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."

Participatory Music and the COVID-19 Challenge

Old-Time Music Jam Session, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

    Live, participatory music-making is social, and the sociality of participatory music-making is threatened under the COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve written extensively about how the sociality of making music together in groups such as the old-time jam session models participatory democracy, face-to-face exchanges in community, and a sound economy. Nowadays many of us are reduced to making music via Zoom, which on account of time delays built into the transmission of sound, is a poor substitute. Instead of all playing simultaneously in each other’s presence to create an emergent group sound that is greater than and different from the sum of its parts, we mute our microphones while playing along with a single unmuted leader who can’t hear what the others are doing. Nor can the non-leaders hear one another. Instead of participatory democracy we have a single leader and many followers. The followers can hear the leader but not each other. Leaders can only hear themselves. This is the opposite of the jam session ideal, socially and politically as well as musically.

A sound way to think about novel coronavirus protein structure

MIT composer and engineering scientist Markus Buehler has created a musical composition based on the patterns in the novel coronavirus' spiked protein structure. The music, which sounds to me a little like a serene composition for gamelan, can be heard here. A story in today's Washington Post goes into more detail. Buehler hopes that this sonic way of perceiving the protein structure may help medical researchers understand the virus in a new way and may aid in finding ways to fight it.

Novel Coronavirus Spiked Protein Structure

Coronavirus soundscape - an ecocentric perspective

Hairy woodpecker. Photo by J. Titon

 What is the new soundscape of the novel coronavirus? In the built environment I hear less noise. Less noise from traffic, from shops, restaurants, factories. In the mix of traffic noise, more from work trucks and emergency vehicles with sirens; less from cars. More prominent in the spring soundscape now are the songbirds, singing away at dawn and through the day, staking out territories, looking for mates to build nests, and raise new broods. The human sounds, called anthrophony by soundscape ecologists, have diminished. More prominent now is biophony, the sounds of animals, and geophony, the sounds of wind, rain, thunder, and the like. Scientists tell us that songbirds find their acoustic niche in the soundscape so they can communicate with the least amount of interference from other sounds. Those who dwell near highways have evolved to sing in a higher-pitched range than others of their species who dwell far from highways. With less highway noise for a while, those birds will find less interference and be able to communicate better. Every morning at dawn I hear a pair of woodpeckers drumming their song, one closer and louder, the other farther away and softer. While human life seems to be in a mostly suspended state, it is comforting to hear the songbirds.

Musical Sustainability and the Novel Coronavirus

Coal miner, West Virginia. Wikimedia Commons.

While musicians throughout the world respond to the COVID-19 pandemic with new songs and virtual performances and concerts meant to express solidarity and hope, musical and cultural sustainability is yet at great risk from the novel coronavirus. As I’ve written here before, as the last century drew to a close, arts policy had settled on a strategy of marking outstanding musical traditions as cultural heritage worthy of preservation and encouragement, and marketing these traditions so that they would become economic engines, wittingly or unwittingly transforming them into commodities in the process. International arts policy emanating from UNESCO considered the greatest threats to musical traditions to be modernization and development that would cause cultural drift and the abandonment of traditions by succeeding generations. Alan Lomax warned in the 1970s of what he foresaw as “cultural greyout” as a result of Western media dominance throughout the world. I became aware of environmental threats as well, such as those from floods, mine cave-ins, and earthquakes, after working with communities in the mountains of Virginia and Kentucky. When I began thinking about sustainability it occurred to me that economic threats, such as regional overdependence on single industries such as fishing, or coal mining, to the communities that sustained musical traditions, could put a population out of business in short order, causing out-migration, cultural dispersal, and disruption of musical as well as cultural traditions. I don’t know that any of us in the world of public folklore and applied ethnomusicology in the US envisioned a threat to musical sustainability from a pandemic.

Now we know. And we know, also, that the most experienced and wisest tradition-bearers in those communities are the elders and by virtue of age and health conditions, therefore among the most vulnerable in those communities. A recent newspaper article highlights the risk faced by Kentucky coal miners, where black lung disease, on the decline until a resurgence in the 1990s, compounds the likelihood of death from COVID-19. Although mining now employs less than ten percent of the population of Appalachia, in some areas such as southeastern Kentucky a majority of the elder population were coal miners earlier in their lives and one in ten now suffer from black lung, while the area has a higher incidence of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes—all conditions of comorbidity with the virus. A retired coal miner, Jerry Coleman, said “A lot of people don’t understand coal mining and the damage it’s done to our lungs. Now that everyone is phasing out coal, they’re all forgetting about the poor old coal miner.” Making things worse, rural hospitals in the coal mining region of Appalachia, like rural hospitals all over, have been closing due to lack of funding, and in some areas the nearest hospital is an hour or more distant. “Nobody knows what this virus is going to do when it gets to this area,” said Jimmy Moore, a 74-year-old black lung patient in Shelby Gap, Kentucky, who spent 22 years in the mines before retiring in 2000. His 51-year-old son, he said, has an even more serious case of black lung. “It’s probably just going to wipe us out.”