apartment has certain legal rights. One of these is the right to reasonable privacy; the landlord must not invade that privacy without due notice and cause. A tenant also has certain duties to the landlord, such as treating the apartment with care and keeping it in good condition. However, the tenant has the right to working heat, plumbing, and so forth, while the landlord has the duty to provide it. Rights and duties are reciprocal in this way. Others have a duty not to interfere unreasonably with my right to liberty, and I have a similar duty not to interfere with theirs. Rights cannot function without reciprocal duties, but the reciprocity also involves an ethical dimension presumed to be absent in non-humans.
    Indeed, even some of Locke’s near-contemporaries thought that the natural rights argument was weak, and that other arguments, based not on unprovable assumptions about inherent rights but, rather, based on favorable (and testable) consequences if rights were granted, made a stronger case. These instrumental arguments included utilitarianism, pragmatism, and so forth. The cultural equity argument, for example, turns not only on the idea of natural (cultural) rights but also instrumentality in those instances when it is argued that cultural diversity represents a kind of bank of various distinct knowledges and practices, all of which contribute (and may in the future contribute) to humankind. The usual example is cultural knowledge of medicinal plants; however, there are many other cultural adaptations. The argument for cultural diversity is similar in this sense to the biodiversity argument against species extinction and is partly derived from it.
    It does not seem to me to be necessary to grant full natural rights to animals in order to make a case for a sound commons for all living beings. One does not need to consider moral agency, or rights and duties. It is sufficient to grant animals a right to life. Although the argument in favor of biodiversity is an instrumentalist argument, while the animal rights argument is based on premise and deduction, both agree that animals must live; and if they must live, then they must do the things that enable them to live: eat, reproduce, and so forth. And one of the things animals must do in order to keep themselves alive is communicate with one another—with potential and actual mates; with members of their own species; and with predators.
     Animals communicate in several ways, but the most frequent are through sight, smell, and sound. Everyone has observed dogs marking territory with their scents, or cats puffing up their fur and making themselves look bigger to a potential enemy. And everyone has heard birds singing and other animals communicating through sound. But noise pollution does not affect humans only, as our example with the helicopters, caribou, and Innu people showed. Increasingly we are learning that noise interferes with animal communication generally, and diminishes animal capacity for survival. Animal communication through sound (zoosemiotics) is an interdisciplinary science that has come into its own in the last helf-century. We now know far more about animal communication than we did in the past. I will be exploring some of this knowledge concerning zoosemiotics and its implications for music, sound, and sustainability in future blog entries.

Classical music as an endangered ecosystem

Henry Doktorski performs with philharmonic orchestra

     I thought it would be fitting to start off the new year with an old topic. I’ve been reading about animal communication (zoosemiotics) and animal rights lately, with a view to filling out certain parts of my argument in favor of a sound commons for all living beings; but I wanted to finish up the ecosystem as descriptor thread, looking again at business ecosystems, with some more attention to James F. Moore’s notions of innovation, cooperation, and co-evolution as the new paradigm for successful business corporations. One argument for animal rights extends the principles of human rights to all animals; and of course the argument for cultural equity extends these rights to all cultures, as I’ve mentioned in earlier entries when discussing the benefits of cultural diversity (again, modeled on biodiversity). The idea of the acoustic niche combined with cultural equity suggests that in the social world all music cultures have inherent rights to survive. I’ve raised the issue before, also, about the periodic sounding of the death-knell for classical music. These days it’s hard to read about classical music without coming across an essay nostalgic for the good old days when people went to symphony and bought recordings and made sure their children had music lessons and when everyone knew that classical music was the best music in the world. But today, these essayists opine, classical music has fallen on hard times: it’s endangered, it’s lost most of its audience, kids don’t want to take piano lessons any more, music education is fast disappearing from the schools, and unless we do something about it, classical music won’t survive.
    Classical music is one of several case studies in music and sustainability. When the rhetoric of the periodic death-knells uses words like “endangered,” it’s helpful to think of the classical music culture as an ecosystem. Picking up the thread from the previous blog entry, this is another instance of ecosystem as descriptor. The classical music culture consists of composers and performers, amateur and professional; it includes music educators and music schools (conservatories, music in K-12 education, music in the colleges and universities, courses and teachers and students and all the music performance ensembles); it includes music institutions such as symphony orchestras and string quartets, early music ensembles, opera companies and town bands, as well as patrons (whether private donors, corporations, or government funded organizations such as arts councils); and of course it includes the listeners who get their music and the places where they find it, in concerts and tours, media products including recordings, television and film, advertising, various venues where music is performed and heard, as well as distribution channels such as the Internet. Music is the central idea, activity, and product; it is the energy that flows through the classical music ecosystem, as through all worlds of music.
    When back in 1984 I wrote that music cultures behaved as ecosystems, what I had in mind was that they could be studied as complex systems much in the same way that ecologists were studying ecosystems: in terms of adaptation, musical energy flowing through the system, and cycles of birth, growth, decay, and rebirth or revival. Most ethnomusicologists then (myself included) were still bound to the culture area idea, borrowed from anthropology, thinking of musics as characteristic sound structures, activities and ideas about music attached to peoples (usually regional, ethnic and/or occupational groups) living in particular places. In this way, ethnomusicologists could conceive of Native America, let us say, as a whole music culture area, and also as the differing music cultures of several indigenous tribal groups, such as Kiowa or Zuni or Passamaquoddy. Beyond description and comparison, the question was why was this people’s music over here as it was, and different from that people’s music over there.
       But younger ethnomusicologists were challenging the usefulness of the notion that each cultural group had its own characteristic music. If instead of looking at music as process, the way ethnomusicologists liked to do, we started looking at the way people actually consumed music as product, then it was apparent that music moved as easily from one group to another in the marketplace as any other product--more easily than most. Soon, ethnomusicologists were studying popular musics and the music industry, all over the world—including so-called world music, an industry marketing category. In a globalizing world, it seemed a little musty to concentrate on the older, traditional layer of music in a given culture when most people were involved with newer, popular musics, marketed as recordings, much (but not all) of it made in the West--a situation that has changed with the rise of indigenous popular music production throughout the world.
    Studying the music industry in this way suggests another use for ecology, the business ecosystem, which as I wrote in my last blog entry is a concept pioneered by James F. Moore. Although the people involved with classical music in the West take great pains to distinguish it from popular music, and although they are often reluctant to view it as a business—seeing it instead as art rather than commerce, its purpose enlightenment and pleasure rather than profit—in many ways it functions as an industry. What happens when we think of it it as a business ecosystem in Moore’s sense of the term?
    Central to Moore’s idea of a business ecosystem is the corporation. Although the classical music ecosystem has its corporations (music publishers, private colleges and universities, media companies, etc.) it is useful to conceive not only of business corporations but also cultural institutions run increasingly as businesses, ones that compete and cooperate, and that adapt and co-evolve (or not). In his most recent essay on the topic, Moore writes that “the term 'business ecosystem' and its plural, 'business ecosystems,' refer to intentional communities of economic actors whose individual business activities share in some large measure the fate of the whole community. . . . [Corporations] must dialogue closely with customers,” Moore continues, “so that what is created is what the customer wants and is willing to pay for. Mastering these challenges, of what might be called 'distributed creativity,' is the aim of the ecosystem organizational form. The conventional hierarchical firm does not effectively address the breadth and importance of inter-firm relationships. The unaided market is not able to achieve inter-firm coordination sufficient to justify players aligning their dreams, plans, and product road maps" ("Business Ecosystems and the View from the Firm," The Antitrust Bulletin, Vol. 51, no. 1, Spring 2006, pp. 33-34).
    It’s not hard to map the classical music industry onto Moore’s idea of ecosystems. Doing so suggests one reason why it’s endangered: it is out of touch with the market. The people involved with classical music surely form an intentional community with an awareness of a shared fate, more like European aristocrats powerless against the rise of the merchant class, than like the community of producers, designers, marketers, evangelists, and consumers surrounding Apple (Moore’s favorite illustration of a thriving business ecosystem). Despite the fierce competition among composers, performers, conductors and orchestras, recording companies and so forth, they know that they’re all in this together, struggling against what they regard as the cheap thrills of non-classical musics.
     But one place where they fail is in dialoguing with customers. Instead, they speak in a top-down monologue, starting with classical music educators who transmit elitism and professionalism, with little respect for the musical amateur. The virtues of its structural complexity, the intellectual experience of apprehending the beauty of its formal characteristics, the virtuoso skills of its finest performers, the notion that being involved with classical music will make someone a more civilized, more refined, and better person—these are not virtues that came out of focus-group dialogues between corporations and customers, or in this case classical music institutions and, broadly speaking, the classical music consumers who support the industry. Instead, they came from cultural leaders in Victorian-era Europe, 150 years ago. In a culture that prized amateurism, particularly the gentleman amateur, and might even have been said to have invented that tradition, this emphasis on professionalism may appear contradictory. However, the skills of the gentleman amateur were at least as well-developed as that of the professional; the difference was that he didn't do it for the money. To be sure, classical music consumers can and do parrot these virtues; but seldom do they originate with them.
    At certain periods in the twentieth century, the classical music industry was able to gain significant market share through recordings, often on the basis of these virtues, but coupled with another, namely connoisseurship. The earliest major record companies, Victor and Columbia, marketing 78s, offered as much classical music as any other kind, and not only priced those records higher but advertised them with much more fanfare. As I’ve written earlier on this blog, connoisseurship in music (whether classical music or any other kind) can lead to the accumulation of social capital, to be spent at appropriate occasions among like-minded people. Accumulating a record collection, for example, carried with it the possibility of connoisseurship even for those who lacked musical talent. Classical music critics such as Irving Kolodin wrote guides to recorded music (the first was published in 1941) that enabled one not only to own the best performances but to be able to say why they were the best. In the 1960s, budget-priced LPs on labels like Nonesuch as Turnabout made a much wider repertoire available, including early music, and the more expensive labels followed suit. Recording techniques improved, and with the higher fidelity of the LP recordings a concert-hall like experience in one’s own apartment or home became possible. More, higher fidelity records led some listeners to buy fine stereo playback systems. Connoisseurship flourished among hi-fi enthusiasts as well in the quest for an absolute sound that was indistinguishable from that of the concert hall.
    The connoisseur’s search for high fidelity in classical music extended to fidelity in performance, leading to the idea of historically-informed performance, and the feeling that it was somehow better to listen to the classical music of the past as the audience would have heard it when it was first composed—and that meant period instruments instead of technologically improved ones, and fidelity to the score whenever possible in preference to traditions that had been handed down in practice from one generation of performers to the next. Today the majority of early music on recordings is performed on period instruments or their reproductions. Just as an aside, it would be interesting to see a revival with period instruments and just about everything else except fidelity to the original score – which would become fidelity to the original recording – in, say, early rock 'n roll. Why not? Such revivals have existed in many kinds of music for decades – blues, jazz, old-time string band music, and Irish traditional music to name a few.
    Historically-informed performance and its alleged authenticity fascinates me. In the introduction to ethnomusicology course that I’ve taught to undergraduates at Brown—it is one of the courses required for the music major—I ask them to think about this aspect of the classical music culture. One year I played an audio recording of an orchestral piece from the 18th century as performed on period instruments by a historically-informed group, then followed it with the same piece as performed in the early 1960s by the non-historically informed Berlin Philharmonic. The students preferred the lush sound of the latter, commenting on the dry timbres and occasional out-of-tune harmonies of the former. The next year I did the same experiment, but this time I showed them a video of the same two orchestras playing the same piece. Now the students responded positively to the historically-minded group, commenting on the clearly differentiated instrumental texture and the enthusiasm of the performers, who were young people dressed like themselves and who moved around and showed emotion as they played. The Berlin Philharmonic became for them a parody of musical fogeyism, and instead of a lush sound the music was perceived as “muddy” and undifferentiated, while the performers’ formal outfits and stiff postures were ridiculed. However, ten years later when I showed the video again—this was in the twenty-first century—some students found the “hippies” playing the period instruments, gesturing and moving about, to be the ridiculous ones, while the Berliners, whose performance style and sound had become remote and exotic, were intriguing.
    Returning to classical music as a business ecosystem, we see another area where there is room for improvement if classical music is to come off the endangered species list. That is what Moore calls inter-firm cooperation. Instead of competing for an ever-dwindling group of classical music composers, performers, and listeners, classical music's businesses could consider how the feeling that they are all in this together can lead toward a common goal benefitting all. This has in fact been happening for many decades, but not intensely enough to make over the ecosystem in terms of Moore's principles of innovation, cooperation, and co-evolution. His ideas might help the classical music culture take steps to make its ecosystem more resilient; but this would require visionary leadership, combined efforts, and changed attitudes.