Toward a Sound Ecology

 
My new book, Toward a Sound Ecology: New and Selected Essays, was published a few days ago by Indiana University Press. It is available in paperback, or clothbound, or as an eBook, either from the Press here, or from major booksellers, or from your favorite independent bookshop. The book is my selection of twelve previously published essays, plus a new essay published here for the first time, “Sustainability and a Sound Ecology.” 

This is the table of contents, with the year that the essay was written in parenthesis following the title:

Introduction

Section I: Field Work: Folklore and Ethnomusicology
1. The Life Story (1978)
2. Ethnomusicology as the Study of People Making Music (1988)
3. Text (1995)
4. Knowing Fieldwork (1993)
5. Applied Ethnomusicology: A Descriptive and Historical Account (2015)

Section II: Cultural and Musical Sustainability
6. The Real Thing (1999)
7. Music and Sustainability: An Ecological Viewpoint (2009)
8. Sustainability, Resilience and Adaptive Management for Applied Ethnomusicology (2015)

Section III: Toward a Sound Ecology
9. A Sound Commons for All Living Creatures (2012)
10. The Nature of Ecomusicology (2013)
11. Thoreau’s Ear (2014)
12. The Sound of Climate Change (2014)
13. Sustainability and a Sound Ecology (2018)

In the previously unpublished “Sustainability and a Sound Ecology” I ask what happens in those moments when we are in the world and know the world chiefly through sounds? What if we gave pride of place to sound worlds rather than object worlds, social group worlds, or text worlds? To put it yet another way, what happens in those moments when we feel our sensations, our being, and knowing centered in sounds? If we privilege how we feel and what we come to know in those re-oriented moments, how might we re-form our communities, economies, and ecologies and how would these differ from those as humans conceive of them at present? Is it possible by means of a thought experiment based in a sound connection to erect a just alternative to the alienated communities, neoliberal political economies, and behaviorist ecologies that drive humans toward injustice, and the planet toward extinction? To do so is to put us on a path of sound ecological rationality, which I believe will lead every being to a more sustainable world. This sound ecological rationality contrasts with and stands in opposition to the now-dominant instrumental economic rationality.

I’m grateful to the editors of the series it appeared in, Music, Nature, Place (they are Denise Von Glahn and Sabine Feisst), to the editors at the Press who kept after me to make this collection (they are Raina Polivka, Janice Frisch, and Gary Dunham), to the external reviewers who told the Press that it was worth publishing (I learned only recently that they were Kate Galloway and David McDonald), and to the production staff at the Press for producing a very attractive book.

Environmental Humanities, Music and Sustainability

Photo by Jeff Todd Titon, E. Penobscot Bay, ME

    Environmental humanities is only six years old, one of a proliferating number of fields prompted by the current environmental crisis. My interests in sustainability and music have taken me, over the years, into a number of environmental areas: conservation biology, human ecology, ecological economics, and ecomusicology, to name a few; and now environmental humanities. Environmental humanities, according to one definition, is meant to integrate humanistic research on the environment from cultural geography, ecocriticism, cultural anthropology, environmental philosophy, and political ecology. The ideology behind it seeks to move beyond a “holistic vision of nature as a privileged place in the history of ecology,” to an understanding of humans and our concerns “within the everyday places in which we live.” It is said to turn away from a conception of an ideal nature constructed as unspoiled (by human culture and corruption) wildness, to an idea of an environment that humans have impacted for millennia, with problems such as climate change and environmental injustice. This conceptual shift turns away from the radical environmentalism of deep ecology, and toward an integration of the human, and humanities, into environmental thinking, at least inside the academic world. Instead of envisioning the restoration or preservation of wilderness ecosystems, “environmentalists are re-envisioning nature as pervasively and enduringly shaped by humans. These concepts are beginning to put pressure on the key concept of ‘sustainability,’ which has organized a good deal of environmentalist thought for the last two decades.”
    One way of looking at the way these developments are “pressuring” sustainability is to consider the critique of the sustainability from within resilience thinking. Advocates of resilience (and I am one) maintain that, first, sustainability is a goal, not a strategy; and second, that insofar as sustainability implies maintaining a climax equilibrium state of natural balance, it is out of step with current thinking in ecological science, which has abandoned the idea of the balance of nature. In chapter 5 of the Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology, I develop this critique of sustainability and discuss resilience as a better way of thinking about musical and cultural continuity and integrity. My thinking about resilience has, itself, changed over the years, from skepticism to a guarded optimism.
    Fall is conference season for me, and only last week I was asked to present about environmental humanities at the American Folklore Society’s annual meeting, in Miami. I spoke about how folklife studies, with its long history of ethnographic documentation of traditional beliefs, customs, and practices, including folk medicine, agricultural adaptations, and beliefs about the place of humans in the natural world, could contribute to the discussion of traditional ecological knowledges in the environmental humanities. I was asked, also, to speak about my own background in the disciplines related to the environmental humanities. I might have said something about studying with Leo Marx, my honors thesis adviser at Amherst College. Marx is surely one of the earliest environmental humanists, an ecocritic whose book, The Machine in the Garden, measures the impact of technology on the American pastoral ideal, as revealed in the literature of writers such as Melville, Hawthorne, and especially Thoreau.
    But I chose instead to speak about my background in ecology, mentioning my introduction to the subject when I spent the summer after my sophomore year working in a human ecology project, for Dr. Lawrence Hinkle, at the Cornell Medical School, in Manhattan. In the following academic year, I studied with Oscar Schotté, a biologist whose academic pedigree extended back to Ernst Haeckel, the German embryologist who in 1866 coined the term ecology and defined it as “the whole science of the relations of the organism to the environment including, in the broad sense, all the ‘conditions of existence.’”
    I went on to talk about my sound ecology project, and concluded (again, in response to my assignment) by repeating some of the conclusions I’d come to after decades of research in fields related to environmental humanities. These included the four principles of interdependence, diversity, limits to growth, and stewardship. They also included some of the conclusions I’m coming to from my sound ecology project, concerning the implications for communities, economies, and ecologies of a sound ontology and epistemology. I also spoke about these a few weeks ago in a keynote address to the southwest chapter of the American Musicological Society, while an earlier formulation of these ideas on a sound ecology are scheduled for publication in Ethnologies later this year, or early next.
    It was fascinating to see the explosion of the environmental humanities at the AFS conference. There were two days of panels on the subject last week, whereas in previous conferences not much if anything. On the panel with me were several friends and colleagues whose thinking has inspired me for many years, including Rory Turner, founder of the cultural sustainability MA program at Goucher College; and Mary Hufford, whose pioneering work in public ecology and folklife is finally getting the recognition that it has long deserved.
    The conference season is always stimulating, as I feel pulled in two directions: one, I want to be with my colleagues, learning from them and sharing ideas; two, I want to be back at home, developing those ideas, thinking, reading, and writing. I have one more conference this fall, the ethnomusicology meeting in Washington, DC in a week. For that, I was asked to speak about public ethnomusicology 25 years after the publication of the first (and only) issue of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Journal that was devoted to the topic of ethnomusicology in the public interest. This topic falls within another relatively new field, public humanities. And all of this—environmental humanities, public humanities, and so forth—arises in a crisis period when “if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu,” as the saying has it.

Sustainability in the local context, and the misplaced critique of resilience

    Sustainability remains ubiquitous. Here on the down east Maine coast, no one speaks of musical or cultural sustainability, although to do so would have relevance, insofar as this area has conserved its culture better than most other parts of Maine. Work, education, even the look of the houses hasn’t changed much in the forty-five years I’ve been fortunate to live here, for at least part of every year. The people exhibit a cultural conservatism, a preference for the old ways.

Stonington Harbor, photo © by Jeff Todd Titon.

     If you’re speaking with folks who’ve moved here from away, sustainability means land put into conservation, through the various non-profit heritage trusts, either as “farmland forever,” or more commonly as a public space for light recreation, nature walks and the like, usually on coastal land abutting the ocean. But if you’re speaking with area natives, sustainability refers to the fishery, traditionally lobsters, clams, and cod, hake, pollock, scallops, and the like. The cod have almost disappeared, and shrimp stock is very low, to the point where government regulations severely limit the catch, making that part of the fishery an example of what happens when resources that had been abundant become unsustainable. Lobsters, on the other hand, have never been more plentiful; yet there is worry that even this fishery is unsustainable, particularly in the face of climate change which, warming the ocean water, will cause the lobsters to move to cooler, more northern waters, just as the birds are gradually moving their ranges north to Canada.
    Some conservationists have formed alliances with the island fishermen (and women), seeking common ground in sustainability. The regional news media includes a very interesting monthly, called Working Waterfront, featuring stories about the populated islands, fishing, crafts, yachting (a pastime that is very old in this area, which supplied the 19th century crews and boats for the successful US America’s Cup racers). Cultural conservation does interest these journalists, as they understand that it is not simply the fishery that is at stake but the sustainability of the culture that supports it, and that it supports. In that regard, the “field notes” editorial by the president of the Island Institute, Rob Snyder, publisher of Working Waterfront, caught my eye last month. “The world is watching our coast: Swedes say Maine lobster fishery among least resilient systems,” read his editorial headline. Snyder reported that Stockholm, Sweden, is home to the Resilence Center, which is taking a resilience approach to sustainability on our planet. He noted that Stockholm is in the center of fourteen islands, so they understand something of what it is to be island-centered, as we are on the Maine coast also. The Swedish Resilience Center, Snyder continues, defines resilience as “the capacity of a system, be it an individual, a forest, a city or an economy, to deal with change and continue to develop. It is about the capacity to use shocks and disturbances like . . . climate change to spur renewal and innovative thinking . . . [grounded in the] belief that humans and nature are strongly coupled to the point that they should be conceived of as one socio-ecological system.” This is the same understanding of resilience that I’ve been writing about recently, in The Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology, and elsewhere; and of course, it is neither original with me nor with the Resilience Center. Resilience is a strategy for achieving sustainability.
    Interestingly, Snyder takes issue with the Resilience Institute’s proclamation that the Gulf of Maine’s lobster fishery is one of the least resilient systems in the world. Ironically, Snyder's resistance echoes the usual local reaction to criticism from away. Instead of admitting the obvious, that the lobster fishery is indeed precarious, Snyder opposes resilience theory, on the same grounds that I did a few years ago, even in this blog--namely, that “it takes a defensive posture to living. Resilience seems to assume that we must become resilient because we are always under threat.” But as I studied resilience theory, I realized that this common critique is based in misunderstanding. I changed my mind. Resilience isn’t the same thing as resistance. Resistance indeed does take a defensive posture, but resilience refers to something else: the capacity of a system to recover, to bounce back, from disturbance. Considering yourself, for the moment, as a system, you take defensive measures to resist a cold; but your resilience, on the other hand, will enable you to recover afterwards. Resilience theory doesn’t deal with resistance; rather, it identifies those things that make a system resilient after disturbance and attempts to maximize those so that a system maintains its integrity as it recovers.
    Snyder goes on with his critique of the Resilience Institute, writing that in response to dissatisfaction with resilience theory, “a movement is growing to think about reframing resilience through a language of thriving. The actions that need to be taken would be the same: embrace diversity, operate at multiple scales . . .” and so forth. But resilience doesn't need reframing, except for those who mistakenly identify it with resistance. Resilience is already about thriving. And in this instance, Snyder recognizes that what is under discussion is cultural sustainability; that is, it is the culture of fishing that must embrace diversity, and operate at multiple scales.
    The same can be said about farming and gardening. Maine’s farming has undergone a quiet renaissance in the past fifteen years, diversifying from mainly dairy farming—once the only profitable kind of farming in Maine, now a break-even proposition at best—and operating at different scales. The number of small farms has increased markedly, as more organic farms, local agriculture, CSAs, and cooperative grocers come to supply a public that wants locally grown organic food and is willing to pay a little extra for it, understanding that the real costs of agribusiness-produced food are not reflected in its low market price. Even in the less populated areas, like this one, locally-sourced farmers markets may be visited most days of the week, with some staying open through winter; and two grocery co-ops are located within easy driving distance. Meanwhile, many residents grow kitchen gardens that supply fresh food in summer, and some put food by in containers, root cellars, and the freezer. Frosts have been arriving later as a result of climate change, with fresh food in the garden now available late into the fall. This fall was unusually warm, on account of the El Niño effect on the East Coast. As of two weeks ago I still had brussels sprouts in the garden ready for harvest.

Blues as a Sustainable Music

    Writers have lamented the impending death of blues for nearly 100 years, yet as Mark Twain supposedly quipped when told that his obituary had been published, the death rumors appear to have been exaggerated. Endangerment and unsustainability are built into the idea of blues and many other musics, yet somehow they’ve managed to persist in one form or another. Is there a lesson of resilience here?
    Writing about blues in the 1920s, the folksong collector Dorothy Scarborough predicted that blues would be gone when the current generation of singers passed away. Like most of this writing about endangerment, hers distinguished between an authentic blues and a transformed, popularized version: the folk blues versus the kind of blues being sung from the vaudeville stage for cheap entertainment. Today, of course, we think of this vaudeville blues as equally authentic, and we honor the contributions and innovations of such vaudeville blues singers as Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey along with their downhome blues cousins like Charley Patton and Son House who were making commercial 78 recordings right along with the vaudeville singers, but whose songs met Scarborough’s criteria as folk songs.
    I write about it from personal experience as a blues musician, experience that goes back to the blues revival of the 1960s. The occasion now is a project for a vinyl record scheduled to be released this year or next, containing some recordings that I made at the 1969 Ann Arbor, Michigan Blues Festival. This, coupled with a revised chapter on blues for the 6th edition of Worlds of Music, the introductory textbook in ethnomusicology that I’ve co-authored with several other ethnomusicologists and which has been in print since 1984, has turned my thoughts back to a music that has been with me all my life; for I must have first heard it from my father, who played blues as an amateur jazz guitarist.
    The generation that performed at that 1969 festival has, mostly, disappeared; and the same can be said about the 1970 festival, except for a few (myself included) who were quite young then. And yet the blues is still around, as a niche music like so many other niche genres (classical, jazz, and so forth) that once had greater claim on the popular imagination, not to mention the pocketbook. Recordings keep blues alive, of course, but so do concerts and festivals, while young musicians are still learning to play it; and if fewer now make a living from it, or listen to it, nevertheless blues persists, and recognizably so, in a variety of older and newer incarnations. It seems to be an example of a sustainable musical genre.
    Both older and newer incarnations were apparent in the 1960s when I was a part of the blues music culture. Most of my participation took place in Minneapolis, where I was a graduate student, and where, in addition to my academic studies, I played blues guitar, eventually joining Lazy Bill Lucas’s blues band. Bill represented the older incarnation within the blues revival; born around the time of the first World War to a family of African American sharecroppers in Arkansas, he migrated with them gradually north, looking for better living conditions, eventually landing in Chicago during its blues heyday, and performing with some of the better known musicians of that era, such as Big Bill Broonzy, Willie Mabon, Big Joe Williams, and Snooky Pryor. With his blues partners Mojo Buford and Jo Jo Williams, he moved to Minneapolis in the early 1960s, where they thought there would be less competition among musicians for jobs. And there was; but the audience was smaller as well. Nevertheless, they stayed; and as the Sixties wore on, and the audience for blues began to shift demographically to include a much larger percentage of white people, Bill’s popularity grew along with the blues revival. The newer incarnations were apparent in some of the younger blues musicians, whether forming their own bands or, like me, joining with some older groups. I was well aware, then, of death knells for blues that had already been sounded for more than forty years; but like most of my contemporaries, I thought even then that the rumors of impending death were exaggerated.
    Our band was invited to play at the second (1970) Ann Arbor Blues Festival; we went and as band leader Bill earned more money from that appearance than from any other, before or since. At the first festival, in 1969, I was only a spectator. I went with some other musicians and we sat in the audience, some sleeping in a car and some in a tent during the morning hours, and eating sandwiches and drinking beer from coolers. The festival lasted three days and nights, and featured most of the prominent blues singers and blues bands of the day, including Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker, B. B. King, Big Mama Thornton, Fred McDowell, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Son House, Luther Allison, Jimmy Dawkins, Freddy King, Albert King, Magic Sam, Lightnin' Hopkins, Bobby Bland, John Lee Hooker, and the list went on and on.
    In those days I had made what was then a large purchase from my meager funds as a graduate teaching assistant, to buy a portable, reel to reel tape recorder, a Sony that used 5” reels which could record up to 25 minutes per side, and which ate up D-size batteries at an alarming rate. It was not a very high fidelity recorder like the Uhers and Nagras that were available to professionals for astronomical prices, but it was what would today be called prosumer gear, for the advanced amateur, with a mic of comparable quality. I had been making field recordings of music as a graduate student, and so bringing it along to record these festivals was an exciting but normal thing for me to do. I did it, recording as much of the festivals as I could afford, for tape (and batteries) were expensive. I wish, now, that I’d had the sense to try to beg or borrow some synchronized sound film equipment, but that seemed out of reach in so many ways that I didn’t give it any thought at the time.
    By the time the 1970 festival was over, I’d recorded about 18 hours of highlights from those festivals. Over the years I’ve listened back to them and wished I could have made recordings directly from the mixing board, but instead these were made from the audience and dependent on the sounds that were amplified by the mics, the PA system and the musicians’ own instrument amplifiers. Compared with the sound of studio-made recordings, their technical quality is fair at best; but they are reasonably faithful reproductions of the sound that the festival audience heard. I took one of those recordings, a song by Magic Sam, and put it in Worlds of Music, but other than that none of the recordings ever was published and few of them circulated. At the time, I was under the impression that both festivals were being recorded by professional sound technicians, targeted for issue on LP recordings soon afterwards. A sound truck from Atlantic Records was prominent at the 1970 festival, and I worried that our band’s performance might not have been up to their standard. I need not have worried, because no recordings ever were released; and years later, I was told that those professional recordings had somehow disappeared. I knew that at least one other person, John Fishel, had made recordings from the audience, as I had done, because some of his were issued by Delmark Records several years later; but until a couple of years ago when his brother and his son were in touch with me about my recordings, I hadn’t realized that ours were the only ones to survive, more than forty years later.
    Jim Fishel was in touch with me asking whether I still had those recordings and if so, what were they, and would it be possible to use one or two for a reissue project that he and his son Parker were proposing through a retro Nashville outfit, Third Man Records. They were planning to release a vinyl LP set commemorating the 1969 festival in recordings, for the niche audience for blues was also inclined toward the older formats, such as vinyl, rather than CD. In fact, back in the 1960s when LPs were current, many blues aficionados preferred the sound from the original shellac 78 rpm records. Jim and Parker were especially interested in my recordings of Son House; later, it turned out he wanted to hear what I had recorded of Freddy King. I retrieved these and digitized them, edited them, and sent them along. Parker was very pleased with the results, and it now looks as if some or all of them will make it onto the reissue. The Fishels are doing this in the right way, licensing the recordings and paying the musicians or their heirs. The music from both festivals was magnificent; and although these recordings don’t have the sound quality of those made with professional equipment, their sound quality has something in its favor that high fidelity recordings from that era do not. That is, in keeping with the retro aesthetic, they have the quality of being well worn, or broken in, with the aura of good and proper use about them. There is something in the hipster aesthetic that prefers the older analog sound (tube equipment, etc.) to the pristine sterility of digital sound. Like a black and white still photograph, these recordings evoke the historical past, which of course they now represent.

Son House. Photo ©1970 by Jeff Todd Titon.

     Recordings like this are, I suppose, one way of sustaining music, a means that I am willing to be part of. But it falls far short of the lived experience of those festivals and the sounds that I remember and which, for me, are evoked by those recordings. I do wonder at their transformation into exotic and distanced objects for a new generation of listeners, but then I remind myself that when in the 1960s I listened to recordings by Mississippi delta blues singer Charley Patton, made in the 1920s, they were similarly exotic and distanced for me. Yet for Jo Jo Williams, the bass player in Lazy Bill Lucas’s blues band, they evoked lived experience. Jo Jo had lived in the delta and as a teenager slipped out of his family’s shack to go hear Charlie Patton and Son House at the all night dance parties they played for, way out in the country on Dockery’s Plantation. When I spoke with Jo Jo about Charley Patton, he recalled those experiences for me, as I myself was able to recall the Ann Arbor blues festivals when Parker decided he wanted to interview me about them, and about the blues revival of the 1960s. Blues has shown remarkable resilience, yet its sustainability lives in the cycles of experience and memory, from one generation to the next, while the role of recordings is evocative but secondary. That, for me, is a more satisfying way of thinking about sustainability in music cultures.

Sustainability: Adaptive Management as Coaching

Photograph by Jeff Titon, Providence, RI, 2002.

    What prompts this entry is a sentence from an anonymous external evaluator of an as-yet unpublished article. Last fall I completed an essay for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology, on music and sustainability. After reviewing sustainability and its cousins—preservation, conservation, and safeguarding—from a historical perspective, I proposed that applied ethnomusicologists undertaking cultural interventions with the goal of sustainability employ strategies involving resilience and adaptive management. The external evaluator, whose response came to me from the press only a few days ago, liked the essay: “This thought-provoking piece does an excellent job of exploring the concepts of preservation, conservation, safeguarding, sustainability, and resilience, considering environmental literature, economics, folklore studies, and ethnomusicology (the latter both within and outside the United States). More broadly, it examines how the ‘ecological trope’ has influenced ethnomusicology, considering what is at stake in using such language, and arguing for ‘resilience’ as a concept that improves upon ‘sustainability’. At the opening of the chapter, I wondered whether the length of the essay and the breadth of its scope would pay off, and they do.”  Next the helpful sentence: “Do the apparently benevolent, enlightened, and consultative interventions of applied ethnomusicologists have commonalities with the forms of human management the Foucauldian tradition expresses concern about?” In other words, if I am going to advocate adaptive management for music cultures, I ought to assuage readers who would look askance at management as a powerful, controlling mechanism characteristic of modern nation-states. My initial thoughts follow.
    Foucault coined the term “biopower” to describe the way modern nation-states regulate their citizenry, particularly in reference to controls over excesses of the body (and body politic). Their disciplinary power is even more effective because the regulations become internalized as culture. Foucault is working in a tradition pioneered by Karl Marx, who wrote about the Protestant religion’s emphasis on bodily discipline (drunkenness, for example, as a sin) effectively providing efficient, submissive factory workers for the capitalists. George Orwell’s prophetic 1984 portrayed a such a society as a police state. These, of course, are forms of management; and the reviewer worries that readers may be concerned about its dangers when strategies of adaptive management are advocated for musical and cultural sustainability.
    A quick response to this apparent problem is to say that the kind of cultural management I’ve been advocating (and practicing) for nearly five decades is not and never has been top-down, but rather grows out of a partnership between the culture worker and the community leaders and tradition-bearers. In an ideal case, the culture worker learns the music culture’s sustainability goals and helps its people plan and then implement a sustainability strategy in which they self-manage, relying on the culture worker as a collaborator and consultant. True enough, but I believe deeper resistances to management need to be engaged, especially where people are involved. It is one thing for a conservation biologist to adopt a strategy of resilience and adaptive management for ecosystems; it is quite another to manage people who have intentions of their own.
    I’ve written earlier in this blog about some of my reservations about resilience and management. The popular idea of resilience, which I shared as recently as a year ago, is that it is a kind of hunkering down, a defensive strategy of resistance. The more that I learned about its implementation, whether in medicine, psychology, or conservation biology, the more I realized I’d been wrong. Resilience is better understood as an ability to bounce back. A resilient system, in other words, whether a human being, a culture, or an ecosystem, has the capacity to respond to a disturbance by bouncing back to a former state, at least far enough so that its integrity remains and its core functions continue. This is not the same thing as resisting disturbance. Think of a resilient system as bending but not breaking, then bouncing back. Think of a resistant one as not bending until the disturbance is too great, then breaking.
    Adaptive management is. moreover, a special kind of management: one that expects sometimes to fail but then also expects to learn from failure and do a better job in the future. In a sense, most management seeks to be adaptive; but the phrase emphasizes that failure is inevitable and leads, ideally, to more effective management. It emphasizes the pragmatic nature of management. For better and worse, it characterizes many contemporary practices, such as medicine.
    Still, many people don’t like to be managed. Earlier, I wrote about management and coaching: in baseball we have managers, but in football and basketball they’re called coaches. Of course, both manage the games employing short- and long-term strategies, and by putting the players in positions where they have the best chance to succeed. Both coach their players, teaching them better techniques. Interestingly, coaches appear in contemporary Euro-American cultures in “the game of life”: people hire coaches for public speaking, for dress and appearance, for health, for social relationships, for business negotiations, and so forth. We don’t seem to mind being coached. Some of us want it, thinking it will advantage us. Why, then, the resistance to being managed, if we’re willing to be coached?
    Marx, Orwell, and Foucault shared that resistance. It impinged on autonomy and freedom; it abrogated natural rights. Being managed meant being told what to do, what to say, even what to think, when one didn’t want to be told--and then being coerced to do it. The difference, with coaching, is the willing partnership: presumably we want to be coached, even if we don’t want to be managed, because we conceive of the goal as our own. Adaptive managing may be regarded as coaching, then, when applied ethnomusicologists partner for sustainability.
    It's a helpful stretch to try to “think” like an animal, or like an ecosystem, or even like a mountain. Poets and environmentalists understand this impulse and have written about it, though scientists are understandably wary of imputing motives to nature. Conservation biologists managing ecosystems would do well to attempt, imaginatively, to enter into their mode of being, which may be done without attributing intentionality to nature. “It’s not what they ‘want,’ it’s just how they ‘are.’” An adaptive manager, as a culture worker partnering with communities over the future of their music, would do well to examine his or her role. Music cultures are like ecosystems, yes; but it’s important to bear in mind that is is only a trope, an analogy. In modern, Euro-American societies they do better when coached. But the culture worker also requires coaching, from the community that carries the music culture. Otherwise there cannot be any hope of partnership.

Sound and sustainability at AASHE

     In early October, Aaron Allen, Denise Von Glahn and I spoke in a plenary session to the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, or AASHE (pronounced HEY-she with the H silent), at their annual conference, in Nashville, Tennessee. Aaron Allen, the Academic Sustainability Coordinator at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, received the initial invitation, then asked Denise Von Glahn and me to join him. Plenaries are special events at conferences, and so our photos and bios were prominently placed in the program.[1] Von Glahn is a professor of musicology at Florida State University; she is very active in ecomusicology and the author of two books on American composers, nature, and place—her latter book is specifically on women composers.[2] Allen is also a professor of musicology and one of the leaders and guiding spirits behind the ecomusicology movement. It was Allen who convened a group of musicologists to write essays for a colloquy about ecomusicology in JAMS (the Journal of the Musicological Society), and who was asked to write an entry on ecomusicology for the New Grove Dictionary of American Music.[3] Although I’m relatively new to the (relatively new itself) ecomusicology movement, Allen was aware of my recent research in ecomusicology via Thoreau, and of my longstanding interests in sustainability—hence the invitation.
     Our topic was sustainability and sound, while the conference theme was resiliency and adaptation, a theme which readers of this blog know has occupied me here for years in connection with ecological models for musical and cultural sustainability. We held forth at the plenary for 90 minutes with a mix of prepared statements (from Aaron, explaining ecomusicology and its relation to sustainability; and from Denise, tracing her interests in nature, sound, music, and listening) and an interview (Aaron interviewed me about my research in sound and sustainability, touching on my plea for thinking about the earth’s soundscape as an acoustic commons for all living creatures [4], and my research on the sacralization of place by sound, particularly in Appalachia.[5].
    Most college and university campuses today make an effort to “be green,” to involve their staff, students, and faculty in energy conservation and recycling, and to lower their campus’s carbon footprint. AASHE brings together the leaders from those campuses, so they can talk to each other about common concerns and their efforts to make their institutions more sustainable. According to its website, AASHE’s mission “is to empower higher education to lead the sustainability transformation. We do this by providing resources, professional development, and a support network. . . “ [6] Not only professional campus sustainability administrators, then, but also students engaged in various sustainability projects on campus, and faculty involved with sustainability and environmental studies, were present at this very large conference of nearly two thousand people. It was about three times the size of the conferences of the Society for Ethnomusicology or of the American Folklore Society, the two I’ve attended faithfully each year since the early 1970s in connection with my own research and teaching. Like the invitation I received two years ago when I spoke to the University of New Hampshire’s Sustainability Academy [7], this was an invitation where people involved with sustainability, chiefly from the perspectives of science and engineering, wanted to hear from humanists about their own involvement with sustainability—to bring the humanities into the discussion.
    Allen, who has thought about bridging those gaps for some years now, is convinced, as I am, that humanists do have something to say to scientists and engineers about sustainability. The reverse is also true, of course. Ecomusicology, as he presented it at the conference, builds on ecocriticism, which is a three decades-old movement in literary history and criticism that takes as its primary subject the interactions of people, culture, and nature within literature, at a time of environmental crisis; and it, too, involves some scientists. That is, ecocriticism is concerned with literature and the environment, broadly conceived. Ecomusicology, then, is the critical study of music and the environment: of music, culture, and nature at a time of environmental crisis.
    Many ecomusicologists, myself included, prefer an ecomusicology that goes beyond music to include the study of all sound, and its relation to all creatures in the environment. In moving from music to the broader concept, sound, we think that ecomusicology shares common ground with other fields that focus on sound, fields such as acoustic ecology, sound studies, and soundscape ecology. I will save for another time a description of the differences of emphasis in these allied fields; suffice to say that Allen, Von Glahn and I spoke to the AASHE conference not only about music and sustainability, but about sound and sustainability.
    By their questions afterwards, the audience seemed as interested in music as in sound. They wondered about the future of musical genres they like, whether classical, folk, hip-hop, etc. Indeed, the majority of entries on this blog have been about music, not sound and environmental policy. But in the past two years, as a result of my work with Thoreau, sound has become more important, as I continue with a line of thought I introduced more than twenty years ago, theorizing a phenomenology of sound, a way of taking listening to sound and music rather than reading and interpreting a text, as the paradigm case of being in the world, and one which leads to a relational epistemology based on fieldwork and friendship.[8]
    In my part of the plenary, I tried to make the point that colleges and universities ought to manage their soundscapes for the health of all the inhabitants, and that this should be part of campus sustainability initiatives. Campuses after all are unusual in the amount of planning that goes into their spaces (pathways, landscaping, architecture, etc.) and their upkeep. Campuses are managed landscapes, and like gardens and country houses they are managed to be pleasant (usually pastoral) retreats from the jumble of appearances characterizing people’s workaday lives. Why not manage the soundscapes as well? I mentioned studies that have shown that soundscape interference (noise) is unhealthy, causing both physical and psychological damage.[9] I asked them if they thought they had any stress on their campuses; when they laughed in agreement, I suggested some of that stress might result from the soundscape. They already manage, or try to manage, certain soundscapes, such as dormitories. Roommates have to agree on the soundscape of their living quarters at any given time, for example; and there are “quiet hours” in some dorms, and so forth. But there is no coordinated campus effort to manage the soundscape for health and general well-being; for curbing the sounds of leaf-blowers, for example, or for attracting birds and other wildlife specifically for their contributions to the soundscape. In many campus buildings, the sounds of ventilator fans, heating apparatus, and air conditioners are omnipresent and noticeable, causing a kind of background stress that most people aren’t aware of until they go outside, and maybe not even then.
    Here, then, Allen and Von Glahn and I were concerned about sound, sustainability, and health and well-being. Von Glahn teaches her students to listen to all sounds, not just music. Attentive listening is a skill that can be learned. Once it is learned, people will pay more attention to the soundscape and its effects on life, human and non-human alike. Allen’s task was more general, to act as interlocutor and to explain the relationship of ecomusicology to sustainability, which he did by saying, among other things, that it introduces an aesthetic dimension that might otherwise be missing if the conversation is confined to scientists and engineers.
    In a sea of presentations on various efforts at sustainability and their outcomes, on campus and in the community at large, mostly involving engineering projects and group activities meant to conserve energy, our plenary must have provided some relief (including comic relief). About 500 people attended it, one of the larger audiences I’ve spoken with. It was a great pleasure to make common cause with Aaron Allen and Denise Von Glahn in this effort to link sound to sustainability for environmentalists, and we may get a chance to do it again. Plans are afoot for a visit to the University of Minnesota, where some interested parties have applied for a small grant to bring us there to coordinate with their own campus environmental sustainability efforts. I’d like to go, to try to give something back to them; for it was at the University of Minnesota that my own graduate education in the humanities took place many years ago.

Notes
[1] For the bios, see http://conference.aashe.org/2013/content/sustainability-and-sound
[2] Denise Von Glahn, Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World (Indiana University Press, 2013) and The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape (Northeastern University Press, 2003).
[3] Aaron Allen, “Ecomusicology,” The New Grove Dictionary of American Music (Oxford University Press, 2013), also available at http://www.ecomusicology.info; and Aaron Allen, Daniel Grimley, Alexander Rehding, Denise Von Glahn, and Holly Watkins, “Colloquy: Ecomusicology,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 64, no. 2 (2011): 391–424.
[4] Jeff Todd Titon, “A Sound Commons for All Living Creatures,” Smithsonian Folkways Magazine, 2012, at http://www.folkways.si.edu/magazine/2012_fall_winter/sounding_off.aspx
[5] See http://sustainablemusic.blogspot.com/2011/04/sound-sacralizes-space.html
[6] See http://www.aashe.org/about/aashe-mission-vision-goals
[7] http://www.sustainableunh.unh.edu/sustainabilityunbound
[8] Jeff Todd Titon, “Knowing Fieldwork,” in Gregory Barz and Timothy Cooley, Shadows in the Field (Oxford University Press, 1996), pp,. 87-100 and Jeff Todd Titon, “Knowing People Making Music: Toward a New Epistemology for Ethnomusicology.” Etnomusikologian vuosikirja, vol. 6, 1994. Helsinki: Suomen etnomusikologinen seura. [Yearbook of the Finnish Society for Ethnomusicology]

Upcoming Cultural Sustainability Symposium at Sterling College

     I've been away from this blog for a little while, as I prepare a keynote address for the symposium on cultural sustainability, which is to take place in Craftsbury Common, Vermont, at the end of this week, August 15-18, on the campus of Sterling College, a small, liberal arts college emphasizing conservation ecology.
     The symposium is open to the public: general information may be found here:

http://www.vermontfolklifecenter.org/education/cultural-sustainability/symposium.php

and the schedule of presentations here:

http://www.vermontfolklifecenter.org/education/cultural-sustainability/schedule.php

     The convergence of college and place, conservation ecology and commons, ought to inspire us all and I'm very much looking forward to meeting new colleagues and re-connecting with old ones there. Among those who will be presenting at the conference is Mary Hufford, an old acquaintance whose work on commons in the Appalachian forest was (and is) very important to my own thinking in this area. We met in the 1980s when she was working at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. She was one of a few scholars back then who was interested in my research into the Appalachian mountain farming ecology, a community worldview based in family, farming, and religious tradition, united by the concept of husbandry, which was an early version of what I now think of as stewardship. She asked me to write about that for the Encycopedia of Appalachia, which I did, and we had many interesting talks in the next decade, as she developed her research into forest commons and shared resources. At that time my research site had shifted south within Appalachia from Virginia to Kentucky, and to Old Regular Baptists, where I found the same ideas of husbandry and a mountain farm ecology. I also found the Lilley Cornett Woods, a preserved old-growth forest that one of the mountain patriarchs (Lilley Cornett) had stubbornly refused to sell out to the timber companies who were clear-cutting the forests in the early 20th century. Today the Lilley Cornett Woods is maintained by the University of Kentucky, and it is the only old-growth forest in the state. Cornett himself was quite a character, and I've mentioned him here before (see the blog entry for Feb. 7, 2011); but he and his forest deserve a separate entry, which I hope to make soon. At any rate, I recall speaking with Mary Hufford, who was at that time doing research into Appalachian forest ecology, and the "falling forest,"  very excitedly about the Lilley Cornett Woods and what it represented, in terms of resistance to the timber and coal corporations that were just beginning their cultural, economic, and environmental genocide in the region.
     For the conference keynote, I sent in the following abstract: "How may we contribute to the struggle for cultural sustainability in the face of increasing environmental, economic, and social injustice? Resilience thinking—today’s fashionable replacement for sustainability—puts us in a defensive posture that by itself is ultimately unsustainable. Nor will a greater reliance on Western economic reason lift all boats on a rising tide. On the contrary, economic reason, based on neoclassical assumptions about 'economic man,' has only exacerbated the current crises. Sustainable alternatives to economic rationality may be found in folklore’s emphases on commonality and orality. Commonality: folklore is not owned, but shared in a cultural commons. Cultural memory sequesters tradition by keeping it available; folklore is preserved by giving it away. Orality: sound vibrates us into co-presence with other living beings. Sound bundles human beings into relationships; economic man isolates individuals. Both commonality and orality may be observed at work in nature as well as culture. An enlightened cultural policy would borrow four principles from conservation biology: diversity, interdependence, limits to growth, and stewardship. But the relationship between culture and the environment goes beyond analogy. The commonwealth of culture is entwined directly with social, environmental, and economic justice. It is impossible to contribute effectively to one without working for all." I'm scheduled to stand and deliver it Friday morning at 9:30 to open the conference, and am very much looking forward to it, and to continuing the conversation about commons, conservation ecology, and cultural sustainability.

Managing for Musical and Cultural Resilience?

     By now, faithful readers of this blog won’t need to be reminded of the “four principles” (diversity, interdependence, limits to growth, stewardship) that I’ve been advocating for cultural policy. At the ABET workshop on music and sustainability, I proposed those four for discussion. Indeed, some of the speakers at the ABET conference were acquainted with them from my essays in The World of Music.[1]  As these principles were developed by conservation ecologists, not cultural policymakers, one might ask what are the grounds for guiding cultural policy by principles derived from attempts to manage the natural world. What does it mean, in other words, to apply an ecological or environmental (they are not the same) way of thinking to cultural policy? And what would such a way of reasoning be? If conservation ecology applies ecological thinking to managing the environment, how would this translate into the world of cultural policy? What is an ecological cultural policy that would enable musical sustainability? It’s important to try to frame these questions carefully, because the nuances in the way they are framed will suggest alternative routes for answering them.

    And so it’s important to ask, first, whether cultural engineering is likely to do more good than harm. Why not let culture take its course, as one would manage nature by letting it alone, to be as wild and “natural” as possible? After all, if plants and animals have natural cycles of birth, growth, decline, death and decay; if species rise and fall, adapt and sometimes become extinct; if ecological communities themselves change beyond recognition, why not simply let nature (and culture) be? Why manage nature, or culture, at all? Isn’t it, perhaps, un-natural to try to intervene? And why presume to manage for sustainability using ecological thinking, when the components of ecosystems die natural deaths? Why shouldn’t musics, languages, and other aspects of culture also die natural deaths? Isn’t that ecological?

    To which we may ask, what is a natural death, if it is caused by human interventions that wreak havoc on individuals, populations, communities, and ecosystems? How many species have gone extinct within the past two hundred years—roughly, since the start of the Industrial Revolution—as a result of human impact on ecosystems, compared to the number that would have gone extinct anyway? The answer to why conservation ecologists should attempt to manage nature at all, of course, is that nature is already being managed, badly. Letting nature alone would mean abandoning nature to the land developers, the oil companies, the timber cutters, the mining companies, agribusiness, and so forth. Does the same analogy work for culture? Those who say no to applied ethnomusicology tend to do so on the grounds that music is best left alone to take its natural course. But what is its natural (cultural) course?

    When I was participating in a meeting of the folk arts panel for the National Endowment for the Arts about 30 years ago, one of the panelists urged this hands-off approach. We were trying to decide whether to recommend for approval a grant proposal that would give money to an organization that was attempting to manage the flow of music in its city by encouraging musicians in underserved communities to set up a music school. One of the panelists objected, saying that it seemed to him like the organization was interfering in the natural (cultural) flow of music in that city. “We shouldn’t be meddling in their affairs,” the panelist concluded, with a flourish. Bess Hawes, director of the Folk Arts Program, seldom spoke at these meetings; she felt she should not try to influence the panelists. But here was a fundamental challenge, and if the answer was no meddling, no attempts to manage, then her organization might as well cease to exist. And so when the panelist said we shouldn’t be meddling, she responded by saying something like this: “Of course we should meddle! Everyone else is meddling with culture and the arts. Some institutions think only fine art is worthy of support, and that’s where they put their money because fine arts aren't self-supporting. Other people think that the only worthwhile art is art that makes money, so they want to get rid of all support. Some people think that the arts are the finest expressions of human life. Others think the arts are useless. Everyone is meddling; why shouldn’t we? We want to encourage the folk and traditional arts. Not many others do. Why shouldn’t we act on our beliefs, if we truly believe in them? Why shouldn’t we meddle? Supporting folk arts is meddling. Not supporting folk arts is another way of meddling. We are all meddlers no matter what. Why shouldn’t we try to meddle for good?”

    Needless to say, her argument carried the day. But the position that one should stay out of the way and let nature or culture take its course might be supported on other grounds. Neoliberal economists rely on their interpretation of Adam Smith’s theory of the invisible hand: that each party acting out of economic self-interest results in a market that is guided (by an invisible hand) for the common good, and so that economy is best which is managed (regulated) least. The same would be true, by analogy, in the realm of culture and the arts: an invisible hand would ensure the best outcome.

    Now, Adam Smith did write that an invisible hand guided self-interested actors to work for the public good. Here is the relevant excerpt from The Wealth of Nations: ““Every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it ... He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for society that it was no part of his intention. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good."

    But although Smith thought that an invisible hand guided self-interest toward public good, he did not go on to derive the neoliberal principle that market regulation was largely unnecessary. In fact, he believed that markets should be managed and regulated. Therefore, the neoliberal argument for laissez-faire rests on a misunderstanding of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” and so it would be wrong to rely on Smith’s authority here. Of course, that does not prevent neoliberals from deriving laissez-faire and less government regulation from the so-called invisible hand. But this is wishful thinking. If the hand is invisible there is no way of knowing whether, or how, it works—or if it works at all. Experience suggests the contrary: that self-interested actors guide their own hands toward wealth, and without regulation the result is income inequality and cycles of boom and bust, not to mention social injustice and ecosystem exploitation.

    Given that conservation ecologists do attempt to intervene to prevent the extinction of species by managing ecosystems in the environment, and allowing that their “meddling” is meant for the benefit of all, we return to the question of how conservation ecology transfers over into the realm of cultural sustainability, particularly for music but also for other aspects of expressive culture. And that is where the “four principles” come in. Why these four principles and not others? Why not, for example, manage for a “balance of culture” or cultural equilibrium? Isn’t that ecological?

    Here it’s helpful to understand that ecological thinking has undergone a sea change regarding how nature “naturally” behaves. Until the latter part of the twentieth century, most scientific ecologists agreed that, left to its own devices, an ecosystem moved towards a balanced equilibrium, a dynamic, but stable, state. Of course, ecosystems were subject to disturbance (fire, drought, etc.) but they tended to restore themselves to a stable “climax” condition, or at least move in that direction until the next disturbance.

    But a paradigm shift occurred during the last 40 years or so, and now most ecologists no longer believe that nature “naturally” moves toward a dynamic, balanced equilibrium. The “balance of nature” paradigm was replaced by a new one that emphasizes change and disturbance. The new paradigm admits that nature may achieve equilibria, but these are temporary and, for a given ecosystem, they occur at different points of balance, with the result that there is no longer any “climax” state towards which nature moves, but rather a series or scale of different possible equilibrium points, some advantaging certain species, some others. Ecosystems are not self-restorative. Instead of sustainability, with a view toward achieving it through encouraging the balance of nature, the new paradigm centers on the concept of resilience, or the degree to which an ecosystem resists disturbance. Ecosystems are managed, now, to increase resilience to damaging changes. Of course, a resilient ecosystem does manage to achieve a degree of sustainability, if only temporarily; but not in the same way as a stable, balanced one.

    Will managing for cultural (and musical) sustainability be replaced, then, by resilience? So far, it does not appear that “cultural resilience” has caught hold. Possibly it will, and perhaps it should; so let’s anticipate a little bit what it would mean. Cultural policymakers managing for sustainability, such as those involved with UNESCO, or the “big three in DC” (the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution’s Office of Folklife and Cultural Studies, and the Folk and Traditional Arts division of the National Endowment for the Arts), have also been managing for resilience as a means toward sustainability, chiefly by encouraging activities involving the traditional arts and their continuation, strengthening institutions and attempting to add value to those arts, particularly among the younger generations who must be the ones to continue them. “Resiliance management” might not come as news to these culture workers, or to those who have been partnering with musical and other traditional arts communities through participatory action research. Alan Lomax’s 1972 call for action against what he termed “cultural grey-out” was a resiliency response to a perceived disturbance.

    But there would, I think, be some subtle differences in managing for resilience rather than for sustainability. For one thing, resilience would suggest that managers (whether for culture or nature) adopt a defensive posture and be vigilant against disturbance, which means anticipating possible changes to the natural (or cultural) ecosystem and planning for them. Again, the obvious example is global warming, and the need to plan for this major change and the disturbances that it is bringing, such as an increase in violent weather that damages the natural and built environment, or the need to transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable sources of energy. In a way, of course, this is common sense. In the cultural arena, resilience planning would involve such things as responses to new communications models, such as the Internet: how can expressive culture be encouraged in an environment where so many musical exchanges, so to speak, take place virtually, over the Internet. Not that virtual music is new; it’s been around ever since recordings, and arguably is embedded in musical notation. But the Internet fosters new models for virtual communication, new opportunities for co-presence (whereas recordings were not traditionally interactive in this way).

    The downside of resilience is that the defensive posture puts managers in a response mode in which cultures are regarded as reactive rather than dynamic or innovative. That is one problem. Another is this: if change is the rule in nature, why not also in science? If nature does not progress to a climax, why should science? What grounds have we for believing in resilience? Is it just that it seems to fit today’s world better than balance? And if so, is that good enough—for now, until another paradigm comes along?  In future blog entries I will have more to say about my reservations about managing for resilience.

[1] "Economy, Ecology and Music: An Introduction," and "Music and Sustainability: An Ecological Viewpoint," The World of Music, Vol. 59, no. 1, 2009, pp. 5-16 and 119-138.

A Sound Commons for All Living Beings

Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904): Orchids, Nesting Hummingbirds, and a Butterfly

     Human beings should attempt to manage the soundscape as a sound commons to permit all creatures to communicate with one another in their acoustic niches. That is my thesis, but it requires elaborating and defending. Besides, these questions regarding the sound environment are part of a larger public discourse concerning whether and how to manage the natural environment, a discourse that historically has been bound up with economics in a variety of important ways. Recall that ecology and economics come from the same Greek root, oikos, meaning household.
    Elaborating this argument requires discussion of several concepts and resolution of a number of questions and objections. For example, while the law recognizes that you and I can own and exchange the fruits of our labor, whether goods or ideas, what sense can it possibly make to say that the chickadees that visit your bird feeder own their songs? Yet without song they could not signal one another and without communication they could not live. Commons, animal communication, soundscape, sound-world, acoustic niche, sound interference, biophony, geophony, anthrophony, soundscape ecology, property, cultural, intellectual, and natural property rights, ownership, stewardship, commodification, exchange, biodiversity, deep ecology, exploitation, regulation, management, wilderness, resources, set-asides, non-use—these are only some of the concepts that need to be explored and put into relation. In addition, of course, as the subject of this blog is music and sustainability, it’s important to locate the place of music (humanly organized sound) in soundscapes and sound-worlds.
    Among the questions and objections to a sound commons for all living beings are these: Must a commons be regarded as a resource to be used, propertized, regulated and, eventually, commodified? If “nature” is unknowable to us except through historically changing human constructions of it, is there a verifiably true basis for claiming a relationship between sound, communication, biodiversity, and a resilient planet? And why are all creatures, not just humans, entitled to their acoustic spaces, bats and snakes and locusts as well as you and I? In such a case, what would it mean to model management of the sound commons on nature’s economy? And why have any confidence in human ability to manage at all, when humans have gotten us into this predicament in the first place? I’ve been exploring many of these concepts and questions in this blog since 2008, and now it is time to run a bit of order through them and place them in relation to make the larger argument.
    In my previous entry I suggested that while the acoustic ecology movement’s efforts to eliminate noise pollution from the soundscape were laudable, the human-centeredness of this approach was too narrow. Those of us who exclaim “I can’t hear myself think!” are responding to sound pollution. But noise interference affects all creatures who communicate using sound, whether humans, whales, or spadefoot toads. Communication is basic to life, but like many other aspects of the environment it is under threat, chiefly from human activity. The helicopter noise impacts communication among caribou which in turn impacts the Innu way of life. A more dramatic example of interdependence among all living creatures would be difficult to find. Developing this argument will not be simple, but summary of the argument is clear enough: human beings should do what we can to manage, not damage, the soundscape, and do so to enable all creatures, not just humans, to communicate in their acoustic niches. If we are able to do so, the music of all living beings will flourish, and sound communication will contribute to sustaining a healthy, biodiverse planet.

Conservation, environmentalism, ecology

    A review of a new biography of Rachel Carson, one of the pioneers of modern environmentalism, affords an opportunity to compare and contrast three keywords in my work on music and sustainability—all of which are very much involved in contemporary sustainability discourse here and elsewhere. Those keywords are conservation, environmentalism, and ecology.
    Carson’s book, Silent Spring (1962), with its warnings about agricultural pesticides' effects on bird and other animal life, ushered in the modern era of environmentalism in North America. Carson wrote it while living on a remote island in Maine where she witnessed DDT's impact on bald eagles. Tim Flannery, who reviewed the biography in the New York Review of Books for November 22, 2012, writes that the biography's author, William Souder, argues that Silent Spring “‘marks the birth of the "bitterly divisive" concept of environmentalistm. Before it, environmental politics was characterized, he says, by the ‘gentle, optimistic proposition called “conservation,” which concerns the wise use of resources and has broad appeal across the political spectrum. Environmentalism, in contrast, can be politically polarizing because it involves a clash with vested interests'” (1). Of course, Carson was not the first environmentalist; Thoreau was one in the 19th century, and arguably so was the Englishman Gilbert White in the 18th. One might even make a case for John Bartram, a botanist (in the American Colonies) who lived a generation before White.
    But although we can point to earlier 20th-century North American, science-grounded environmentalists such as Aldo Leopold, Carson was the first to change public consciousness. Indeed, Carson’s work was polarizing: while President Kennedy and the general public took her side, the chemical companies who manufactured pesticides tried to discredit Carson, influence the public debate her book ushered in, and lobby Congress to prevent the eventual ban on DDT. Carson prevailed. Since then, of course, many global corporations have done their best to fight environmentalists in similar ways, adding greenwashing and large campaign contributions to their arsenal.
    At issue here is the distinction between conservation and environmentalism. Among early conservationists in the US, such as Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, and again in the 1930s with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the guiding principle was so-called wise use, which included public recreation and managed extraction of natural resources; the National Parks are examples. But even in the early period, and especially during the CCC era, more radical voices argued for setting wilderness areas aside: not wise use, but either light use or no use at all. The keyword "conservation" still implies a compromise between strict environmentalists who would severely limit or prohibit use, and “wise use” conservationists. In contemporary sustainability discourse, the wise use faction is represented by those who advocate “sustainable development” which, to use the words Flannery quotes from Souder, is a “gentle, optimistic proposition” and one under which certain developers and environmentalists find common ground.
    Besides wise use, conservation also bears another cross as a movement supported by the wealthy at the expense of the poor. The National Parks (Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountain) that were built in the southern Appalachians, for example, were established by eminent domain; that is, the federal government dispossessed the inhabitants (chiefly subsistence farmers) against their will and resettled them elsewhere “for the good of the Nation.” Such dispossession by the law of eminent domain is not exactly a new thing in the US, and there is a shameful history behind it (consider, for example, the treatment of Native Americans).

Local forest path

     And if one looks around today at the various conservation heritage trusts, the ones that receive charitable contributions from the wealthy to buy up land and turn it into preserves for nature trails, ocean access, farmland preservation, and the like, the question arises as to who uses these preserves. In my part of the US, as in many others, they're for those with money, leisure and an aesthetic interest in nature--in short, for environmentalists. The heritage trusts do not set aside land for trailer parks and RV campgrounds or for ATV and snowmobile use. Local naturalists in my part of Maine host a series of “walks and talks” through these forest and coastal preserves during the warmer months, for tourists and interested residents; subjects include local bird and animal life, geological formations, and other aspects of natural history. These rural preserves do not host visits from inner city residents who are below the poverty line; not only do the urban poor have no means of getting to them, but nature walks aren't high on their list of priorities.
    When conservation was first coupled with the word “cultural” beginning in the 1970s, the historic preservation model was applied to culture. Managed and wise use was the watchword, as federal and state agencies, historical societies, and NGOs got into the act. Cultural conservationists tried to manage cultural flow so that traditional expressive culture was not crowded out by what were felt to be the fads and fashions of modern, media-driven, popular culture. (I’ve written recently that those of us involved in cultural conservation and cultural sustainability need to be aware not only of cultural threats but also economic and environmental ones; I needn’t repeat that here.) Yet there was, in the early decades of cultural conservation, a kind of top-down, wise-use mentality in operation, one which has gradually and unevenly been giving way to cultural partnerships, participatory action research, and bottom-up management.
    As a keyword, environmentalism is usually distinguished from ecology in that the former is a political movement while the latter is a science. The distinction can be made clearer by saying that the science of ecology, like all science, aims to be objective and apolitical, or politically neutral; whereas environmentalism advocates in the political arena with its agenda to protect and preserve the natural environment. In this sense, it is plain that the conservation land trusts, with an ideology of environmentalism, ought to prohibit snowmobiles and ATVs from their nature trails if these tear up the land and bother the nearby animal inhabitants (human and otherwise) with their noise and fill the air with their carbon exhaust. Sometimes, of course, in popular discourse the word "ecology" is used when "environmentalism" is meant; people sometimes refer to “the ecology movement” as if they were referring to the environmental movement and at other times use the two words interchangeably. Indeed, even the word "ecosystem" is becoming common in public parlance.
    Yet in some instances this distinction between ecology and environmentalism is hard to maintain. For example, the science known as conservation biology (sometimes called conservation ecology) can be regarded as an applied ecology: environmentalism based on ecological principles.
    Just which ecological paradigm should rule, though, is a crucial question. Returning to the new book about Carson, Flannery reveals his own ecology-informed environmentalism. Concluding, he writes, “After recently rereading Silent Spring, I discussed Carson with an Indian friend, who put a question to me: ‘What is more orderly, a jungle or a garden?’ After a moment’s thought the answer became obvious. Of course it is the jungle, where the invisible laws of ecology dictate the relative abundance of plants and animals, and where they occur. The very shape and position of every leaf abides by those eternal rules” (p. 23). When Professor Flannery invokes the “invisible laws” and “eternal rules” of ecology he is thinking of the ecosystem paradigm in which nature in relatively pristine areas such as a jungle achieves a “balance” or equilibrium (the “relative abundance,” “shape and position of every leaf”) that it tends toward elsewhere, except when the balance is upset by human intervention (or as Joni Mitchell sang, “They paved paradise and they put up a parking lot”).
    The only problem with a balance of nature is that most ecologists—that is, the scientific ones—no longer believe in it. Beginning around the same time that cultural conservation arose in the public arena—the 1970s—ecologists began seriously to challenge such concepts as stable ecosystems, climax forests, and the balance of nature, arguing that the evidence indicates the opposite: that left undisturbed by humankind, the natural world does not move inevitably toward balance but is, rather, characterized by frequent perturbation, disturbance, and merely temporary equilibria—indeed, many different equilibrium points, one in which the relative abundance of plants and animals is always changing, as is the shape and position of every leaf.
     It is not accidental that ecologists were abandoning the balance of nature theory at about the same time that scientists were advancing chaos theory, a view of an uncertain universe that aligns with the new ecological paradigm of a natural world consisting not of ecosystems but of “patches” moving, in response to disturbing forces beyond their control, from one state toward another. How conservation biologists and environmentalists, let alone cultural conservationists and sustainability advocates, react today to this changed ecological paradigm depends on their awareness of it and how seriously they take it. Like a number of environmentalists, the reviewer for the New York Review of Books appears unaware of this paradigm shift. But to those who are aware, a concept like “resilience” is one way of responding—and I have blogged about resilience in this space before (please see the entry for July 21, 2011: "Sustainable Music: Resilience"). That is, resilience is the ability to resist or recombine in the face of perturbation or disturbance; management for resilience is one way to think about conservation under the new ecological paradigm.
     But there are other “downers” at work against environmentalism and musical and cultural sustainability. These include some of the obvious, such as the ideology of global corporate capitalism and neoliberalism; but it also includes powerful critiques (from critical theory) of science as privileged truth, and of environmentalists’ concepts of nature. It can even be supposed that environmentalism and sustainability efforts are themselves responses to the changed intellectual climate of the past forty years. In order to understand music and sustainability in its contemporary context, it’s important to view it not simply as a response to the changing natural and sociocultural environments, but also as a response to various currents in contemporary Theory which undermine old ideas of nature and culture. Some of the environmentalist response is, predictably, reactionary; but some of it attempts to think along with critical theory. I will be writing from and about this perspective in the coming months as I try to organize my thoughts on this music and sustainability project.

(1) Tim Flannery, review of William Souder, On a Farther Shore, New York Review of Books, Nov. 22, 2012, p. 21.

Photo "Local Forest Path" by Jeff Todd Titon, East Penobscot Bay, Maine, December 2005. 

A visit to Portland, Oregon

    I'm just back from an exciting trip to Portland, Oregon, one of the most environmentally conscious areas of the U.S. Professor Darrell Grant, of the music department at Portland State University, invited me to speak on how music might take a seat at the table where sustainability was under discussion. He'd told me that sustainability was an important topic of conversation in his city, and that much good work was being done; but people were puzzled about how music fit into the civic dialogue. Darrell Grant is an active member of the university and the Portland community, a graduate of the Eastman School of Music, a highly regarded teacher and jazz pianist, and a citizen concerned with the health of the music community and the Portland soundscape. Last fall, out of the blue, he invited me to kick off a series of lectures on music and sustainability sponsored by the music department as part of the university's sustainability initiative. He'd run into this blog, read it, and hoped I'd be willing to share some of my thoughts with the Portland community.

    In addition to the lecture, Darrell arranged a 90-minute morning round table to which he'd invited not only members of the music department and the university at large who were interested in the topic, professors from sociology and English, for example, but also several people involved with the city's soundscape, including urban planners, acoustic ecologists, arts administrators, architects, and the president of the local musicians' union, all for a dialogue around music's place in the city's ongoing efforts at sustainability.

    On Friday morning while eating breakfast I read the city paper, The Oregonian, and found an entire section devoted to "How We Live: Sustainability." The lead article was on Oregon State University's new green energy center; other articles discussed an exhibit of Whale Island petroglyphs from the Wampanum tribe, a documentary film entitled The Economics of Happiness, sponsored by Portland's Center for Earth Leadership, a public symposium on policy planning for the Williamette River watershed, a tree plantation repair work project, meant to improve stream health and restore wildlife habitat, and seeking volunteers; a film about the vanishing bees; and more. Writer Carrie Sturrock's column, "PDX Green" (PDX is the abbreviation for Portland), quoted Dick Roy, of the Center for Earth Leadership: "If everyone became a naturalist and understood the geology of the region and the history of the region and had a commitment to place, then the place we are isn't just a commodity. Then you have a foundation of people living in place who accept deep responsibility for it." Sturrock concluded that "Consequently, it becomes more easy and natural to support local businesses and farmers rooted in place." I felt grateful to be in such an environmentally-conscious place as Portland, with like-minded people.


    The music department representatives spoke about the mission statement they'd drafted concerning music and sustainability, in the process discovering many different interests and voices. I likened this, and the additional voices at the table, to the acoustic ecology of the tropical rain forest, where the voices of birds, reptiles, insects (yes, they make sounds by rubbing parts of their bodies together), and other animals all can be heard, not in a cacophony but each species with their particular acoustic niche, and where they can communicate with one another. A sociology professor picked up on this idea, saying that in her work she's very much concerned with the role of music in the health and solidarity of human communities.

    One of the Portland city community members spoke about music's quality of resilience, both in preference to the term sustainability, and as a supplement to it. He was speaking about the resilience of musical cultures and musicians as well, and instanced resilience as a quality that enabled music to survive in the face of change. This stimulated me to suggest to the group that resilience was one of the more important ecological concepts. A few of the people at the round table were aware that in the last  forty years or so the idea that ecosystems tend toward a state of dynamic equilibrium, exemplified in the climax forest, has been severely challenged by an opposite hypothesis, namely that disturbance rather than equilibrium is the natural tendency, that the ecosystem is no system at all, and that entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics characterize the natural world. Against this movement toward disorder, randomness, and chaos, however, I said that the natural world does exhibit resilience; and certainly the resilience of musical cultures is analogous.

    After everyone had a chance to speak and introduce themselves and their concerns, I noted that their concerns fell broadly into two topics: (1) the sustainability of music into the future, and (2) the role of music in the sustainability of life on planet Earth. These concerns, I said, lead us to formulate cultural policy in regard to music. Sustainability is a new word, but cultural policy has been concerned with the sustainability of music for a very long time. For example, music education has been going on for centuries; its goal is the sustainability of music and musical cultures. Beginning in the nineteenth century, efforts were under way to preserve musical artifacts in museums; before that, in private collections. Conservation was another form of cultural policy, ancient in regard to patronage, such as music supported by courts and governments throughout the world; but in the last part of the 20th century, cultural policy involving conservation began to target endangered musics for support, just as conservation efforts in the natural world were targeting endangered species.

    After critiquing targeted interventions, I pointed out that in the last decade or two, cultural policy has moved from conservation efforts in support of music to a view of music as an arm of economic policy, and I mentioned the ways in which cultural policymakers were bringing music and the arts into what was being termed the creative economy, as a spur to technological innovation and economic growth. It was interesting to see some resistance at the round table to the creative economy argument, as if there were something crass about it. Instead, as one of the community members put it, cultural policy should view music as an important component of happiness and well-being. I told them that music, art, gift, commodity, and the creative economy is an area I will be exploring in invited lectures later this winter and spring.

    Toward the end of the long and productive discussion, the talk turned toward the influence of the Internet on the future of music. Professional musicians, indeed the profession of music itself, was going to have to change, said the president of the musicians' union. How would it be possible for professional composers and musicians to continue earning a living, if society was moving away from the idea that musical product and performance is intellectual property that should be protected by copyright? Some felt that it would be difficult for older musicians to adapt, and that the future would see more musicians making less money. Some of the younger people at the table pointed out that while the Internet was moving toward free delivery of recordings, the circulation possibilities for music and access for musicians were increasing enormously, to the point that more musicians would be making more money in the future, not from music available on the Internet, but from concerts and recordings sold at concerts (which were not available on the Internet). Afterward many of the participants mentioned that they had been reading this blog with pleasure and were glad to meet the author; some had been reading it for more than a year or two.

    Friday evening’s lecture concentrated on the implications of the Four Principles from conservation biology (diversity, interdependence, limits to growth, and stewardship) for cultural policy regarding music. I spoke about these, thinking that in such an ecologically-conscious community, this aspect of the topic would be of more interest than others. I spoke about stewardship and partnership, had them sing an Old Regular Baptist lined hymn with me, and then talked at length about how the Old Regular Baptists had been able to conserve and revitalize their 425-year-old singing tradition.

    I was going to conclude by talking about the Lilley Cornett Woods, the only old-growth forest left in eastern Kentucky, but I ran out of time. The Lilley Cornett Woods is located in the same southeastern part of the state as the Old Regular Baptists. In fact, the hymn we listened to, and then sang, was one that I recorded in a church not more than a few miles away from the Lilley Cornett Woods. So I will leave for another time the story of Lilley Cornett and the 500 acres of original growth forest he bought after World War I on his miner’s wages, and preserved because he wouldn’t sell out to the timber cutters and the coal companies. Nor would the Old Regular Baptists sell out to the musical reformers, whether the purveyors of music literacy, shaped notes and gospel music in the 19th century, or the dominance of gospel music (what some of them call "radio songs") in the 20th. It’s not a coincidence that the Old Regular Baptists and the Lilley Cornett Woods inhabit the same geographical and cultural space.