Cultural rights are not property rights

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         David Throsby’s view that music is a cultural asset cohabits with the argument that cultural heritage is intellectual property and should therefore be protected by international copyright law. Indeed, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), an agency of the United Nations, has gathered international legal experts to write that law. Propertizing cultural heritage in this way confuses cultural values with economic value, pushing heritage further into the marketplace. I have already written about this in relation to the economics of cultural policy as Throsby understands it. WIPO’s work, still on the drawing board, is potentially even more troubling than Throsby’s, because it would have the force of international law. How did we get to this place? What is the problem that propertizing traditional culture is meant to solve?

            In a word, exploitation. The instances where European and American musicians have profited enormously from copying indigenous music include Paul Simon’s album Graceland, Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man” (from his Headhunters album), and the French duo Deep Forest. Simon later did help the black South African musicians whom he drew upon, but neither Hancock nor Deep Forest appear to have shared their wealth with the African pygmies whose music they copied and sampled. Indeed, when ethnomusicologist Steven Feld asked Hancock if he felt any obligation to compensate the pygmies, he replied that this kind of borrowing was normal in African and Afro-American culture: “It’s a brother thing,” he was quoted as saying.

            Such musical exploitation pales in comparison to better-known ripoffs in other areas, such as pharmaceuticals derived from indigenous medical knowledge, and textiles imprinted with native art. To cite just one example, treated at length in anthropologist Michael F. Brown’s intelligent and even-handed discussion of Who Owns Native Culture? (Harvard University Press, 2003), an Australian Aboriginal artist named Johnny Bulun Bulun, along with the head of his tribal clan, sued an Australian textile company for putting a design from one of his paintings (hanging in the Metropolotan Museum of Art, no less) on fabric without asking permission or offering compensation. The textile company’s argument was that these images were folkloric, in the public domain, and that anyone could use them—the artist, and also the textile company. In a complex Australian court decision, the textile company for the most part prevailed. To protect indigenous artists and cultural groups from such exploitation, WIPO is propertizing culture—indeed, it must be said that in these instances it had already been propertized (by the musicians, the drug companies, and the textile manufacturers). WIPO could be viewed as simply trying to protect the original owners.

            Of course, intellectual property protection is known to readers of this blog. Records and books carry copyright notices. The law does not permit me to take your song, your poem, your photograph or your short story and market it as if it were my own creation. Or as yours, for that matter, without your permission to do so. In fact, you do not need to publish or market your creation for it to be protected by copyright; US law treats your unpublished ideas as your intellectual property. Therefore, the argument runs, why not consider cultural heritage the intellectual property of cultural groups, and protect it with international copyright law?  

            Protecting cultural heritage by declaring it the intellectual property of cultural groups has implications that reach well beyond discouraging, if not preventing, commercial exploitation. Acknowledging that cultural heritage is intellectual property gives legal approval for, and provides an even greater impetus toward, thinking that heritage is a cultural asset whose primary value is economic and whose proper location is in the commodity marketplace where it may be sold, bought, and collected. I think there are better ways of approaching a solution to this problem, ways that I hinted at in the last paragraph of my second entry “Music is not a cultural asset” (March 11, 2013). Rather than helping to sustain a music worth having and a culture worth wanting, efforts to propertize culture only exacerbate the problem of exploitation, substituting one kind for another. 

             But for now, let us stay with our question: are cultural rights property rights? Should cultural heritage be subjected to international copyright law? Just as we have laws to protect private property (including property owned by corporations, NGOs, etc.) and public property (such as roads, public schools, hospitals and prisons), so we might have, or make, laws to protect heritage as if it were property. Property laws already do apply to certain kinds of tangible heritage. Historical buildings, for example. Intangible cultural heritage, which is based in living history, involves cultural know-how and ways of doing things. Clearly these are ideas and actions; they may result in performances, not always in tangible products. Intellectual property law, which operates through trademarks, patents, and by copyrighting ideas, would seem to apply. 

            Music and Cultural Rights (University of Illinois Press, 2009), edited by ethnomusicologists Andrew Weintraub and Bell Yung, begins by stating that “Cultural rights refer to both proprietary and proprietary-related assertions based on cultural grounds.” Proprietary rights are property rights. The introduction, written by Weintraub, continues: “Cultural rights claims have become increasingly prominent in discourses of human rights, international law, and struggles for social justice throughout the world . . . . especially in advocating rights of indigenous peoples to political self-determination, economic development, land, and education” (p. 1).

            Weintraub questions the wisdom of treating traditional music as intellectual property belonging to a cultural group. “Intellectual property rights laws were created for Western music made for (potential) profit, with specific characteristics (namely, an original work by an author that is fixed in a tangible form of expression). These conditions are antithetical to the collective nature of traditional music” (p. 7). That is, traditional music often (though not always) does not have a known author. In some indigenous cultural groups, when the author is known, it is a bird or jaguar or some other living being, not a human. Moreover, there may not be an object such as a musical score or recording that establishes the work in a fixed form subject to copyright. Instead, traditional music usually is shaped by many co-authors who have changed the music over time, and as it is still changing in expression—that is its living nature—it cannot, must not, be fixed in one tangible form. Finally, Weintraub quotes the author of one of the essays in the book, Felicia Sandler, who wrote that WIPO’s idea of intellectual property rights differs from most indigenous people’s understanding of rights, for WIPO regards them as economic rights whereas indigenous people comprehend them as “a bundle of relationships” (8). By a bundle of relationships is meant a series of obligations that take precedence over economic value. This is a common insight from cultural anthropology.

            These are intelligent critiques, but they are also subject to counter-argument. Even if copyright law was devised to protect intellectual property rights of authors of original works, why could it not be extended in scope to protect a collectivity’s rights to its group intellectual property? After all, group ownership of property is common: we have highways, bridges, public schools, and so forth. Yet, as Lewis Hyde points out in Common As Air (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010), copyright law is meant to protect ownership rights for a limited time only, after which time no one owns the property—that is, it becomes part of the public domain and anyone may copy and market it. A time limit on copyright protection for cultural heritage would solve the problem of exploitation for only so long; after that it would be open season. But without any time limit, indigenous cultural groups could conceivably sequester anything they claimed to own, in perpetuity; and they could remove from the public domain ideas, artifacts, and anything else that is currently in circulation. 

            Do the Samoans object to Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa? Do Native Americans object to the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology’s series that documented their culture a century ago? Do the French object to the way French history is presented in the Encyclopedia Britannica? Then remove them from sale; take them out of the public libraries; ban the books, put history and cultural anthropology out of business! Of course, the exact opposite is happening: more and more of the public domain is available on the digital commons. That is, while copyright law attempts to tighten its grip on intellectual property rights—the length of time for copyright protection has been extended from 28 years to the owner’s lifetime plus seventy years, which would be two lifetimes before intellectual property entered the public domain—the digital commons of the Internet exerts a powerful counterforce to traditional copyright law. WIPO may well be too late.

            In the next blog entry, I will take a closer look at WIPO, and at the “bundle of relationships” argument, which is the same position that I have been developing over the years, in this blog and elsewhere, when discussing gift exchanges and gift cultures such as the old-time string band community, where music is freely exchanged and relationships among musicians—among the current custodians, and between them and those who were stewards of this musical tradition in an earlier time—are critical to the experience and continuing sustainability of the music. 

Sound Commons in Smithsonian Folkways Magazine

     My argument in favor of a sound commons for all living creatures has just been published in Smithsonian Folkways Magazine. You can read it in full by following this link:

http://www.folkways.si.edu/magazine/2012_fall_winter/sounding_off.aspx

     Some of the staff at the Smithsonian's Office of Folklife and Cultural Heritage, which includes Folkways Records, were reading my entries on a sound commons on this blog. In response, they invited me to contribute an essay to an issue of their magazine on sounds and scoundscapes, with reference to albums on the Folkways list, many of which were recorded fifty and sixty years ago. I was happy to do so.

   The essay in the Folkways magazine summarizes an argument which I've been making on this blog since last fall or so, that we should manage the acoustic envirnoment as a sound commons shared by all living creatures who communicate via sound.

     I welcome all those who've read the essay on the sound commons and who've clicked the link to arrive here. For first-timers, you may want to know that I began this as a research blog in 2008 to gather thoughts on music, sustainability, and cultural policy, a theme of my public lectures and writings since about 2005. Over the years it's concentrated on those themes, but it's also expanded in scope to include sound and soundscapes, acoustic ecology, and ecomusicology. Please browse around; you have nearly five years of entries to look through at your leisure.

Music is not a cultural asset (2)

    David Throsby is today’s foremost theorist writing about the economics of cultural policy. Concerned with putting the arts (including music) on a sustainable footing, he argues that the arts are best viewed not as an alternative to or a respite from a base and commercial world of money-making but, rather, as an engine of economic competition and growth. The arts, he reminds us, have significant economic consequences, whether local or global. His argument that the arts are economically valuable cultural assets, though persuasive today among arts advocates, rests on a problematic distinction between art’s economic value and its cultural value.
    When Throsby writes that the arts have economic value he refers to the fact that arts are products involved in commodity exchanges, supported by a massive entertainment arts industry that involves venues, art products, advertising, gear, and so forth. We contract to buy music, whether in concerts, on CDs, over the Internet, or in the form of instruments, music lessons, and so forth. As long as we buy it and it has a price, as long as the money we pay supports the arts industry, art has an economic value. In fact, music and the entertainment arts represent a significant portion of the consumer economy.
    Throsby also claims that music and the arts have what he calls cultural value. He lists several kinds of cultural value: aesthetic, spiritual, social, historical, symbolic, authenticity and locational. Cultural value is realized in collective, not individual terms: “collective benefits that cannot be factored out to individuals and yet are important.” Cultural values are those aspects of a group’s lifeways that members of the group have strong feelings about, either positive or negative. That is, they have aesthetic feelings, spiritual feelings, feelings concerning social solidarity or solitude, and so forth. Cultural value is difficult to quantify. It seems to be outside of, or in addition to, the realm of commodity exchange. Throsby’s usual example is the collective benefit of a traditional art to a group of people who identify with that art. So, for instance, an ethnic group identifies with a music that it calls its own, and this has a value that seems beyond price.
    The cultural value argument is seductive; surely those of us involved in promoting traditional arts believe that it expresses group cultural identity. Indeed, folklorists and ethnomusicologists have been making a similar point over and over again in case studies of traditional and contemporary art in various cultural groups for the past fifty years. The notion that traditional art expresses, reinforces and even constitutes collective identity has become a truism.
    If we agree that the arts have cultural value, it does not necessarily follow that arts are cultural assets. Throsby wants to translate cultural values into cultural assets; that is, he believes that cultural policymakers can—and should—factor cultural values into the economic worth of artistic activities and products. The problem turns on the different meanings of value. When Throsby writes of economic value, he is thinking of price, what the art would be bought for as a product in a commodity exchange. But when he writes of cultural value, he is thinking not of price but principle. Cultural values are ideas, principles that guide individual and group behavior. As Throsby recognizes, cultural values are not the result of commodity exchange. They are “values added” but not measurable as added value. Cultural values are invaluable.
    Throsby’s dual use of value conflates value (price) with values (principles) and in so doing it tricks cultural values, which operate chiefly in the arena of gift exchange, into becoming assets with measurable worth which can enter a calculus for a cultural policy operating within the framework of an economic neoliberalism based in property rights, economic deregulation, competition and growth. Then, instead of operating as a critique of the social structure, or as providing an alternative social structure (e.g., commons, gift exchanges, egalitarian democracy), the arts are enlisted to serve a very different end, global corporate capitalism. According to Throsby, they do so by stimulating the creativity required for business innovation and successful competition, which leads to improved technology and continual economic growth, a rising tide that is supposed to lift all boats. Unfortunately, however, this set of economic assumptions is what has made our world unsustainable in the first place.
    Throsby’s argument leaves out the most important aspect of trade: the personal relations that obtain as a result. In a commodity exchange—say, a purchase of an mp3 over the Internet—the legal contract between buyer and seller obviates the need for any personal relationship at all. In a gift exchange, even when the gift is a commodity with economic value—say, a DVD that I purchase and give to you—there is no legal contract between giver and receiver, only a set of personal obligations which I have discussed in earlier blog entries. Throsby’s concept of cultural value recognizes the gift exchange aspect of the arts, but transforms its consequences. Music has economic value, but it may be involved in both commodity and gift exchanges. One of the characteristics of music and the arts is that compared with other goods they partake of a greater proportion of gift exchanges; in fact, the arts often are regarded as belonging to a collectivity, not a single individual.
    Indeed, many artists have testified that they feel their ability is a “gift,” which is not far in concept from the more common notion of “talent” as something one does not earn but either has or does not. Recall the story old-time fiddler Clyde Davenport told me about a rich man who came to him and asked Clyde to teach him. After a few lessons, Clyde advised the man to give up. “But I’ll pay you anything if you can teach me to play like you!” said the rich man. Clyde replied that he had found something money could not buy. Clyde’s ability, he said, was a gift.
    Insistence that art is a cultural asset objectifies and propertizes it. When music is regarded as private property, whether intellectual property or something tangible that one can collect, social relations arising from music exchanges are defined by legal contracts among individuals (or corporations acting under the fiction that they are individuals), instead of by the obligations of gift-giving and friendship within collectivities operating as social networks. As economic value increases, cultural values decrease. What, then, are the alternatives? How does local participatory art, gift exchanges within social networks, operate largely outside this neoliberal economic mainstream, and how may it become a viable alternative? In truth, it already is becoming one; and in future blog entries we shall be seeing where and how.

Sharing music at a festival.
Photo courtesy of Stephen Green.

Music is not a cultural asset (1)

   Once again this semester at Brown University I'm leading a seminar in music and cultural policy. In that seminar we've returned to ideas discussed in the first few years of this blog, those involving the dominant concepts operating in the arts policy world today, namely heritage, cultural tourism, and the arts as cultural assets. Using the term "asset" brings the arts into the sphere of economics, one which met initial resistance from arts administrators who voiced fears that commerce runs counter to the spirit of art. That resistance dissolved as arguments about the "creative economy" began to persuade government decision-makers to spend money to stimulate the arts. But thinking of the arts as economic assets also runs counter to what we now know about sustainability. I believe that a policy which views music as a cultural asset will not sustain music—or people making music—in a way that is worth having. Quite the contrary, it will transform music—and people—into things not worth wanting.
    In his book The Economics of Cultural Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2010), David Throsby makes a powerful argument for the economic value of the arts; that is, an argument that the arts do not merely cultivate the personality, provide aesthetic pleasure and civilized refinements. Throsby argues that the arts also stimulate personal creativity. Creativity leads to innovation and an entrepreneurial spirit, required for individuals and businesses to compete successfully in today's globalized, corporate world. For that reason, corporations, foundations and governments should invest in the arts--and such patronage, along with the new economic value that is placed on the arts, will assure their sustainability. This is a seductive line of reasoning for cultural policymakers because if true, it makes the arts (and their advocates) much more powerful players in public policy debates. Yet despite the argument’s sustainabilty-friendly appearance, I remain concerned that something bad happens to arts and people when objectified into economic assets. In the next blog entry I will critique Throsby’s argument. It’s not the first time I’ve mentioned it on this blog, but because it is winning more and more allies in the world of arts and politics, it’s important to come to come to grips with its limitations. But first, some background. How did we get to the place where support for the arts is thought to yield economic benefit?
    As Throsby notes, thirty and forty years ago government, corporate and individual patrons sustained the arts in Western nations mainly with financial grants to exemplary artists and arts presenting institutions, such as “educational television” (as PBS was called then), museums and symphony orchestras. Then, policy discussions took up such issues as how the arts “contribute to a civilized society, how more people could be introduced to the benefits of artistic consumption, and how the arts content of education systems and the media could be improved” (p. 1). In the early 1980s when I helped the Folk Arts Division of the National Endowment of the Arts distribute nearly $3 million in grants per year, our awards went in this direction, often to sponsor specific events such as festivals, arts education workshops, and media productions targeted to a large audience. Gradually, these cultural policy agencies began to move away from event-centered arts patronage and towards arts infrastructure support. A guiding principle, cultural conservation, began to be articulated. As in natural conservation, the idea was a series of targeted interventions that would enable folk and traditional arts cultures to maintain themselves and, as the N.E.A. guidelines put it, “move confidently into their futures” secure in their connections with the past.

Guitar as folk art.
Photo by Jeff Todd Titon, Bangor, ME, 2011.

    The apprenticeship grant was regarded as an outstanding example of this new kind of initiative in cultural conservation. An apprenticeship grant meant money paid to a master traditional folk artist such as a Portugese fado singer or a Penobscot basket maker to teach a worthy tradition-bearer in the younger generations how to master this art, usually in a one-on-one collaboration over a period of months or years, with a young person who had shown much talent and serious interest and was likely to make it a career (or as much of one as was possible, if such a career wasn’t very remunerative). This kind of grant was thought to have more long-term positive effect in sustaining the tradition than a one-time festival or workshop, or a media product that had only a short presentational life before it was put on the storage shelf. Grants also were given in increasing numbers directly to arts agencies themselves—that is, to local NGOs consisting of culture workers encouraging folk and ethnic arts activities, who would themselves offer assistance to local arts-presenting organizations. It was not a coincidence that the cultural conservation initiative took hold at a period in the United States when support for the arts was being challenged by political conservatives. Just as the welfare state was reformed in the 1980s and 1990s, so arts support thinking moved from welfare to conservation.
    Along with the change in thinking from welfare to conservation, the word “culture” began to be used more and more as in anthropology, referring a people’s way of life, what’s learned and passed along from one generation to the next, the non-biological inheritance. But how to fund cultural conservation efforts remained a problem. Yet a solution, as I pointed out years ago on this blog, was already available—in the arena of historic preservation—and what worked over there could be used to fund the arts. In so doing, tourism, the economic lifeblood of historic preservation, was brought into cultural conservation. Not that arts tourism was unknown, but for more than a century it had been aimed at the fine arts objects in museums, cathedrals, and the like. Traditional arts, on the other hand, could become the focus of arts tourism in living history settings. These arts were alive; the artifacts could, as one museum executive director put it, emerge from their glass cases and reunite with their makers who would demonstrate their making for the tourists.
    Historic preservation sounded a little too musty for the arts in this context, though. UNESCO in particular took the initiative and settled on the concept of heritage, which is to say history with a certain kind of cultural value placed on it. With UNESCO, heritage was already in use to describe historical monuments, and so the somewhat awkward contrast was made between tangible heritage, such as a historic building, and intangible heritage, such as a traditional art, understood both as cultural knowledge and expression or product. Eventually the term in use, intangible cultural heritage, became shortened to its acronym, ICH.
    Although usually pronounced eye-see-aitch, the UNESCO policy regarding ICH also itched, or irritated, some cultural policymakers for a number of reasons: fuzzy conceptualization and problematic implementation, for starters. Nevertheless, cultural policymakers throughout the world began using intangible cultural heritage and the arts, particularly traditional music, to promote tourism and then, the argument ran, with tourist dollars not only sustain the arts but also pour money into the local economies.  At a time when, in the so-called developed world, manufacturing had been outsourced and economies had changed to largely service and information providing, when income inequality was increasing, and when local economies were under great stress, arts tourism seemed an avenue worth encouraging. Soon arts were being regarded as potentially powerful economic assets.    
    In the next blog entry I will critique the argument for sustaining music and the arts by treating them as economic assets, particularly when termed cultural assets. I will reveal the confusion underlying Throsby’s attempt to differentiate between art’s economic value and cultural value, while assigning a measurable worth to each. I continue to believe that local, participatory music in small groups, based on commons, social networks and gifts exchanges, is a better alternative for long-term sustainability than economic asset-think which, despite Throsby’s seductive presentation, makes neoliberal assumptions concerning economic growth and competition that are inimical to both music and sustainability.

Biodiversity, the Sound Commons, and the Great Chain of Being

    One of the pillars of the argument for a sound commons is biodiversity. It is in a commonwealth of sound, with every living being communicating in their acoustic niche, that biodiversity is best expressed and maintained. Biodiversity is so well entrenched an idea within ecological theory and environmentalist thought that it comes as a surprise to learn that the word itself, derived from the phrase biological diversity, was coined only about 25 years ago, in 1985.[1] It is usually understood to mean life forms in all their variety. It has become axiomatic that biodiversity is an index to ecosystem health; the greater the diversity, the healthier the ecosystem. This holistic approach to biological variation also provides a rationale for conservation.

One kind of diversity

    I am curious about the rapid acceptance of this concept despite its imprecise character. Where, after all, is biodiversity located? We hear of biodiverse ecosystems, or biodiverse communities, or biodiverse species, or of a biodiversity of species traits and functions, or of biodiversity at the gene level. In fact, biodiversity embraces all levels and puts them in a “full hierarchy of variation."[2] But then, how to measure biodiversity, and how to maintain it overall, becomes more difficult. At what level of the hierarchy should the conservationist, who does not have unlimited powers or resources, intervene? Besides, interventions at one level may have unintended and harmful consequences at another. But leaving these problems aside for the moment, why has the idea of biodiversity become so pervasive, and why has it been almost universally accepted, not only among ecologists, but also environmentalists and the general public?
    One of the reasons for biodiversity’s appeal is that it distills common sense: “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.” Many baskets, more chances. “Hedge your bets.” That is, the idea behind biodiversity, the comparative advantage of many different investments, so to speak, rather than one single large investment, aids in successful adaptation and resilience against misfortune, whether, for example, in farming (mixed farming as opposed to monoculture) or in buying lottery tickets. The commonsense advantages of diversifying have been known for centuries, if not millennia.
    Another reason for biodiversity’s appeal is less obvious but no less powerful: its congruence with a very old and pervasive worldview in Euro-American thought, the great chain of being, turning on the twin concepts of plenitude (fullness, plenty) and continuity. Plentitude and continuity are at the heart of that metaphor which intellectual historian Arthur Lovejoy traced nearly a century ago in the William James Lectures at Harvard: “The result was the plan and structure of the world which, through the Middle Ages and down to the late 18th century, many philosophers, most men of science, and, indeed, most educated men, were to accept without question—the conception of the universe as a Great Chain of Being, composed by an immense . . . number of links ranging in hierarchical order from the meagerest kind of existents, which barely escape non-existence, through every possible grade . . . up to the highest possible creature. . . “[3]
    This worldview centered in a hierarchical chain of creation, with its roots in Plato, Aristotle, and particularly in Neoplatonism, bears an obvious resemblance to the “hierarchy of variation” in contemporary ecological thought, not only in terms of plenitude, continuity, and hierarchy, but also in its bias toward holism. Of course, the chain of being is also notably different from biodiversity in the sense that sitting atop the chain was the Creator. Nevertheless, the resemblance is so striking as to suggest an important reason for the rapid and general acceptance of biodiversity; if biodiversity somehow “seems right,” it is in part because of the residue of this once most powerful worldview.
    Are we dealing with mere resemblances, or was there a period in the history of Euro-American ideas when the great chain turned into biodiversity; and if the latter, how did that occur? Of course, certain underlying assumptions about the universe, that it is patterned and rational, as well as that its laws are humanly discoverable, helped. But I would suggest that as the great chain began to lose force in the late Enlightenment and early Romantic eras, it was gradually replaced by the ideas of diversity and the balance of nature; and that biodiversity was coined much later on to foreground the already-understood idea of biological diversity.
    We have already encountered ideas of “Nature’s economy” and balance in many earlier blog entries; suffice it to say here that Gilbert White was marveling, in his letters from Selborne in the 1770s, over plenitude and balance in nature—balance conceived not so much as equilibrium but as economy, of Nature taking care of its own. In other words, for White, Nature’s economy was an expression of the great chain, just as it was for natural historians such as Linnaeus. Although for White, a cleric, God was at the head of the chain, a Creator is not a requirement for the concept. Natural theology in the early 19th century was an attempt to reconcile those incongruities. Darwin himself wrestled with that problem, of course, as did many scientists in the mid-19th century. Notable among them in the US were Louis Agassiz (who would not abandon the idea of God at the head and separate creations to explain the variety in nature) and Asa Gray (who eventually came around to the more secular view). Even the naturalist Thoreau embraced Darwin’s idea of evolution. Upon examination, Darwin’s idea of evolution retains the concepts of plenitude and continuity.
     What about diversity? Again, Lovejoy is helpful. He broadly characterizes the Enlightenment as a period in Euro-American intellectual history when classic ideals prevailed, “controlled by the assumption that, in each phase of his activity, man should conform as nearly as possible to a standard conceived as universal, uncomplicated, immutable, uniform for every rational being."[4] The single classic ideal began to be displaced, in the late eighteenth century, by diversity. Again, Lovejoy: “It came to be believed not only that in many, or in all, phases of human life there are diverse excellences, but that diversity itself is of the essence of excellence; and that in art, in particular, the objective is neither the attainment of some single ideal perfection of form in a small number of fixed genres nor the gratification of that least common denominator of aesthetic susceptibility which is shared by all mankind and all ages, but rather the fullest possible expression of the abundance of differentness that there is, actually and potentially, in nature and human nature, and – for the function of the artist in relation to his public – the invocation of capacities for understanding, sympathy, enjoyment, which are as yet latent in most men, and perhaps never capable of universalization. And these assumptions, though assuredly not the only important, are one of the common, factors in a number of otherwise diverse tendencies which, by one or another critic or historian, have been termed ‘Romantic’. . .”[5]
    Lovejoy is writing here chiefly in reference to art, not science; but we must remember that the divisions between the two were not so great in the eighteenth century as they are today. In short, although biodiversity and the acoustic niche hypothesis are current, they are an expression of very old and pervasive ideas about nature in Euro-American intellectual history, plenitude and continuity; and on such a foundation do they rest—a foundation that is under a twin challenge. One challenge comes from ecologists, who no longer believe in Nature’s economy or a balance of nature, but who nevertheless retain a belief in interdependence and biodiversity. Are those beliefs incompatible? And a second challenge comes from those deconstructionists who hold that the Romantic idea of nature is only that—an idea, and that it must be abandoned if we are to achieve a postmodern ecology worth wanting. We shall see.

Notes

1. "Biodiversity," in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/biodiversity/
2. Ibid.
3. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Harvard University Press, 1964 [1933]), p. 59.
4. Ibid., p. 292.
5. Ibid., p. 293.

Photograph: Crowd listening at a festival, 2010, Bangor, Maine. Photo by Jeff Todd Titon.

Animal Rights and the Sound Commons

Animal Rights Demonstration

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

Animal cooperation

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

Classical music as an endangered ecosystem

Henry Doktorski performs with philharmonic orchestra

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

Ecosystem as descriptor

     One of the key concepts in the argument for a sound commons for all living beings is the ecosystem, an ecological paradigm that stresses the interconnectedness of animals, plants, and minerals within a bounded geographical area. Interconnectedness is also one of the four principles I identified in my work on musical and cultural sustainability.[1] Of course, there is much more to an ecosystem than interconnectedness; and fifty years ago when the concept governed ecological science, ecologists worked with mathematical models to determine the flow of energy among the components of ecosystems. Nowadays, the word ecosystem is cropping up all over the place. I began to notice this a while ago, in the phrase “the Apple ecosystem.” Today it’s difficult to find an article about a new Apple or Google product that doesn’t speak metaphorically of their ecosystems. Now that I’m watching for it, I also see the term to describe the financial ecosystem, the urban ecosystem, and the digital ecosystem. Ecosystem hasn’t yet become as ubiquitous as the word sustainable, but it won’t be long before it does.
    What can ecosystem mean outside of its ecological science context? I’ve seen it used, first, as a synonym for system where “eco” appears to add value but doesn’t because “system” will do just as well by itself. Second, it's used as a synonym for an integrated but closed system. Third, it appears as a descriptor for an open, interdependent, co-evolving community, a complex system with a degree of uncertainty--predictions of its behavior cannot be more than probable. It is this last usage that is of particular interest to me. Tellingly, although they imply opposite kinds of systems (closed vs. open), both the second and third usages arose from interpretations of Apple’s business model.
     As a synonym for an integrated but closed system, it comes up in phrases such as “locked into the Apple ecosystem.” Here it refers to how Apple components (hardware, software and media) work with one another but not with non-Apple components.  For example, writing in The Guardian (UK), Benjamin Cohen reviewed the new iPhone 5: “. . . the real reason this device will still be a success and why I upgraded to another iPhone recently, is that all the applications and content I've purchased over the past four years will only work on an Apple product. I'm locked into the Apple ecosystem just like tens of millions of others. That's the true magic of Apple, luring us into using their pieces of technology and then selling us applications, music and video that are locked to their proprietary formats and products. It's a clever tactic and one that looks like it'll keep us hooked for a years to come.” [2]
    Such descriptions of the Apple ecosystem emphasize the pleasure as well as the pain of the tender trap. Here is another: “Every couple of months articles crop up on the Internet calling Apple’s ecosystem a ‘walled garden’ or a ‘golden cage.’ These articles usually try to convince the reader that Apple has lured users into a trap using design/popularity/marketing, shut the door behind them and thrown away the key.” [3]
    The third contemporary usage of “ecosystem” also describes an integrated system, but one that is open rather than closed. Interdependence and evolution are emphasized. A recent book review is a case in point: ”Might DNA be likened to a digital program, and might computer programs themselves evolve within our complex ecosystem of information technology and assume virtual life?” [4] The ideal digital ecosystem is similar: an open, collaborative platform.
    James F. Moore, a systems theorist, applied this open system ecological model to business communities. In a 1993 article, Moore argued that successful contemporary corporations were changing from traditional, vertically integrated, competitive organizations to innovative, collaborative institutions working with partner organizations (suppliers, distributors, accessory-makers) as well as customers in co-evolving communities of common interest and purpose. In his view, successful corporations did not compete with each other so much as build business ecosystems. For an illustration he compared Apple's successful computer community with the older logic of the Tandy organization. Readers born before 1975 might remember the Tandy TRS-80, a popular personal computer from the mid-1980s that ceased manufacture. By contrast, Steve Jobs was said to have built not just computers but the business equivalent of a surviving ecological community. [5]
    Moore’s 1996 book, The Death of Competition, elaborates the business ecosystem analogy explicitly and in great detail. He defines a business ecosystem as follows: “An economic community supported by a foundation of interacting organizations and individuals—the organisms of the business world. This economic community produces goods and services of value to consumers, who are themselves members of the ecosystem. The member organisms also include suppliers, lead producers, competitors [sic] and other stakeholders. Over time, they co-evolve their capabilities and roles . . ." [6].
    As I pointed out earlier in this blog, back in 1984 I published my thoughts on how music cultures were ecosystems, with music in a musical community circulating like energy in an ecological community. [7] But although I made a comparison to a biological ecosystem to describe worlds of musical activity, as Moore used it ten years later to describe worlds of business activity, I did not publish an article and a book elaborating the concept. Ten years later, Moore did, and his remarkable work deserves further attention, which I will reserve for the next blog entry.
     Suffice it to say now that while Moore views business ecosystems as politically revolutionary, progressive and positive, those who think of them as closed systems regard them as dangerous manifestations of late capitalism. For another, as the word ecosystem becomes increasingly ubiquitous in public discourse, its meaning diffuses outside of its original and precise context in ecological science; and this must be taken into account in descriptions of communication among creatures—perhaps “ecological community” rather than ecosystem is a more worthy term, though the word “community” has problems of its own.
     Finally, of course, whereas ecosystem as a concept can fairly be said to have organized the discipline of ecology for most of the 20th century, challenges eventually arose to the idea that nature behaved systematically at all. Ecosystem’s association with the increasingly problematic paradigm of stability, climax, holism and the balance of nature seemed too teleological, lessened its usefulness, and after about 1980 displaced it from the center of ecological science, even as it was gaining ground as a metaphor elsewhere. Yet despite its lowered status, other aspects associated with ecosystem, such as biodiversity and interdependence, retain their central importance in contemporary ecological science.

Notes

[1] Jeff Todd Titon, “Music and Sustainability: An Ecological Viewpoint,” The World of Music, Vol. 51, no. 1 (2009), pp. 119-137.
[2] Benjamin Cohen, “Caught in an Apple World,” The Guardian (UK), Sept. 13, 2012, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/13/iphone-5-caught-in-apple-world
[3]  “The state of Apple’s Ecosystem lock-in, and where we’re at today,” Macgasm essay (no author named),  Feb. 9, 2012, at http://www.macgasm.net/2012/02/09/state-apples-ecosystem-lockin/
[4] Michael Saler, review of George Dyson, Turning’s Cathedral, Times Literary Supplement, nos. 5725 & 5726, Dec. 21 and 28, 2012, p. 31.
[5] James F. Moore, “Predators and Prey: A New Ecology of Competition,” Harvard Business Review, May-June, 1993, pp. 76-85.
[6] James F. Moore, The Death of Competition: Leadership and Strategy in the Age of Business Ecosystems, New York, HarperCollins, 1996, p. 26.
[7] Jeff Todd Titon, Worlds of Music, New York, Schirmer Books, 1984, p. 9.

The photo at the beginning of this entry shows new growth of skunk cabbages arising from roots in the fall as the old spring growth decays. The new, green spaeths and decaying, blackened spadices are apparent. Click on the photo to enlarge it for better viewing. Photograph by Jeff Todd Titon, East Penobscot Bay, September, 2012.

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.

A Human-Centered Sound Commons?

    In my previous blog entry I suggested that it is helpful to think of the acoustic environment as a sound commons. The usual example of a commons is land that members of an agricultural community use for grazing livestock. New England towns traditionally set aside a plot of land that was called the “town common”; these still exist in some towns, such as Amherst, Massachusetts, very close to my alma mater, Amherst College. Of course, the citizens of Amherst don’t graze their sheep and cattle on the town common anymore; it’s a park, and it’s used for public events. English peasants farmed on commons land until villages were transformed by enclosures (private property), a gradual process that took place mainly in the 1700s. In highland parts of Europe, and also in North America, livestock were let more or less loose to graze and feed on mountain land in season, sometimes with shepherds, sometimes without. Deep water ocean (for fishing) is another example of a commons. In a commons, then, members of a group share a particular resource, and the people who use it assert that they have rights, or entitlements, to do so.
   
     I raised the idea of a sound commons in the context of an acoustic disturbance, the sounds of helicopters flying, which confuse and upset caribou and cause the herd to change its migration pattern, which in turn impacts Innu people of northern Canada, whose lives traditionally are bound up with hunting caribou. A question immediately arises: is the acoustic environment a commons? And if so, which group am I talking about here in regard to a sound commons: the Innu or the caribou, or both? I think we can assume that the Innu have moral, if not legal, rights in this case, their right as a people to hunt caribou, which is compromised by the helicopter noises that take place in a sound commons shared by all human beings. Of course, the corporations who fly the helicopters and build the roads that make the noise assert opposing rights, to find and extract minerals from the land: that the benefit to humanity realized from mining the minerals outweighs the harm done to the Innu. But does it make sense to say that caribou have any rights in the matter? On what grounds could animals (including non-humans) have rights to a particular kind of acoustic environment or sound-world?
    The concept of commons has been around for a long time in Europe, going back at least to Roman law, which recognized as res communes those things that were incapable of being possessed by individuals and thus were commonly available to all. The usual examples Roman law gave for res communes were water and the atmosphere (the air mantle). The history of the commons has been one of enclosure, or propertization of the commons, whether public property or private. The enclosure of agricultural land in England (and Europe) is the usual example, but in modern history water and air resources have come to be regarded as public property, to be regulated by governing bodies; and some individuals even have claimed water and air rights as private property.
    The Internet has gotten people talking about commons once again: an information commons, with free Internet access (a digital information commons), is a right that is asserted by information managers (librarians) and readers, while there is pushback from authors and publishers. In the same way, digital file sharing (recordings, movies) has resulted in claims (particularly from youth culture) of a media commons, with pushback from artists and the recording industry. In an important book, Common As Air, Lewis Hyde has placed the debate in a larger context, arguing on behalf of a cultural commons of art and ideas, shared by all members of a society. Important ethical questions arise, such as how to mediate between free access to ideas, on one hand, and to protect the rights to their own ideas that individuals, particularly creative artists, assert, called intellectual property rights, on the other.
     One legal solution is the so-called "fair use" doctrine, in which small portions but not entire works are freely accessible. Anyone who has read portions of a copyrighted book on Google Books knows how this compromise works. Hyde supports the original American copyright law, which offers copyright protection for a once-renewable period of 26 years, after which time the property passes into the public domain where it may be used freely by all. These are very lively issues in legal circles today, particularly as global corporations (as “persons”) with enormous financial resources assert rights to movies, recordings, books, and so forth. But although there are many interesting questions involved, such as whether music, for example, ought even to be regarded as property—Thoreau would have thought it preposterous to do so—here, this debate serves mainly as background, at least for the time being.
    The concept of a sound commons is not original with me. Although the idea may be older than the late twentieth century, at that time environmentalists concerned with noise pollution asserted that people have the right to silence, to be free from assaults with noise; and at least two based this assertion on the principle of a sound commons. In 1993 Ursula Franklin gave a lecture at the first international conference on acoustic ecology, in which she said: “I want to come back to the definition of silence and introduce the notion of the commons because the soundscape essentially doesn’t belong to anyone in particular. . . . The notion of the commons is deeply embedded in our social mind as something that all share. . . . Because of the ephemeral nature of sound, silence was not considered part of the commons in the past. Today the technology to preserve and multiply sound and separate it from its source [i.e., what Murray Schafer termed schizophonia] has resulted in our sudden awareness that silence, too, is common good.” (1)
    In a similar vein, in 2000 the acoustic ecologist Henrik Karlsson wrote that “. . . a healthy, unspoiled acoustic environment [must] become something of a common right—a public domain—to which all citizens should have free access, no matter where they live. The acoustic environment will then become something which nobody can sabotage for others or privatise for personal gain. The focus of attention will then be on the individual citizen and his [sic] needs, not on product development or other economic interests, whether individual or transnational. An anthropocentric model of this kind, I am convinced, is the only feasible way of regarding, restoring and preserving the acoustic environment.” (2)
    Both Frankin and Karlsson conceive of a sound commons as “anthropocentric” (human-centered) and would have no argument with Innu asserting rights over their acoustic environment. They do not theorize the sound commons, as I am starting to do here; they simply propose it to be true on the grounds that the acoustic environment belongs to and is shared by all (humans). And although the acoustic ecology movement calls attention to the harm Navy sonar does to whales and dolphins, their main issue is noise pollution and its impact on human beings. The sounds of the natural world are “unspoiled” and must be respected, but their activism is aimed chiefly at the impact of noise pollution on people. In the case of the helicopters, the caribou, and the Innu, the acoustic ecology group would primarily be concerned, as the Living on Earth reporter was, with the Innu, not the caribou. It would be a more radical step to propose that there exists a sound commons for all creatures, but that is what I am suggesting here. In a future blog entry I will argue that the concept of commons leads us to conclude that all creatures, not just humans, have the right to communicate in their acoustic spaces (or niches). An anthropocentric sound commons is too narrow in scope.

Notes

(1) Ursula Franklin, "Silence and the Notion of the Commons," Soundscape, Vol. 1, no. 2 (2000), p. 16. Originally a lecture given in Banff, Canada, on Aug. 11, 1993, at the first international conference on acoustic ecology, "The Tuning of the World."
(2) Henrik Karlsson, "The Acoustic Environment as a Public Domain," Soundscape, Vol. 1, no. 2 (2000), p.13.

The Sound Commons

Caribou

A new sound has come to the George River in Labrador, northern Canada, where the Innu traditionally relied on hunting caribou for food and clothing. It is the sound of helicopters flying through the air bringing in engineers and prospectors exploring the area for minerals. According to George Rich, an Innu elder, “the sound of the choppers really is a devastating sound because they [the caribou] don’t know where to look, all these choppers are going flying all over the place.” The result is a declining herd and a changed migration route, away from the traditional hunting grounds. “One of the mineral exploration companies is trying to build a road right in the heart of our territory. Right in the heart of [caribou] calving grounds,” Rich said.(1)   
    One thing leads to another as an intrusive new sound threatens what is left of a way of life. Besides their importance for diet and clothing, caribou “is our identity,” Rich said when interviewed recently for a radio broadcast. “It’s our culture, it’s our way of life. It’s also a part of the big spiritual awareness of what’s going on in the animal world. And without the caribou we don’t think the Innu will be able to survive.” The Innu are so isolated in their northern fastness that without as many caribou they are getting food shipped to them in the summer when the waters are open, or flown in to them in winter. “And then that’s created a lot of problems in diet and eating junk food. . . . A diabetes epidemic is one of the things that we are facing right now,” Rich concluded.

Traditional Innu camp

     There are 850 Innu living in a village 150 miles north of Goosebay, Labrador. They were not always villagers. Until about fifty years ago Innu were nomads, living in camps and following the migration routes of the caribou. The caribou herd, then estimated to have numbered as many as 900,000, has declined to less than 28,000. Of course, the sound of helicopters and road construction isn’t the only thing affecting the caribou. Global warming is doing its part. Caribou bear their calves in cool weather, and they forage for food beneath the powdery tundra snow. The warmer weather brings black flies, makes it more difficult to calve, and covers the ground with rain that freezes to ice and prevents browsing. And the Innu way of life underwent profound change when they were forced to settle in villages. But they still hunt caribou, though now subject to Canadian law which forbids them to hunt in certain places and at certain times. When they violate the law--as they sometimes do--they are subject to arrest.
    But for George Rich, it was the noise pollution from the choppers that most clearly--and most recently--affected the herd. We are not used to thinking in terms of sound-worlds when we measure the environmental effects of development. We usually limit our gaze to the visible landscape: forests cleared for timber use, farmland covered with factories and shopping centers. Sound? It seems so ephemeral. The warnings coming from acoustic ecologists about noise pollution in urban environments seem trivial by comparison. But are they? It isn’t just that sirens and jackhammers are deafening; they cause anxiety and confusion in humans as they do in caribou.
    Not unexpectedly, the Innu have music about the caribou, hunting songs that were passed from one generation to the next. What would a hunting song be about? The strength and prowess of the hunter? A boast or a threat to the prey? A triumphant enactment of the kill? None of the above. Instead, they establish relationships with the caribou. George Rich translated one of them: “You are so far away, I cannot reach you. I’ll catch up with you and call my friends.” This is how music evokes, and shapes, the “big spiritual awareness of what’s going on in the animal world,” as Rich put it. The music of the Innu is not only a critical part of the Innu sound-world, but it embodies Innu worldview.
    “I do hope the caribou come back soon,” the radio host said, somewhat lamely, in ending the interview with George Rich. Rich could not help but agree. They were hoping for resiliency. Beyond hope, though, we might try management: get those helicopters out of there, stop building the road, stop exploring for minerals, and understand that the effects of climate change will be felt not only by vulnerable peoples in remote areas but by every creature everywhere on the planet. Music, sound, nature, culture: again, it’s all connected. A sound-world is not simply an acoustic environment, a container for music and noise. Incidents such as this one with the caribou among the Innu show how a sound-world is a common-wealth, a commons shared by all. Managing the sound commons starts with understanding its nature and significance.

Note

(1). George Rich, interviewed by Steve Curwood. “Reindeer Populations in Decline,” Living On Earth, aired during the week of Dec. 7, 2012. Accessed at http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=12-P13-00049&segmentID=4

"Original-Ecology Music"

    I first encountered the idea of “original-ecology music” early in October, on my way back to northern New England from Knoxville. The occasion was the conference at Northeastern University in Boston, celebrating the publication (in English) of a book entitled Discourse in Music, edited by Zhang Boyu, director of the world music program in ethnomusicology at the Central Conservatory of Music, in Beijing.(1)  Professor Zhang had invited me to Beijing to lecture on music and sustainability in 2009, so I was looking forward to seeing him again, presenting a paper at the conference, and helping celebrate this milestone, as very little scholarship by Chinese musicologists and ethnomusicologists is currently available in English. Three of the book’s articles were concerned with “original-ecology music” in one way or another.(2) Was it possible that Chinese scholars were thinking about music and sustainability in terms of an ecological model?
    The answer is both no and yet, embedded in the Chinese language, yes. It turns out that “original-ecology music” is a linguistic back-formation from the written Chinese characters for the phrase “original style.” That is, according to the article by Tian Liantao, “The phrase ‘original style’ in Chinese includes the word ‘ecology’. . .” (Discourse, 118). Moreover, “folk song of original style” was “first proposed [around the year 2002] by show business rather than the music society [i.e., music scholars]” in order to distinguish the older folk song performances, felt to be more authentic in melody and performance style, from performances rendered by professional Chinese folksingers, which show modern and Western influences (Ibid., 119).
    The three Chinese musicologists who wrote about original-ecology music in the volume are specialists in the music of Chinese minorities. China, like Europe and North America, has a history of cultivated, semi-professional, and professional folk music. Coupled is the familiar idea that there is, or was, a more authentic, spontaneous, uncontaminated folk music expression. “In my understanding,” Professor Yu Renhao wrote, “‘original-ecology music’ generally refers to folk music formed in the natural economy, which hasn’t been affected too much by foreign culture. . . . Its ‘original flavor’ is reflected not only in the tunes, but reflected even more in the performance form and style. . .” (Ibid, 255). This untutored folk music is said to be characteristic of peasant and minority people in the “natural economy” of remote rural areas. There, it is thought that traditional agricultural life and music was and to a far lesser degree still is relatively unaffected by travel, trade, towns, cities, merchants, money, scholars, government bureaucracy, formal educational institutions, and foreign influence.
    Western ethnomusicologists of my generation were taught that Chinese scholars and bureaucrats, like those in the Soviet Union, collected, edited, transformed, and composed and promoted folksongs to reflect the kind of worker’s consciousness desired by the government after the Communist Revolution in 1949. But as Jonathan Stock pointed out in Worlds of Music, Chinese government officials had for centuries been collecting folk music and putting it to their use.(3) “In ancient China, the emperor sent out officials to gather song texts to help him judge whether the people were happy or not,” while  seventeenth century Chinese scholars collected folksongs but published only those which they felt had literary merit (Worlds, 372). Francis James Child, the Harvard professor who collected and published his famous 5-volume anthology of English and Scottish ballads in the nineteenth century, employed similar criteria. The concept “folk song” is a construction of the educated, literary class, sometimes put to use by various political groups.
    Professor Yu concluded that “In order to avoid misunderstandings, I suggest using the term ‘native folk music art’ in lieu of the so-called music of ‘original ecology’” (Ibid., 58). Still, it intrigues me that the Chinese characters written for “original style” contain the character for “ecology.” This linguistic formation suggests that style does not exist primarily as structure, or even as a combination of structure and performance. Rather, embedded directly within the etymology of the Chinese language is the idea that structure and performance style interact with the surrounding natural and cultural communities. That structure and performance style interact with the surrounding cultural community is constitutive of ethnomusicology, and one of the axioms that in the 1950s established it as a new discipline and separated it from its ancestor, comparative musicology. But that structure and performance style also interact with the surrounding natural community is an idea only now gaining momentum within the West.
    As I have mentioned in numerous blog entries earlier this year, Thoreau was the pioneer in this line of thought concerning nature and sound-worlds, in the mid-nineteenth century. John Cage, Murray Schafer, Steve Feld, Bernie Krause and Ted Levin are among those composers and scholars who have promoted this idea more recently. But a relation between music, sound, and the natural world is not only embedded in the Chinese characters that make up the Chinese language, it has precedent in ancient Chinese writing. Unaware of “original-ecology music” when preparing my presentation to the conference at Northeastern, I nevertheless had tried to find common ground between Thoraeu’s ideas of sound in the natural world and ancient Chinese thought. Here is what I said to them at the conference:
    “Thinking about our Chinese guests today, I was reminded of the ancient Chinese legend of the origins of music in the discovery of bamboo tubes that blew overtones in fifths. Looking a little further in ancient Chinese history, I came upon the Daoist text called Zhuangzi, named after the Chinese author who lived nearly 2,500 years ago. In English translation, the text reads as follows:
     “Zi-Qi said, ‘. . .  You may have heard the notes of Man, but have not heard those of Earth; you may have heard the notes of Earth, but have not heard those of Heaven.'
     Zi-You said, 'I venture to ask from you a description of all these.'
     The reply was, 'When the breath of [Nature] comes strongly, it is called Wind. Sometimes it does not come so; but when it does, then from a myriad openings there issues its excited noise; have you not heard it in a prolonged gale? Take the projecting bluff of a mountain forest - in the great trees, a hundred spans round, the [openings] are like the nostrils, or the mouth, or the ears; now square, now round like a cup or a mortar; here like a wet footprint, and there like a large puddle. (The sounds issuing from them are like) those of angry water, of the arrow’s whizz, of the stern command, of the inhaling of the breath, of the shout, of the gruff note, of the deep wail, of the sad and piping note. The first notes are slight, and those that follow deeper, but in harmony with them. Gentle winds produce a small response; violent winds a great one. When the fierce gusts have passed away, all the openings are empty (and still) - have you not seen this in the bending and quivering of the branches and leaves?'
    Zi-You said, 'The notes of Earth then are simply those which come from its myriad openings; and the notes of Man may just be compared to those which (are brought from the tubes of) bamboo- allow me to ask about the notes of Heaven.'
    Zi-Qi replied, 'Blowing the myriad differences, making them stop [proceed] of themselves, sealing their self-selecting - who is it that stirs it all up?’”
   
Notes

1. Discourse in Music: Collected Essays of the Musicology Department, Central Conservatory of Music, ed. Zhang Boyu. Beijing: Central Conservatory of Music Press, 2012.

2. Tian Liantau, "Original Style: 'Original-State' or 'Original-Ecology'?", pp. 118-124; He Yunfeng, "Some Doubts about 'Protoecological' Music," pp. 153-161; Yu Renhao, "Music of Original Ecology and Original Ecology of Music," pp. 255-258, in Discourse in Music (see n.1).

3. Jonathan Stock, "East Asia," in Worlds of Music, 5th ed., Jeff Todd Titon, gen. ed. Belmont, CA: Schirmer Cengage Learning, 2009.