Adaptations in Sound and Music: Confronting Climate Change Amid Covid-19

 This has been a pretty busy month. On October 6 I participated on a roundtable at a virtual conference at the City University of New York. The four-day conference brought together musicologists, ethnomusicologists, composers, performers, and some of us who also identify, as I do, as ecomusicologists. The conference subject was "Responses in Music to Climate Change," and our roundtable forum topic was "Adaptations: Confronting Climate Change Amid Covid-19." Presenting on the panel were Aaron Allen (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), Mark Pedelty (University of Minnesota), Alexander Rehding (Harvard University), Denise Von Glahn (Florida State University), Holly Watkins (University of Rochester), and myself (Brown University). My presentation was untitled, and was an extremely brief excerpt from a portion of a 7,000-word article forthcoming in a book edited by Jonathan Stock and Beverley Diamond, for Routledge, to be titled The Routledge Companion to Ethics and Research in Ethnomusicology. Most of the articles are completed, including mine; but the editors are waiting for a few that remain, whereupon they will all be forwarded to Routledge. I doubt that the volume will appear before 2023. At any rate, here is what I said on the panel, in response to the topic at hand:

          "As I understood it we’re supposed to speak of the effects of COVID-19 and climate change on music, and although I could speak about its devastating effects on my own old-time musical community, where under non-pandemic conditions we play fiddles and banjos sitting knee to knee and feeling each other's presence, instead I plan to do the traditional ethnomusicological thing and speak about some of its effects in two marginalized religious communities that I’ve visited in and written about for many decades. Their perspectives on climate change are somewhat different from mine, and perhaps they also differ from yours. 

            Old Regular Baptists in the coal country of the southern Appalachian mountains are a demonstrative, intimate group of about 10,000 people descended from the Calvinist wing of the Reformation. Their gatherings are best experienced in person. They sing lined-out hymnody in heterophonic unison, often with lyrics from the 18th century and melodies of indeterminate age. They intone their prayers and they sing their sermons. In the last century we collaborated on a music sustainability project. They say that the sound of their singing, praying, and preaching opens a mutually communicative channel of experience among them, and between them and the presence of God. I spoke with Elwood Cornett, their Association head, about the effects of COVID-19 and climate change on their music. Regarding COVID, there is no opposition on religious grounds to masking and social distancing, but there is longstanding mistrust of government and drug companies, so vaccine hesitancy is significant. Some are still going to church meetings while overall attendance is down. All are masked and they're doing the best they can, to refrain from the frequent handshaking and hugging that has characterized their meetings for centuries. Some tried church via Zoom but it failed for lack of presence as well as poor rural internet service. As for climate change, they agree that it’s anthropogenic but point out that they’ve been experiencing environmental violence and ecosystem devastation in the mountains for decades. Mountaintop removals and more frequent flooding are only the latest examples. 

            Things are different for the group of evangelical fundamentalists in Virginia's northern Blue Ridge who were the focus of my ethnography, Powerhouse for God. As a result of COVID they closed church for a couple of months in 2020. They knew Zoom church would be a failure so they did not attempt it. They got the idea to try to hold it outside in the church parking lot as if it were a drive-in movie. The pastor told me he felt like he was preaching mainly to Silverados and F-150s, and he didn’t much like it. None of them did. So after a few more weeks they all went back into church, some wearing masks and some not. Like the Old Regulars, they experience the sound of their singing, praying and preaching as a demonstration of the power of the Holy Spirit that opens a communication channel among them and between them and the divine presence. Climate change is much on their minds. They believe it is real, and that human beings have caused it; but they don't believe that it will cause the Earth's destruction. The pastor quoted Genesis 8:22 to me: "As long as the Earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease." But they do see climate change as another sign of the end times, the Second Coming, and the rapture of the Church when, as they say, there'll be much so much shouting and singing in Heaven as to deafen a mere mortal."

An ecological approach to sound communication in living beings (Lecture, Geneva, Switzerland, September 29, 2021)

Last spring I was invited to lecture in Geneva, Switzerland for a consortium of students and others involved in a joint graduate degree program in ethnomusicology. The topic was up to me, but it should reflect my current research, I was told. I had hoped that by September 29, the target date for the lecture, that the COVID-19 pandemic would have subsided sufficiently to make international travel no longer risky for someone my age but as we now know although the virus had subsided in the US and Europe in the spring and early summer, it returned with the delta variant in the late summer and fall. Travel would be impossible, but luckily it was possible to deliver the lecture remotely over the internet. I spoke for about an hour, highlighting some of the research that went into a chapter I'd written a few years ago that was only recently published, in the Oxford Handbook of Phenomenology of Music Cultures. There followed a question and answer period until our time was up about a half hour afterward. Here is the abstract for the lecture:

La définition de l'ethnomusicologie comme l'étude des gens qui font de la musique continuera à servir les chercheurs qui se concentrent sur les humains qui font de la musique et sur la création musicale en tant que domaine culturel. Cependant, une approche écologique élargit le sujet à l'éco-ethnomusicologie, ou écomusicologie, un domaine qui englobe non seulement les personnes qui font de la musique mais aussi tous les êtres qui font du son. En d'autres termes, la musique n'est qu'un cas particulier de la catégorie plus large qu'est le son. Les éco-ethnomusicologues s'interrogent sur ce que tous les êtres vivants d'une planète elle-même vivante peuvent partager sur le plan sonore et sur ce que ces points communs signifient pour notre avenir collectif.

            En répondant à cette question, je développe une perspective que j'appelle "écologie sonore". Par "son", je fais référence non seulement au phénomène acoustique, mais aussi aux significations anglaises du son comme "sain", comme dans "un esprit sain et un corps sain", et comme bien fondé, comme dans "un argument sain". L'écologie sonore prend comme point de départ la communication sonore multi-espèces, élargissant la discussion à l'écosphère pour prendre en compte les sons géophoniques, biophoniques et anthropophoniques. L'écologie sonore réoriente les idées occidentales contemporaines de l'être humain et de la connaissance, de la contemplation subjective de textes externes (comme les humanistes ont l'habitude de le faire) ou de l'observation d'objets externes (comme les scientifiques le font principalement) vers une ontologie et une épistémologie intersubjectives ancrées dans les connexions sonores.

            Le son, bien sûr, consiste en des vibrations transmises entre entités au moyen d'ondes longitudinales à travers un milieu. Deux ou plusieurs entités, ou êtres, si elles sont ainsi reliées par le son, vibreront ensemble. Il s'agit d'une connexion viscérale, physique, bien que dans certains groupes sociaux, les sons puissent également être compris comme ouvrant et maintenant des connexions rituelles avec des êtres spirituels, incarnés ou non. Le son annonce des présences, tandis que les connexions sonores établissent une coprésence qui constitue la base d'une épistémologie des relations intersubjectives, avec l'important corollaire éthique que les êtres ainsi reliés sont interdépendants et donc responsables du bien-être de l'autre. Cette reconnaissance de l'interdépendance et de la responsabilité mutuelle peut nous éloigner des économies et des communautés basées sur des relations sujet-objet, telles que celles qui sont principalement légales et contractuelles, et nous conduire vers des relations sujet-sujet qui sont personnelles et présentes.

            Il ne serait pas sage de laisser l'étude des mondes sonores plus qu'humains aux seuls biologistes, écologistes, philosophes et anthropologues culturels. Je suggère plutôt que nous, éco-ethnomusicologues, nous engagions nous aussi dans cette recherche, en poursuivant nos propres méthodologies et conclusions lorsque cela est conseillé et en collaborant avec des chercheurs d'autres disciplines lorsque cela est possible. Les idées phénoménologiques de perception sociale directe et d'empathie par perception directe, associées à des conceptions de l'incarnation et de l'Umwelt, des affordances et des compréhensions écologiques, sont en accord avec d'importants courants de recherche neuroscientifique sur les cultures expressives des oiseaux, des chimpanzés et, semble-t-il, des humains. Ces approches s'écartent du modèle behavioriste de la biologie évolutive d'une manière qui est cohérente avec les récentes découvertes biologiques concernant le génome, la codépendance du génome avec la culture et la coévolution des gènes et de la culture. Tout cela offre de nouvelles pistes de recherche importantes.