Does mountaintop removal cause earthquakes?

   Three days ago at 12:08 p.m. an earthquake centered in the town of Blackey that measured 4.3 on the Richter Scale “rattled southeastern Kentucky” -- this from an AP report published in the Huffington Post on Nov. 10, 2012. The Post reported that according to the U.S. Geological Survey, the quake was a “shallow” one, at a depth of only seven-tenths of a mile, or 3700 feet below the surface. Blackey, in Letcher County, may have gotten its name from nearby Black Mountain, or possibly from the blackness of the coal seams in its mountains. The Wikipedia reports that it was named after Blackey Brown, one of its early inhabitants, but the locals think the name comes from the coal that has been mined all around for nearly a century, first underground, then with strip mining, and lately by means of mountaintop removal (MTR). With its blasting and earth removal, coal mining obviously disturbs the earth. Could mining have caused this earthquake?

   On hearing that the earthquake was centered in Blackey, I immediately got in touch with Elwood and Kathy Cornett, friends of mine who live only a couple of miles from the center of Blackey, to see if they were all right. Elwood told me that they had survived just fine, and that it didn’t seem like their house had any damage, even though the exact center of the quake was one mile from their home. Theirs is a home that I have visited many times. I have been “kept overnight” there, as they say. And Elwood and Kathy have visited me twice where I live in Maine. Elwood is the elected moderator, or head, of the Indian Bottom Association of Old Regular Baptists. I first got to know Elwood and Kathy (his wife) when visiting with the Old Regulars every weekend in 1990 when teaching as a visiting professor of Appalachian studies, at Berea College in Kentucky. Since then I’ve been back to visit many times and collaborated with them on several projects to help them sustain their music, some of which I’ve mentioned in passing in this blog.

   Ironically, on October 25 at a conference in New Orleans I presented a paper whose main point was that when we think about helping communities to sustain their traditional arts, we need to bear in mind economic and environmental threats as well as cultural ones. In that presentation I mentioned the threat presented by MTR, which levels the mountaintops, extracts the coal, and dumps the toxic waste into the stream beds and hollows below, where it poisons the water and sickens the people. Not only does MTR endanger the people but it engineers an ecological catastrophe in the natural world of the Appalachian mountains. If anyone had asked me how those catastrophic threats to the nature of Appalachia were made manifest, the first thing I’d have mentioned was flooding resulting from deforestation. If they had asked further, I would have talked about ecosystem disturbance and the extinction of species. I did not have earthquakes in mind then. I do now.

   Ironically, or perhaps prophetically, my blog entry from one week ago was all about this--how cultural sustainability must take into account economic and environmental threats. Take a look, if you will. I would like to think that four days later it was as if the earth trembled in response. (I speak metaphorically, of course: “as if.”) In a sense, it doesn’t matter whether the quake was caused by mining, or something else: the quake shows that the Old Regular Baptists, the community that keeps alive the oldest English-language religious singing tradition in the United States, are vulnerable not only to cultural threats but to catastrophic environmental ones.

   But was MTR the cause? I hesitate to bring MTR up again with Elwood and Kathy and the others, but I will do so. Several years ago, when MTR first came into their region,  I had asked them how they felt about MTR. Elwood, who is a very kind, wise and effective leader in his community, understood that as an outsider, a university professor, and someone who acted on his beliefs in cultural equity and in the Environmental Movement, I would have been mightily opposed to MTR—I did not have to tell him so. In fact, just before mentioning MTR I had asked Elwood about the nearby Lilley Cornett Woods, the largest remaining old-growth forest in Kentucky, and whether he was related to the man after whom it was named, a World War I veteran who kept his land intact by refusing to sell the property rights to the timber and mining companies. He was related, distantly--all the Cornetts in the area, after all, are related somehow. Anticipating my opinion, when I finally got around to asking how he and Kathy felt about MTR, he said something like this to me: “You know, you have to bear in mind that our people have depended for their living on coal mining in this area for nearly 100 years.” That told me a lot. But I want to talk with them about it further now.

   The Blackey earthquake was widely reported in the Press, mostly from various AP bulletins. Here is one: the Alpena (Michigan) News reported on Nov. 12 that nearby residents were shaken up: “Blackey Public Library . . . worker Bonnie Asher said she was coming downstairs when she heard a big boom. Asher said the entire building shook and the lights flickered off and on, and at first she thought maybe a plane had crashed nearby. 'It was very scary,’ she said. ‘It knocked about 14 books off one shelf.’” I would like to know which ones they were.

  Was MTR the cause? It is generally accepted that underground coal mining has caused some earthquakes. Common sense would suggest it does cause them, as mining undermines (to speak in a 'dead metaphor') the structural integrity of the earth. What about the earthquake in Blackey? And does MTR have the same effect as underground mining? The Associated Press reported the following on Nov. 12 (this is from the Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader):

Zhenming Wang

“Geologists say the 4.3 magnitude earthquake that shook eastern Kentucky over the weekend was too deep to be induced by the region's underground mining activity. The epicenter was . . . in the heart of Kentucky's coal country, where underground mining and surface blasting are common. The head of the University of Kentucky's Geologic Hazards Section, though, says Saturday's quake occurred about 12 miles below the surface, far too deep for underground mining to have been a factor. Zhenming Wang says it came near the Eastern Tennessee Seismic Zone. That area receives a 4-magnitude quake every five to 10 years. [Wang] says mining and hydraulic fracturing used by the natural gas industry can possibly be a contributor to earthquakes but not in this case.”

   Twelve miles below the surface? That is what Adjunct Professor of Geology Wang said, but the U.S. Geological Survey concluded that the quake was only 0.7 miles below the surface. Who is right? Both conclusions were separately and widely reported but I've seen no report in which they were put in contrast with each other. And how far below the top of the mountains in Letcher County is seven-tenths of a mile? If we ask how high is the highest mountain near Blackey, the highest in the county is Black Mountain, with an elevation of 3,700 feet. Blackey itself is at an elevation of 1,000 feet, five-tenths or half a mile below that peak. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, then, the quake itself must have occurred at sea level.

   The mountaintop removals at Oven Fork, about 15 miles as the crow flies from Blackey, are pictured below. The evidence is circumstantial, to be sure. But common sense tells me that when mountaintops are dynamited and otherwise blasted to smithereens, the earth below is going to be “some disturbed,” as my friends in the state of Maine would say. Look at the picture and ask yourself if it’s related to the earthquake. Talking about music, ethnomusicologist Dave McAllester, then the last living founder of the Society for Ethnomusicology, repeated as a refrain in his last public speech, in 2005, “It’s all connected.” Indeed.

Mountaintop Removal, Oven Fork, KY, 15 miles from Blackey

2011 I.U. Keynote now on YouTube

As of Oct. 1, 2012, a video of the keynote address that I gave at Indiana University in March, 2011 (please see my blog entry "A Hoosier Mediation," May 20, 2011) was posted in three parts on YouTube by Michael Goecke. I didn't know that a video was being shot of my presentation, but I don't mind its being on YouTube. It can be found and viewed here:
          Part One: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm-RieiUJA8
          Part Two: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03feYtGVvkk
          Part Three: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwJ1ij0jwGk

Cultural Sustainability, Economics and the Environment

   Efforts at musical and cultural sustainability must not fall victim to tunnel vision. Even in those areas where musical loss appears to have been reversed, entire social groups remain at risk. Economic and environmental threats to cultural sustainability may be even more significant than media pressures. Public folklorists and applied ethnomusicologists, concentrating on short-term victories in cultural sustainability, have short memories. Only twenty years ago, folklife specialists understood the interdependence of culture and the environment. Bent on community partnerships for the arts, culture workers today seem to overlook the fact that cultural sustainability faces potentially catastrophic economic and environmental forces. That is the essence of what follows here.

A sea of mown hay 

Not long ago folklorists were theorizing cultural conservation; today the operative term is cultural sustainability. Both refer to partnerships between culture workers such as public folklorists, applied anthropologists, and applied ethnomusicologists, on the one hand, and communities of people who are rich in  expressive culture, with the goal of preserving, conserving, encouraging, and sustaining both the arts and the communities. These culture workers almost always work both with community artists and community leaders. These include community historians, scholars, arts promoters and political leaders. But whereas cultural conservation emphasizes preservation, cultural sustainability encourages development.
    In the cultural sustainability discourse, culture is used in three ways: one, as the whole way of life of a group of people; two, as a synonym for art; and three, in the phrase “expressive culture,” which refers to art as lived experience.
    Late last month, at the annual American Folklore Society conference, I heard dozens of public folklorists describe their cultural sustainability work. Most of these descriptions fell into a pattern. The folklorists described instances of successful partnerships that helped sustain the community’s traditional arts, usually through the tried and true methods of festivals, parades, artists coming into the public schools to demonstrate their arts, arts apprenticeships, museum exhibits, and media projects including recordings, videos, books, and Internet sites. These activities are intended to validate the artists and their traditional arts, to make them feel more secure in what they are doing, to help them support themselves by generating more of a market for their arts products, and to give a larger public stamp of approval (usually from a government agency such as an arts council) to community artists and their activities.
    The argument also is made—although it was not made so strongly at this past AFS conference—that these artistic activities constitute a “creative economy” which can help make up for financial losses in communities that have been hurt by the loss of manufacturing or other jobs, particularly if the traditional arts are branded as cultural heritage and attract tourist dollars. What I’ve just described is the general model, and although in some cases it’s worked better than others, at the AFS conference almost all the reports were positive. One success story followed another and another, at least in terms of encouraging the traditional artists and raising their profiles within the various communities (usually urban and ethnic), if not in terms of a creative economy whose impact was measured in dollars and cents.
    I, too, have written about cultural partnerships with the goals of conservation and development, describing my work in southeastern Kentucky in the 1990s with Old Regular Baptists to help the community maintain its music culture. This involved obtaining a self-documentation grant for them, teaching them how to use recording equipment, and their making recordings of endangered music among their own people and creating a library and a stock of teaching tapes to help maintain the tradition. In addition, we recorded two CDs for Smithsonian Folkways, some of them appeared at the Smithsonian Folk Festival, and then in the new century they participated in two conferences on lined-out hymnody at Yale University, organized by Professor Willie Ruff, where they demonstrated their singing—the oldest English-language religious folksong tradition in the United States (1).
    Cultural sustainability, in short, appears to be a growth industry. About four years ago Goucher College began offering the M.A. in Cultural Sustainability, to educate culture workers. Other graduate programs that emphasize, or at least include, public folklore or public humanities in their curricula, similarly are emphasizing community partnerships and cultural sustainability. Of course, many of the public folklorists who advocated for cultural conservation ten, twenty, and even thirty years ago were saying some of the same things about community partnerships and the traditional arts (2).

No train horn

     Nevertheless, I worry that overlooked in the celebrations of community expressive culture are economic and environmental threats to those communities themselves. Why? For one thing, partnering with community leaders is far more difficult when the subject is economics or the environment than when the talk is about encouraging the arts. Everyone likes the arts and the only argument is over whether and how to pay for them. But bring up problems involving industry, transportation and fossil fuels, community relations, poverty, unemployment coupled with crime and drugs, or schools, land use, the location of medical services and the cost of their delivery, energy sources, noise pollution, natural disasters, relations between natives and newcomers, discrimination based on gender, age, and race, global warming and climate change, the effect of floods and rising sea levels, income inequality, gentrification, public transportation, water rights, and the like, and communities show themselves to be in serious disagreement. When community partnerships are viewed as feel-good, kumbaya opportunities, and the "culture" in "cultural sustainability" is centered on the arts, then a focus on community arts and cultural sustainability has worked effectively, though this is not to say it has been easy. But when intractable problems and deep community divisions surface, and the "culture" in "cultural sustainability" is taken instead to mean the whole way of life of a people, then united action is far more difficult, if not impossible; and success stories will be fewer and farther between. Yet cultural sustainability is ultimately dependent on solving those environmental and economic problems, for the arts depend on it even as community sustainability does. 
    Mary Hufford was one folklorist who probed the connection between cultural and environmental conservation. Unlike most of her colleagues who were concerned then (as now) with the conservation of the traditional arts in communities, Hufford in the 1980s explored community expressive culture which related to conservation in the world of Nature, whether in the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey or in the forests of West Virginia. Working for the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, she helped initiate the Pinelands Folklife Project in the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey, thus linking cultural with government natural conservation management efforts and moving the field of folklife in this direction. After completing this project she turned her attention to links between folklife and the forest ecology of the southern Appalachian mountains while editing a volume of essays, Conserving Culture (3).
    Indeed, the Folklife Center had considered the links between cultural conservation, land-use planning, and the natural environment in the early 1980s in conjunction with the Tennessee-Tombigbee River Waterway project, already under construction, when they were asked by the National Parks Service to take part in so-called “mitigation efforts” to counteract adverse effects of the Waterway on the affected areas’ populations and surrounding resources. After initial enthusiasm for the project, the Center withdrew, citing ethical issues (4). Further attempts to partner with the Parks Service during the next fifteen years also produced uneven results, due to differences over politics, bureaucratic problems, and arguments among stakeholders over goals and methods. In 1999 a new Folklife Center director was hired, in 2002 Hufford left the Center to direct a newly formed folklife and ethnography center at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center moved away from team projects involving ethnography, culture and nature (5). Meanwhile, intangible cultural heritage gained currency as both a term and strategy among public folklorists, particularly when UNESCO intensified its international efforts in this area in the new century.

    Hufford had approached me in the 1980s to discuss mutual interests because I too had been exploring the relations between culture and nature in my research for the Powerhouse for God projects (6). In the Powerhouse book I proposed an ecological model for farming, family, and belief using the metaphor of husbandry to unite the realms. Back in the 1970s when I started this research I was not thinking in terms of cultural conservation; rather, I was interested in how traditional ways of thought nurtured in that ecosystem had persisted into the twentieth century, particularly in a religious worldview, despite the loss of the farm economy and the transition to an industrial and service economy (7).

    And so despite the early efforts of folklorists like Hufford, the environment is not playing an important role in contemporary cultural sustainability discourse. I plead guilty myself. Although I’ve been talking and writing about conservation biology and environmentalism and their contributions to the sustainability discourse, until fairly recently I’ve been concerned chiefly with music, sustainability, and cultural policy. But as I continued to explore Nature’s economy and acoustic ecology, conservation biology became not only a resource for my cultural policy work but also a bridge to environmental sound-worlds themselves. My recent work in Thoreau and sound in the natural world instantiates this shift.

Yellow warbler

    Burt Feintuch, another folklorist who was an early leader in theorizing cultural conservation, asked me some years ago what role economics played in the Old Regular Baptist community that I had been working with in the 1990s (8). He had, himself, been researching music and cultural tourism and the creative economy in Cape Breton, where much of the industrial and fishing industry has departed, while the major economic activity of the island has become a tourist trade which depends, in significant part, on the traditional music and dance of the region. I did not have a good answer for him at the time, but I’ve thought about the question ever since. Economics also has been largely absent from the cultural sustainability discourse, except insofar as people were talking and writing about cultural heritage, tourist dollars and the creative economy. (Of course, the Old Regular Baptists would not care to become actors demonstrating their cultural heritage for tourists, except very occasionally, at festivals, conferences, and so forth.)
    Here, then, are some excerpts from what I said on the cultural sustainability panel, when I spoke about the perils of overlooking economic and environmental threats when considering work in cultural sustainability.
    “When thinking about culture, it would not be wise to overlook nature and the traditional economy as it relates to the community that culture workers partner with.. . . 
    “In other words, if the natural ecosystem that sustains traditional expressive cultures is damaged, drastically altered, or collapses, the effects on cultural sustainability are catastrophic. This is not an entirely new idea for folklorists, of course, but it is a principle that is liable to be forgotten when discussing cultural sustainability, for those discussions most naturally turn to cultural threats.
    “In those areas where traditional expressive culture is dependent on ecosystem maintenance or, in some cases, ecosystem restoration, the idea that culture is dependent on the natural environment is unavoidable. Examples include Native American basketmaking in northern New England, where a beetle, the emerald ash borer, threatens to destroy the ash trees from which baskets are made. Examples abound among traditional indigenous cultures in Africa, Asia, the circumpolar regions, and Latin America whose lifeways are threatened or have been unalterably changed by destruction of the environment, usually done under the banner of modernization and economic growth. But in other areas the link between culture and nature is not always perceived as directly. I would like to suggest that this is a failure of imagination which folklorists and other humanists are in a position to understand and act upon, because we can understand these interconnections in terms of what humanistic geographer Yi-fu Tuan four decades ago called topophilia, or love of place (8).
    “. . . as folklorists are well aware, wholesale changes in local and regional economies, such as the drying up of fisheries or, in the case of central Appalachia, automation in the coal mines, threatens local cultures and causes out-migration. But threats to the natural environment rise to yet another level, because economies are themselves dependent on the natural ecosystem. The economic human does not exist apart from the natural world. An entire field, ecological economics, is devoted to that principle.
    “Thus in Appalachia an even greater threat to cultural sustainability, greater than cultural threats from newfangled music or trendy religion, and greater than from economic displacement, is the threat to the nature of Appalachia caused by the impact of modern mining methods on the mountain ecosystem: first strip mining, and now the horror of mountaintop removal. Topophilia is strong in Appalachia, as elsewhere; and it results in and from the intimate connection between culture and nature. But with wholesale alterations to the mountain ecosystem, and the resulting natural disasters—some obvious, like flooding, and others less obvious, such as microclimate change, unchecked predation in agriculture and elsewhere in the natural world because the ecosystem has been disturbed, and so forth—cultural sustainability is threatened as never before. Folklorists, in short, would do well to understand where and how cultural sustainability interacts with environmental sustainability, and build that into their cultural policies.”

Notes

(1) Jeff Todd Titon, “The Real Thing: Tourism, Authenticity, and Pilgrimage among Old Regular Baptists at the 1997 Smithsonian Folklife Festival,” The World of Music 41 (3), 1999, pp. 115-139. Also, Jeff Todd Titon, “Tuned Up with the Grace of God: Music and Experience among Old Regular Baptists,” in Music in American Religious Experience, ed. Philip Bohlman and Elizabeth Blumhofer, New York, Oxford University Press, 2005.

(2) Ormond Loomis, ed., Cultural Conservation: The Protection of Cultural Heritage in the United States. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, American Folklife Center, 1983.

(3) Mary Hufford, One Space, Many Places: Folklife and Land Use in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, American Folklife Center, 1986. Also, Mary Hufford, ed., Conserving Culture: A New Discourse on Heritage. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1994.

(4). See Alan Jabbour, The American Folklife Center: A Twenty-Year Retrospective. Washington, DC: American Folklife Center, 1996.

(5) The University of Pennsylvania’s Administration decided about 2000 to put an end to its Folklore Department and distinguished Ph.D. program, and to put in its place a new Center for Folklife and Ethnography, hiring Hufford as its director. Tenured folklore professors were permitted to stay in the university.

(6) Jeff Todd Titon, Powerhouse for God (2 LP recordings, booklet), Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1983. Also, Jeff Todd Titon, Powerhouse for God: Speech, Chant and Song in an Appalachian Baptist Church, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1988. Also, Barry Dornfeld, Tom Rankin, and Jeff Todd Titon, Powerhouse for God (16mm film), 1989. Distributed by Documentary Educational Resources, Watertown, MA; also may be streamed and viewed in its entirety at www.folkstreams.net.

(7) My thoughts had turned in this direction partly because of my participation in the environmental movement of the 1970s, and partly because of my participation as a faculty member in a team-taught course in the American Studies program at Tufts University. The course was entitled “History and Ecology in America,” and it was in that context that I began linking my interests in ecology with my academic work.

(8) Burt Feintuch, ed., The Conservation of Culture. Lexington, University of Kentucky Press, 1988. See, e.g., Jeff Todd Titon, Elwood, Cornett, and John Wallhausser, eds., Songs of the Old Regular Baptists of Southeastern Kentucky, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Folkways CD, 1997. See also, Jeff Todd Titon, “Old Regular Baptists of Southeastern Kentucky: A Community of Sacred Song,” Smithsonian Institution, 1997, at http://www.folklife.si.edu/resources/festival1997/baptists.htm.

(9) Yi-fu Tuan, Topophilia. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974.

Photographs above: 1: "A sea of mown hay," East Penobscot Bay, Maine, summer 2012. Photo 2: "No Train Horn," Pittsfield, Maine, summer, 2009. 3: "Yellow warbler," East Penobscot Bay, Maine, summer 2010.All photos by Jeff Todd Titon, © under a Creative Commons license. You may freely share them, but you must not alter them and they must not be used for commercial purposes.

A Barbecue in Sweetwater

Some readers of this blog have asked whether I'd be willing to say something about the places I've visited in lecturing publicly about music and sustainability. Travel writing isn't my purpose but I can't pass up the chance to write about Bradley's Barbecue, formerly Wilson's Barbecue, in Sweetwater, Tennessee, just south of Knoxville, where I lectured on October 3 (please see the previous blog entry).

In the spring of 1990 Loyal Jones had taken me to Wilson's on the way to the Appalachian Studies Conference, in north Georgia, and the barbecue was so delicious, and I must have been so effusive about it, that Loyal called the owner over to the table—he knew him—and I repeated my praise, whereupon the owner, Mr. Wilson himself, wrote down the recipe to his barbecue sauce on one of those green-colored guest checks printed on cheap paper. Of course, most of the taste was in the pit barbecuing, not the sauce; but the sauce was excellent, and I was struck by the secret ingredient, which I won't reveal here. Upon returning to Berea College, where I was teaching as a visiting professor at the time, I copied and then carefully handed over this guest check with the recipe to Shannon Wilson (no relation to barbecue Wilson), the special collections librarian and archivist at the Berea College Hutchins Library, for safekeeping; and he put it into an acid-free manila folder. I vowed that if I ever returned to the Knoxville area, I would seek out Wilson’s Barbecue and have another meal.

Interior, Bradley's BBQ


In September of this year, a few weeks prior to my flight to Knoxville, Leslie Gay, my host at the University of Tennessee, emailed asking if there was anything special I wanted to do during my stay there. He may have been surprised to hear that I wanted to go to Wilson’s once again, but he was game to give it a try, although he said he couldn’t locate a Wilson’s in Sweetwater and wondered if the place had disappeared. Fearing the worst—it had been 22 years, after all—I emailed Loyal and asked if he knew what happened to the restaurant. He confirmed my fears, saying that the place had changed hands since then, and he couldn’t remember the new name of it; but he and Nancy had stopped in some years ago and had not been impressed by the change. 

Meanwhile, Les discovered that there was a place in Sweetwater called Bradley’s Barbecue, and wondered if that was the same place. I told him about Loyal’s warning, but he thought we should give it a try anyway; and I’m glad he did.

 Wilson’s Barbecue had gone, but Bradley’s was in the exact same place, with the exact same barbecue pit, and the exact same sauce. The barbecue was as good as I’d remembered it. Maybe Loyal had gone on a bad night.

Fireplace, Bradley's BBQ

The interior of the place had been gussied up a bit, but it was not made to look, as a barbecue joint in New England would have been, like a replica or representation of a southern barbecue joint: it was such a joint, in effect a diner with a barbecue pit. Decor such as the fireplace objects would never be seen in a New England barbecue restaurant, but I have seen similar in places like Duffy’s, in Orland, Maine, a neighborhood joint which has traditional Maine home cooking, though it never calls attention to its cuisine as such.

 Les and two musicologists (one was his wife, Rachel Golden; the other was their colleague Jacqueline Avila) and I all enjoyed a wonderful meal there, all the better because it exceeded expectations.

Pulled pork barbecue plate, Bradley's BBQ




An Echo in Knoxville

     “Thoreau’s Pastoral Symphony” was the title of the public lecture I gave at the University of Tennessee on October 3. It was sponsored by the university’s Humanities Institute and their School of Music. As at the University of New Hampshire last March, I spoke about Thoreau’s remarkable attention to sounds in the natural world and what we might, for music and sustainability today, learn from them. (To stream a video of this lecture, go to http://www.sustainableunh.unh.edu/sustainabilityunbound/) “Music,” Thoreau wrote, “is the sound of circulation in Nature’s veins.” In this University of Tennessee lecture I was able to concentrate on Thoreau’s fascination with echo, with the way echo orients creatures in space and also alters our sense of time. Here is an excerpt from the lecture:

    “With an echo we have a doubling, as if time is stopping and running backwards on itself as the echo returns to the listener. Listening to the echo of a distant drum, Thoreau writes, personifying time, ‘Suddenly old Time winked at me, -- Ah, you know me, you rogue. . .’  Here Time addresses Thoreau as a ‘rogue’ for having found Time out, having known Time by the echo. At this point—it is in the Monday section of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers—Thoreau breaks into a visionary poetry very like that of Emily Dickinson:

          'Then idle Time ran gadding by
           And left me with Eternity alone;
           I hear beyond the range of sound,
           I see beyond the verge of sight, --'

     The encounter with the echo sharpens the writer’s senses, alters his sense of time and space, and enables him to peer into the workings of universe. In the same book he quotes Iamblichus in Taylor's translation, on sphere music thus: ‘Pythagoras . . . extended his ears and fixed his intellect in the sublime symphonies of the world, he alone hearing and understanding, as it appears, the universal harmony and consonance of the spheres, and the stars that are moved through them, and which produce a fuller and more intense melody than anything effected by mortal sounds.’ Thoreau did believe in a version of the theory attributed to Pythagoras which we refer to as the music of the spheres, whose harmonies were based on the mathematical ratios believed to exist between their astronomical intervals; and this was an instance in which Thoreau’s ecstatic experience with the echo confirmed it. Except for Pythagoras himself, humans were supposedly unable to hear this music; but Thoreau felt that he heard it all around him in the sounds emerging from the silences of the natural world. Therefore he pursued it on his daily walks, attended to what he heard, and seldom failed to make note of it in his journals. Thoreau never wrote a pastoral symphony. He never needed to: it was all around him.”

     I also spoke some about Thoreau’s belief in the echo as a signal of co-presence; on one occasion he likens the echo of his voice to the sound of a friend reading his verse back to him. And I spoke about Thoreau’s comparison of echo and reflection, referencing Hudson River School paintings (see the entry for Aug. 30, 2012 in this blog for some of them). I contextualized it within the music and sustainability discussion by suggesting that “this discourse proceeds along two fronts: one, how people can sustain music; and two, how music san sustain people. How people can sustain music gets us into issues involving best practices for the sustenance of music cultures. How music can sustain people gets us into issues of the role of music in the sustenance of life on planet earth. Both of these ways of thinking about music lead us to policy: the first primarily to cultural policy affecting the future of music cultures; and the second to a variety of cultural, economic, and regulatory policies affecting musical activities and their relation to the future of life on the planet.” The Thoreau lecture was an exploration along the second of those two fronts. 

     The audience of students and faculty filled the concert hall auditorium. The thought occurred to me that Thoreau himself had given many public lectures, although he was quite ambivalent about doing so. Several faculty—from the English department, from American Studies, from Religious Studies, and of course from from the School of Music—attended, along with many students and some from the university community in Knoxville at large. After the lecture, there were many thought-provoking comments and questions, and the discussion went on for about a half hour. I can’t recall when I’ve ever given a lecture to so many people that resulted in such a long discussion afterwards. Many people had a stake in different aspects of the talk: cultural policy, sustainability, music psychology, ecocriticism, cultural criticism, and Thoreau himself.

     The chair of Religious Studies spoke at some length in response to my point about co-presence and the way sound sacralizes space (see this blog, April 18, 2011). She had been thinking along the same lines for some time, but was unable to get her colleagues in comparative religion to pay much attention to sound-worlds. After the talk I was taken to dinner by a dozen or so faculty members, she among them; and she asked me why I thought that was. I said that in some ways this is the fault of those in music who have unwittingly erected a barrier with our special language (musical notation and music theory) to describe sound structures. The result is that many academic professionals outside of music feel ill-equipped to discuss it because they don’t know the language. What we in music don’t realize is that this wall not only shuts others out but it also shuts us in. I will pursue this with her after I return from the conferences in New Orleans.

Thoreau's Pastoral Symphony

Next week I will be speaking at the University of Tennessee's School of Music, and later in Boston, on "Thoreau's Pastoral Symphony." Of course, Thoreau never wrote a symphony; but he had a singular understanding of music and its place in the natural world, one which has a good deal of affinity with contemporary composers of ambient music and environmental sound art. Here I want to say a few things about Thoreau's musical background and conclude with a word about how his understanding of music can shift our understanding from people sustaining music to music sustaining life.

Indeed, a very prominent mid-20th century American intellectual historian, Perry Miller, disparaged Thoreau's understanding of music. “Thoreau had an insatiable hunger for music,” he wrote. “His untutored flute-playing has become a legend. He could invoke Beethoven, but he knew little about music, had virtually no chance to learn. . . . The second chapter of 'The Service,' that on heroic music, is pathetic in its revelation of musical illiteracy. What he could learn of music, aside from his little 'music box' and Emerson's Aeolian harp, was only what he might hear through the windows of some burgher's house wherein a daughter of respectability was practicing her piano lessons" (Miller, Consciousness in Concord, p. 146). 

But Thoreau’s pastoral symphony was not, like Beethoven’s, a representation of pastoral; it was pastoral. After all, Thoreau didn’t just write about pastoral; he actually experienced it in his cabin at Walden Pond. And so in these public lectures I will claim that Thoreau’s pastoral symphony was the music of the whole world of Nature, humans included, with which he vibrated sympathetically. 

Thoreau understood Beethoven’s music, the music that Professor Miller said he was ignorant of, as a kind of human echoing of the music of Nature; that is, of natural sounds. Miller’s characterization was at best ungenerous; but was it also correct? What, exactly, was Thoreau’s musical background? Was he really musically illiterate? Was he limited to music boxes, Aeolian harps, and listening through a window to some respectable young lady practicing the piano? David Henry Thoreau (he later reversed his given names) was born in 1818 and spent most of his youth in rural Concord, Massachusetts. What musical education would have been available to a young man of his time and place?

If he had been a musical prodigy Thoreau might have studied performance with a master, but musical conservatories had not yet been introduced in the United States, and the formal study of music history, literature and criticism was even further in the future. We know Thoreau played the flute, loved to sing popular and folk songs, and enjoyed dancing (his mother had sent him to dancing school as a boy). In order to play the flute he would have had to had some kind of tuition which likely would have involved learning musical rudiments, if he had not already learned them in singing school as a boy, in grammar school or, more likely, in church. We can suppose that he was musically literate at least in the limited sense of someone who could read for an instrument and who knew musical intervals, melody, rhythm, and harmony. Also, he was renowned for his unusually keen ear; he could discriminate among different birds singing simultaneously and had a knowledge of each one's song (that is, he could sing it back) as well as a mnemonic device for remembering it (Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau, 195, 265, 354-355.)

As a young man, Thoreau went to dances and other entertainments (Ibid, 73). He did not study music at Concord Academy (where he was enrolled from age 11 until he went on to Harvard) but then it was not offered. He did not receive a musical education at Harvard either because, as far as I can tell, it was not offered. Lowell Mason established his Boston music academy when Thoreau was fourteen years old, with instruction in singing and theory, and therefore launched his music education in the schools program too late for Thoreau to have taken advantage of it. Where else might he have received his education in music? Most likely it was from his father, John Thoreau, who "took great pleasure in music and often played the flute in the parish choir as a young man" (Ibid, 8). His older sister Helen "gave music lessons" in Concord (Ibid, 10). His sister Sophia was "fond of music" and "sang and played the piano well" (Ibid, 12). So instead of being limited to what he could overhear from a respectable neighbor lady playing the piano, he in fact grew up in a musical family; his father sang and played the flute, he himself played the flute, and his two sisters played piano, one well enough to give music lessons. In point of fact, then, his musical education would have been more advanced than most of his peers for that time and place. 

Miller's conclusion about Thoreau's musical illiteracy is, therefore, likely incorrect; but as Thoreau had a much broader concept of music than Miller, the critique is also somewhat beside the point. Thoreau did not write in his journal about the soirees in the family home when he played flute and his sisters played the piano, or the social occasions when he was called on to sing popular songs and ballads. His writings did not chronicle his social life. He did write about times when he and his companions, boating on rivers and lakes, break into songs of camaraderie; and he gives some of the lyrics. We recognize these as occupational folksongs of the sort that folklorists later collected from sailors and loggers. And he also wrote about those times when adrift in a boat on a lake or pond he plays his flute in a meditative way, the scene usually compared to pastoral. Seldom did he comment about concert-going, although we know he attended them; once he wrote, in typical perverse fashion, that opera must be for deaf people. (In fact, his hearing was acutely sensitive and until the last years of his life he could recognize very soft sounds over long distances.) He mentioned Beethoven and other Western art music composers very occasionally, and usually in a complimentary way. But most of his writing about sound and music concerned the sounds he heard in the natural world: frogs, crickets, birds, the sounds of the wind and rain, and also the ambient sounds of children playing, church bells tolling, and people chopping wood and surveyors halloing through the woods to mark their location.

To digress for a moment, when I was a sophomore at Amherst College I met Perry Miller. He had come down from Harvard, where he taught, to lecture us on Roger Williams, in our American studies course. He had written a book on Williams, and in his lecture he argued that the Puritans who ruled the Massachusetts Bay Colony had been ethically wrong to convict him of sedition and heresy and to exile him from the Colony for proclaiming his views on religious freedom. Another professor had taken an opposite view, that the colonial magistrates had the right to banish someone from their community who was a threat to its very fabric. Like most of the students, I sided with Miller when I was asked to write about the conflict. Who, after all, could oppose freedom? Later in the course, as we explored First Amendment rights, I began to understand more about the context. Williams was, in effect, screaming "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, the classic case. Therefore, when I read Consciousness in Concord, I was surprised at Miller's condescension toward Thoreau, his lack of essential sympathy. 

Thinking with Thoreau here, we begin to see the importance of music as sound, and of sound in sustaining life on planet earth. As I've written earlier, one approach to music and sustainability is to ask how we can sustain music; and I've addressed that in various writings on this blog and elsewhere. Another approach to music and sustainability, however, comes from acoustic ecology and is to ask how music is involved in sustaining life on planet earth; and it is in reply to this question that Thoreau's larger scope pertains, for he understood sound to be the natural language of the universe. Thoreau never wrote a pastoral symphony. He never needed to: it sounded all around him. We may not share his Romantic views, but insofar as sound is the primary medium of communication among the creatures of the universe, interference with and threats to the natural soundscape make inter-species communication increasingly difficult, to the point that they endanger the sustainability of life. 

Echo and Reflection

That sound can turn space sacred is one of the principal reasons music is so central a part of ritual performance. (See this blog, April 18, 2011: "Sound Sacralizes Space.") Most Euro-Americans do not often think of sacred space in the world of Nature. A few anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, poets and folklorists study indigenous cultures that do think in those terms. Some music composers, particularly environmental sound artists, also tend to think this way. Recently, I've become interested in echo both literally and as a figure for that sacralization of sound. And thinking about echo led me to mirrors and reflections. 

Echo, I have been thinking, is to hearing what reflection is to seeing. Reflection challenges our normal perception of space. Echo transforms our perception of both time and space. Both are doublings (though not exact imitations); original and near-copy are both present, the reflection simultaneously with the original, the echo later, though usually overlapping in time. (That is, the original sound remains in memory, if not still present to the ear, when the echo is heard.) 

Echo Lake, New Hampshire

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was fascinated by both echo and reflection. He wrote about his encounters with echo chiefly in the woods and on or around lakes. His interests were aesthetic and appreciative, curious and scientific. He liked to hear the echo of his own voice, as well as the echoes of other sounds--church and school bells, axe blows, the shouts of children, the sounds of thunder, the tapping of the woodpecker, a falling branch, the song of a bird. Why was an echo "good" (strong) at one time and place, and weak at another? How did American Indians use echo to measure distance and guide them on their journeys? (He had a chance to observe this in his trip to Mount Katahdin, Maine, and he wrote about it in his Journal and in The Maine Woods.)

Frederic Edwin Church, Mt. Katahdin (Maine) from Lake Katahdin (1850)

More generally, Thoreau asked what happens to sound as it travels over distances? Echo helped him develop a proto-theory of ambient sound; he may well have been one of the first to do so. 

Sanford Robinson Gifford, Lake Scene (1861)

Thoreau wrote about his encounters with reflections in pools and lakes. For example, "The lake is a mirror in the breast of nature, as if there were nothing to be concealed. . . It is the earth's liquid eye. . . I should wither and dry up if it were not for lakes and rivers. I am conscious that my body derives its genesis from their waters. . . " (Journal, Dec. 2, 1840). Here he writes from a perspective of naive realism, as if the reflection were an exact copy of the original. Years later, a more careful and scientific observer, he is puzzled that the lake reflection he sees is not an exact copy, and wonders in his Journal from what standpoint (not his own) it might be. He concludes that there is no standpoint from which the reflected image would be an exact imitation of the original.

Asher B. Durand, Thanatopsis (1850)

While Thoreau in the mid-19th century was living out his pastoral at Walden Pond and writing about echo and reflection, American luminists were painting echo and reflection into their pastoral visions of forests and bodies of water. This cannot be coincidental. Rather than portray Narcissus looking at his reflection in the pool with the nymph Echo by his side, they painted natural landscapes with lakes and rock formations, rivers and ocean estuaries, cliffs and mountains, echo and reflection in the same scene.

Thoreau's vibrating to the sounds of the natural world is the aural equivalent of Emerson's transparent eyeball, in which the sense of self disappears into the ecstasy of hearing (or, following Emerson, of seeing). It is the same when sound sacralizes space and time. Every good musician has felt those magic, ecstatic moments, when the self or ego disappears and you are at one with your voice or instrument: you are your voice or instrument. In those moments time and space become something other, and you experience the music playing (or singing) you, not the reverse. 

Martin Johnson Heade, Thunderstorm on Narrangansett Bay (1868)

The luminists achieved a similar effect, as if they had become transparent eyeballs, eliminating the appearance of their painterly selves by removing from their paintings the marks of their creation. They did so by concealing their brush strokes, as in Heade's arresting painting of the thunderstorm on the bay above, an example of the Romantic sublime. Durand (above), Fitz H. Lane, Heade, and, in some of his paintings, such as his "Eel Spearing at Setauket," William Sidney Mount were among those who brought this luminist vision into being.

In Heade's thunderstorm the artist has vanished inside the painting much as the musician has become the music, the voice merged into the echo. Here, reflections are doubled: the water is dark, reflecting the sky, and this darkness contrasts with the white reflections of the boats' sails. Meanwhile, we see the jagged lightning and, in our mind's ear, we hear the echoing thunder. Listening to those paintings one may hear the co-presence of sound that is characteristic of sacred space.

     "Each more melodious note I hear
       Brings this reproach to me,
       That I alone afford the ear,
       Who would the music be."
                                -Thoreau, from "The Service"

Catching Up

   Various summer activities have prevented me from posting in over a month, so this will be kind of a catch-up entry. Further pursuing music and sustainability through sound studies in the natural world, I've turned to a couple of concepts, namely reflection and echo, that seem to hold possibility. I hope to say more about them here and in my public lectures in the fall. Three await: one at the University of Tennessee, another at Northeastern University, and the third at the Ecomusicologies conference in New Orleans.

   An invitation came along to spend nearly a week in early October in Knoxville at the University of Tennessee, giving a talk on music and sustainability, visiting some classes and speaking about my work and theirs, and being available to faculty and graduate students. This short-term visiting professorship is agreeable work and something I've done before, at the University of Alabama, and also at Florida State University. I very much look forward to that, and to an event coming right on its heels, a symposium at Northeastern University with special guests from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. I was invited to give a presentation in the symposium, and will look forward to seeing some old acquaintances from China including Professor Zhang Boyu, who will be leading the symposium. One of the other presentations is by the Chinese scholar Yu Renhao and is titled "Music of Original Ecology and Original Ecology of Music." I'm not sure what "original ecology" means in this context, but am eager to find out. Finally, I will be presenting at the Ecomusicologies 2012 conference in New Orleans at the end of October, on Thoreau's importance for students of ecology and music. I will have more to say about all this in the coming weeks. 

Musical Being and the Wealth of Nature

Today's news programs noted that an independent Japanese commission, the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission, issued a Report on the incident that occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant on March 11, 2011, just after the earthquake and tsunami. It was the largest nuclear disaster since the 1986 incident at Chernobyl. After reading the Report, it's difficult to continue calling this disaster a nuclear "accident." As Haroko Tabuchi wrote in the New York Times, the commission's chair, Kiyoshi Kurokawa, concluded that "What must be admitted, very painfully, is that this was a disaster ‘Made in Japan.’ Its fundamental causes are to be found in the ingrained conventions of Japanese culture: our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to ‘sticking with the program’; our groupism; and our insularity." 

No doubt; but the Report overlooks even more fundamental causes. Nuclear disasters are not caused by particularities of Japanese culture, though they may be exacerbated by them. They are embedded in the cultures of modernity, of the so-called developed world. The fundamental causes for this catastrophe are to be found in the reasons for the developed world's reliance on nuclear energy in the first place: One, the assumption that humanity could and should control Nature rather than try to live in harmony with Nature's economy. Two, that human happiness increases as material wealth does. And Three, that happiness is chiefly a technical problem, one that will be solved by continuing economic growth, fueled by increasing quantities of energy.

I remain convinced that what I have written about elsewhere (“Knowing Fieldwork,” in Shadows in the Field, ed. Gregory Barz and Timothy Cooley. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 87-100.) as “being in the world musically” is an antidote to this way of thinking. Very briefly, insofar as sound sacralizes space, our space, and time, our time, we live in harmony with Nature's economy; we do not invent our own. But how to realize that permanently? How to turn those moments into the norm? How, in other words, to realize sustainability through musical being-in-the-world? In this research blog I have usually discussed music and sustainability in terms of cultural policies meant to sustain people making music. But now I am writing about music sustaining people. 

Logocentrism is so ingrained that it is unmarked, the default mode: we are in the world in our heads, thinking one word at a time. How, instead, to re-orient consciousness to sonic-centrism? I don't mean to be taken so literally as to be suggesting that if we spent all our time grooving and flowing and dancing to melodies going through our brains and bodies all would be well. Rather, sonic-centrism as a default mode of awareness invokes not only the harmonies of musical melody but also the harmonies Thoreau heard in Nature's economy: in the wind and rain, the birds and frogs, and in the crickets' earth-song. It leads us to appreciate the wealth of Nature, not the wealth of nations.

"Banjo as Mediator" now on the Web

My keynote address, "Music, Mediation, Sustainability: A Case Study on the Banjo," for the folklore and ethnomusicology conference held at Indiana University in March of 2011, is now freely available for viewing and reading on the Internet, as published in the on-line journal Folklore Forum:


http://folkloreforum.net/2012/06/28/music-mediation-sustainability-a-case-study-on-the-banjo/#more-1147


I described this innovative conference, and my participation in it, on this blog in the entry for May 20, 2011. The conference theme was "Mediation," so I took the opportunity to juxtapose two mediation-related topics that I'd been thinking about for several years: one, how a banjo-player learns a tune aurally, on hearing it for the first time, in an old-time music jam, and in so doing mediates between fiddle and guitar; and two, the unwitting documentation of the Black-white vernacular music exchange involving fiddle, banjo, and dancers in the 19th century U.S. Here is the abstract: "The banjo mediates structurally, culturally and historically, and experientially. Structurally, it resists taxonomic classification. Culturally and historically, it is a mediator among African and European American cultures. For that, I interpret evidence of the Black-white vernacular music exchanges in the 19th-century sketches and genre paintings of the American artist, William Sidney Mount. Experientially, the banjo mediates in the old-time string band session as the banjo player creates melody and rhythm interactively with the other musicians. For this, I offer a phenomenological account of what goes through a player's mind/body when learning and performing a previously unfamiliar tune at normal tempo in a jam session. This constructive, creative, and integrative faculty is expressive culture's principal act of resilience, and it may be its main contribution to sustaining life on planet Earth." Internet publication allowed Folklore Forum, a publication of The Folklore Institute, at Indiana University, to show the Mount paintings of musicians in color. 

Sustainability Unbound (5): Political Ecology

Before trying of summarize Enrique Leff's brilliant presentation to the Sustainability Unbound gathering at the University of New Hampshire last March, a word or two about the person himself. We happened to arrive at the conference inn at the same time. This inn, which housed the speakers, advertised itself as an 18th-century antique; but most of it had been tastelessly rebuilt and furnished by someone who spent lavishly but knew little of what period New England antiques were supposed to look like. After introducing ourselves to each other while checking in, we spent the next few minutes talking, then went to our rooms to unpack our bags, and emerged commenting that as the inn's ersatzian decor made a mockery of sustainability, we were glad the symposium was to be held elsewhere--at the university. Leff is a gracious, soft-spoken man of middle height and build, with a dry sense of humor. He is a native of Mexico, perhaps five or ten years younger than I, and a public intellectual who is an author and also a research professor in Mexico City. He has the Ph.D. in developmental economics and considers himself an environmental sociologist. He has held numerous posts with UNESCO on environmental education, and he is the author of several books and essays on the environment and economics. 

In our conversations over the next two days I learned that he is also seriously interested in music, and that he performs as a bolero and opera singer. I told him of my current project involving Hawaiian slack-key guitar performance, and he was interested to learn of Mexico's involvement in bringing the guitar itself to the Hawaiian islands in the early 19th century, for the instrument was unknown in Hawaii earlier. I spoke to him about how the slack-key style of guitar playing was a Hawaiian invention and how it developed into a family and rural community tradition of informal, group music-making, with many different tunings, techniques and repertoire carefully guarded as intellectual property by different families up to about World War II. At that point, with the rural areas emptying, it became clear to many that unless something were done to preserve it, the tradition would die. And so the prominent musical families decided to save the music not by giving it to an archive for preservation, but by giving it away, putting it in the public domain and spreading it around--a better means of sustaining music than archiving alone.

Leff's presentation, "Unbinding Sustainability: A Latin-American Political Ecology Perspective," drew powerfully on the sustainability indictment of economic greed within the framework of ecological economics, pointing out the irony that so-called economic rationality (the idea that when economic man acts to maximize wealth, the invisible hand of market capitalism benefits all) has led not to universal prosperity but to irrational damage to the planet and its ecosystems. Like me, he is skeptical of so-called sustainable development, because despite good intentions development trumps sustainability. Leff pointed out that in order to reverse this irrational damage, humanity must not merely throw over sustainable development but more fundamentally the values on which it is based: wealth measured in terms of how many things a person accumulates or a nation produces (GDP). It is why I am skeptical of economic growth as a panacea, for while it may temporarily relieve economic recession, it will not cure human depression. Wealth measured in terms of beauty, harmony, spiritual values, and so forth offers a different path to happiness, a much more sustainable one. 

In working up this indictment, Leff made a number of provocative points. One, that economic so-called rationality is based on objectification--the measurement of a person or thing or process in terms of cash value only. Two, ecological economics in itself cannot create the revolution in consciousness necessary to overturn those values. Three, "the environment," nebulous as that term is, is nonetheless an external reality which resists being absorbed into rationality, economic or otherwise. This struck me as a viable alternative to the deconstructive attack on philosophical realism. Four, in reaching for a model of ecotechnological productivity based on what Leff called "life" (or what I've thought of as Nature's economy), he turned to the model of photosynthesis, a negentropic process. (The negentropy is temporary and local, of course--Frost's momentary stay against confusion--but if it effected a revolution in consciousness and productivity it would be global, not local, and would effect a technological revolution as well.) 

In searching for cultures whose ecotechnological productivity is based on "life principles" rather than the entropic acceleration caused by economic rationality, Leff turned to Native peoples of South America, particularly Inca civilization and its descendants. These cultures, with their traditional life ways, could offer models, just as certain Native North American cultures have offered models. And Leff also mentioned Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation, showing that he had gone down a similar route concerning pre-capitalist Europe and the rise of the market economy. This was a route I explored a couple of years ago and wrote about on this blog (Oct. 4, 2010 and again on Aug. 14, 2011), in terms of alternative economic systems, asking whether economic anthropology has concluded that Native economic systems are or were more environmentally friendly and ecologically integrated. The evidence, I gather, is not generalizable; moreover, it and its interpretations are disputed by different factions. But that does not mean that one throws out the baby with the bathwater--some Native economic principles and systems clearly suggest a more harmonious relationship with the natural world. And Leff has been thinking about this for several years, with native Latin American cultures as his reference point.

One of my conclusions from Leff's presentation was that if, in the West, Nature has been humanly constructed time and again in our changing image of the economy, then we may try to find constructive ways to resist ecological chaos theory just as Leff proposes models based on photosynthesis as negentropy in opposition to the "normal" degradation that is entropy. After the symposium concluded, his parting words to me were that "music will keep us together." Indeed, we've been in contact by email and I'm looking for more of his work in English--most of it is in Spanish, of course, and unfortunately I never learned that language.

Sustainability Unbound (4): Video Links

I posted the abstract for my talk on "Thoreau's Sounding Earth" in an earlier blog entry (Feb. 28, 2012) and since then I've written about the first two lectures in the Sustainability Unbound series at the University of New Hampshire last March. I'd delayed posting about my presentation there on "Thoreau's Sounding Earth" until they'd posted full videos and podcasts of the lectures on line. Now that they've done so, I feel a bit like Emily Dickinson's public frog, but at any rate here is the link in case readers of this blog would like to see and hear the lecture: 

http://www.sustainableunh.unh.edu/sustainabilityunbound 

Videos of four of the five lectures have been posted to that web page; only Lewis Hyde's is missing. To view or download any of them, for free, just click on the links on that page. The videos show in very high quality, a tribute to the technology that UNH used.

My presentation begins with an introduction by my old friend and colleague Burt Feintuch, the director of the Humanities Center at UNH. After his introduction, I speak for about an hour on Thoreau's remarkable understanding of the soundscape, particularly but not exclusively in response to the sounds of the natural world, drawing many examples from his Journal, and relating it to sustainability issues. This is followed by a  period of questions and answers. It was unusually warm in New England during those two days--the temperature got up in the high 80s in Durham, New Hampshire where we were, late in March, which was about 40 degrees higher than normal. Some of the UNH sustainability faculty introducing us commented that a sign of global warming must have risen to the occasion, showing me that scientists have their moments of magical thinking.  

The lecture that followed mine, by Enrique Leff, was very interesting to me in that it showed a scholar from Mexico who had come through many of the same thought processes I had concerning cultural sustainability within an ecological framework, particularly ecological economics. While I didn't speak about that at UNH, I've written about it extensively on this blog, delivered papers at conferences on the topic, and published essays on it. My movements toward Thoreau reflect my growing interest in acoustic ecology and sound studies, which of course do relate to music and sustainability. But Leff used some different metaphors than I do, and his conclusions were also ones that I could not fully accept. I will write more about that in the coming weeks. 

Bird Song, Borror, Thoreau, and Traveling in Place

I used to think birds of the same species were genetically programmed to sing the same song. And so when I began listening carefully to bird song, I was surprised to find slight variations. I assumed these were accidental, the result of a bird's genetic defects or my inexperience in listening. Curious, I began reading what the ornithologists had to say about it. It turns out that, on the contrary, some young male birds must "learn" their species song from their elders. And very occasionally one does not get it quite right--and when that happens, the offspring may learn that slightly different melody.

Today on my walk in the woods, after three days of heavy rain, I heard a bird singing three of the five notes of the black-throated green warbler's song--the first, second, and fourth only. I concluded that it must be a youngster learning his song. Within a half-mile radius, a couple of other adult birds of that same species were singing all five, so it won't be long before this youngster likely has it right.

But one of the consequences of birds having to learn their songs is that songs of the same species may vary a bit, according to geographical region. The black-throated green warbler's five-note song on this island in East Penobscot Bay, where I spend time when not teaching at Brown or traveling, is typical for Maine. But black-throated green warblers who take up their spring and summer residences outside this region of northern New England sometimes feature a four-note song--that is, only four of the five heard around here. And some have a six-note song, even here.

Novice bird watchers often have difficulty recognizing songbirds by sight--they are small, shy, and do not care to be close to humans. Moving targets, they are not easy to bring up close with binoculars until the novice has practiced with them. In the spring and summer when they are singing, mating, and nest-building they are easier to recognize by sound than sight. Besides, anyone with an interest in the soundscape will pay attention to bird song.

About fifteen years ago I made tape recordings of bird songs on the island where I spend time when not teaching at Brown or traveling. In hopes of identifying them, I compared my recordings to the standard ones on CDs from the Audubon Society and other authoritative sources. But some of the identifications were difficult or impossible, due, I realized, to differences in regional bird song dialects.

To proceed, I needed to find recordings of the birdsong dialects I was hearing. After some searching, I found that Donald Borror (1907-1988), of the Ohio State University, made the recordings that most closely matched the bird songs I was hearing in Maine, and for an obvious reason: he recorded them in Maine. (A brief and informative biography of this bioacoustics pioneer may be found at http://elibrary.unm.edu/sora/Auk/v106n02/p0321-p0323.pdf). 

Borror used a top-of-the-line Nagra reel to reel tape machine with a very sensitive microphone inside of a parabolic cone. (He was also a pioneer in recording techniques.) As a result, his recordings are technically excellent even by today's digital standards. Some of his recordings were issued on LPs in the 1960s, with his commentary aimed at bird watchers interested in identifying birds and bird behavior by sounds. Dover Publications reissued them as cassettes, in the early 1970s, with lengthy accompanying booklets. Borror understood about song dialects and on these recordings aimed at the general public he was careful to say where he made each recording. Today, thousands of Borror's recordings are available for listening on the Ohio State website at http://drc.ohiolink.edu/handle/2374.OX/30658 but this huge database is useful primarily for the scientist and advanced birder wanting to compare songs from the same species according to geographic area and over a forty-year time period. There are, for example, more than fifty separate recordings in the database for the black-throated green warbler. 

Interestingly, Borror also released an LP (Bird Song and Bird Behavior), later reissued by Dover on cassette, which took up various topics of interest to anyone curious about bird song, including how to make recordings of bird songs (and the problems in doing so), classifying bird sounds, types of songs, singing habits, song development in a particular bird, geographic variation in songs, duet singing, differences between songs and calls, making sound spectrograms of bird songs, and so forth. Borror's biographer, his colleague Sandra Gaunt, wrote that he "was a private and retiring person. He preferred to spend his time in the field collecting or in the laboratory organizing, analyzing, and describing his collection." 

Like Thoreau, Borror observed natural sounds by returning seasonally to the very same locations, year after year. Like a bird, Borror migrated annually from southern Ohio to the state of Maine, recording in both places. Gaunt writes, "I once asked Borror if he did not wish that he had traveled more broadly in his years of collecting. He allowed that his participation in the Pacific Theater [in World War II] was all the world travel he cared to experience and, more seriously, that there was more than enough to document at home." Emerson criticized Thoreau for staying close to his home in Concord, Massachusetts most of his life. Thoreau fashioned his reply: "I have traveled much in Concord." Indeed, Thoreau walked every afternoon (and on moonlit nights) to observe the changes in the natural world and, occasionally, his neighbors. Ecologists, of course, study small area ecosystems intensively today. Gaunt concluded, "For many of [Borror's] locations he obtained recordings of many species for nearly 40 consecutive years. These repeated samples supported the research effort of one man, and today they are a valuable, if not unique, resource for future studies, especially studies of song pattern variation in time." 

Bird song presents an interesting contrast with music; that is, with music as humanly organized sound. We have no problem calling bird vocalizations "song" even though they do not meet the scientific criteria for music. Nor do they meet the criteria for language, because they lack language's recursive qualities. Music composers throughout history and in many different cultures have been inspired by the melodies of bird song, sometimes directly imitating it, and sometimes transforming it. One ethnomusicologist, Steve Feld, wrote a book about the complex cultural ramifications of the belief, among the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea, that bird song is a signal from departed ancestors.

What are the songs of birds telling us about sound and communication, the uses of sound as signal (territory, mood, danger, location, etc.)? What do they tell us about sound and place, about sound and movement, about the ecology of the acoustic niche? And finally, what can we learn from birds about music, sound, and sustainability? Thoreau and Borror both were struck by the seasonal, the calendrical, the cyclical repetitions of bird song and sound in the natural world. Thoreau's last great (and unfinished) project was his cyclical "Kalendar" of the seasonally changing natural world around Concord; his journal observations were made to that end, as were Borror's recordings--longitudinal studies, intensively rather than extensively, of sound and sustainability, by traveling in place.

Classical Music's Radio Future

In November, 2010, I wrote three entries in this blog about the future of classical music on US radio. WGBH-FM, Boston's premier classical music station since 1951, had nearly a year earlier acquired the other Boston classical music radio station, WCRB-FM, and decided to switch the flagship station to a mostly talk-show and news format. In the year and a half that followed, an increasing number of public radio stations, ones that once played classical music for at least part of the day, have gone over to news, opinion, and information, sometimes making classical music (chiefly the warhorses) available 24/7 on radio channels that require the Internet or special receivers.

Seldom, if ever, have public radio stations justified these decisions in front of the public. Classical music on radio goes (away) without saying. And so the May 3 announcement, on the public broadcasting blog "Current.com," is of interest not only because it offers a rationale but also insight into today's public radio climate. I quote from the entry: "WUIS, a public radio station operated by the University of Illinois Springfield, will transition from classical to news and talk in July, reports the Illinois Times. The shift follows the retirement of Karl Scroggin at the end of March, who had hosted the weekday Classics since 1984. The station has already started streaming a 24-hour classical digital channel with live announcers. 'We recognize classical radio is one of those things that's slowly going away, but we're still willing to make an effort to get it to people who want it,'" General Manager Bill Wheelhouse said. [Italics are mine. The quotation is from Current.org, May 3, 2012.]

"Slowly going away." Fade to black. Belief in the inevitability of this departure must be shared by most pubradio (as it's called in the trade) managers--that classical music has become a niche market, no longer popular with the majority of listeners. One might argue that because so much different music, and in such quantity as never before, is available today on the Internet, for streaming and download, all genres, not only classical, have become niche musics. At the same time the number of pubradio programs available to stations by subscription has also increased enormously--and these are chiefly talk and information shows, not music.

Nowadays pubradio stations rely more and more on local and regional fundraising from members and business underwriters. Surveys reveal that talk radio attracts more listeners than classical music programming; more listeners supposedly translates to more members, or at least to an argument (made to legislative bodies that still fund pubradio) that the taxpaying public is being served. Classical radio isn't "slowly going away" of its own accord; pubradio programmers are squeezing it out in favor of talk, opinions, points of view. Everybody has one, today--and talk radio is there to air the chatter.

The decline of classical music programming on pubradio signals a cultural shift; cultural in the Arnoldian sense as well as the anthropological. People of a certain age will recall that in its earliest days, public television was called "educational televison." Public radio also was meant to have an educational purpose, and because the consensus among educators in the twentieth century was that classical music was the music of the highest quality, it followed that music programming on pubradio should emphasize it, just as the news programming on public television and radio was meant for a well-educated audience.

Classical music on radio, then, reflected the kind of highbrow cultural uplift characteristic of the rising middle classes in the second half of the twentieth century. A person of that rising class subscribed to symphony orchestra concerts and attended opera as well as musical theatre; a person of that class read The New York Times and the better novels that were reviewed there, perhaps through a book club. A family of that class made certain that their children were exposed to classical music: piano or violin lessons, most likely, along with Young People's Concerts.

It is no coincidence that with the decline of the American middle class--the idea of a rising middle in today's "developed" economies is laughable; it is, rather, a rapidly falling middle--classical music's future on US radio (as elsewhere) is unsustainable in its present form. It is that economic reality, a decline in the patron class, coupled with the media availability of so much "other music" to interest people with eclectic taste, that accounts in large part for the cultural shift that causes pubradio program managers to say "We recognize that classical radio is one of those things that's slowly going away..."