Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-vt8vv Total loading time: 0.001 Render date: 2024-08-14T11:29:26.390Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Examining the Place of Music in Western Eco-cosmology, with Implications for Electroacoustic Musical Practice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 January 2012

Chris Bocast
Chris Bocast*
Affiliation:
The Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin – Madison, 2114 Allen Boulevard 24, Middleton, WI 53562 USA
*
E-mail: bocast@wisc.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article addresses the place of music in the Western worldview, arguing for a greater appreciation of music in a modern eco-cosmology which embraces environmental priorities as central to human prosperity, while contextualising defensible connections between music, sound and environment potentially useful for electroacoustic musical practice. Precise analytical terminology is established, and the methodology of environmental history is used to assess Western understandings about the role and place of music. Origins and ideas regarding immersive space, emotive power and the development of dualistic ‘nature–culture’ schemas are explored. Impacts of key developments in twentieth-century technology and environmental thought are examined as they relate to electroacoustic research. Biomusicology is reviewed for insights into innate musical structures and possibilities, and a recent linguistic study is analysed from a musical perspective to advance a cross-disciplinary argument: music may represent a form of mitigational behaviour used to balance the evolutionary tradeoff that enabled modern language. This argument suggests that if music in itself represents an environment critical for human mental health, then the contribution of electroacoustic music is vital for fresh eco-critical debate and awareness, and that an increased musical practice, especially in participatory contexts, may be essential for the human project.

Type
Articles
Information
Organised Sound , Volume 17 , Special Issue 3: Sound, Listening and Place II , December 2012 , pp. 240 - 247
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Augustine of Hippo. 1997. The Confessions, trans. M. Boulding. New York: New City Press.Google Scholar
Brown, S. 2000. The ‘Musilanguage’ Model of Music Evolution. In N. Wallin, B. Merker and S. Brown, eds, The Origins of Music. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 271–300.Google Scholar
Cage, J. 1967. Happy New Ears. In D. Rothenberg and M. Ulvaeus (eds) The Book fo Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
CDC (Center for Disease Control). 2004. Health, United States, 2004, PHS-2004-1232. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/04news/hus04.htm (accessed on 16 December 2010).Google Scholar
Charlton, K., Hickok, R. 2007. Experience Music! Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Colapinto, J. 2007. The Interpreter: Has a Remote Amazonian Tribe Upended our Understanding of Language? The New Yorker 83(8): 120–137.Google Scholar
Darwin, C. 1871. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray.Google Scholar
Dean, R., Bailes, F. 2007. Human Understanding in Imagining and Organised Sound: Some Implications of John Locke's Essay for Ecological, Cognitive and Embodied Approaches to Composition. Organised Sound 12(1): 89–95.Google Scholar
Debussy, C. 1927. Monsieur Croche the Dilettante Hater. In Three Classics in the Aesthetic of Music. New York: Dover Publications, 1962.Google Scholar
Diamond, J. 1990. Bach, God, and the Jungle. Natural History 99(12): 22.Google Scholar
Dunn, D. 2001. Santa Fe Institute Public Lecture, 15 August. http://www.daviddunn.com (accessed on 27 April 2011).Google Scholar
Emerson, R.W. 1836. Nature and Other Essays. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2009.Google Scholar
Emerson, R.W. 1847. Hermione. In Collected Poems and Translations. New York: Library of America, Penguin Books, 1994.Google Scholar
Esposito, J. 1977. Schelling's Idealism and Philosophy of Nature. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.Google Scholar
Everett, D. 2005. Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã. Current Anthropology 46(4): 621–646.Google Scholar
Everett, D. 2008. Don't Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Glacken, C.J. 1967. Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grann, D. 2009. The Lost City of Z. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Hagen, W. 2005. What is a Medium? http://www.whagen.de (accessed on 3 May 2011).Google Scholar
Heidegger, M. 1954. The Question Concerning Technology, and other essays. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.Google Scholar
Hughes, J.D. 2006. Defining Environmental History. In J.D. Hughes, ed., What is Environmental History? Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Kirschner, S., Tomasello, M. 2010. Joint Music-making Promotes Prosocial Behavior in 4-year-old Children. Evolution and Human Behavior 31: 354–364.Google Scholar
Krause, B. 1997. What Does Music of the West Have to Do with Nature? Terra Nova: Nature and Culture 2(3): 1–3 http://www.wildsanctuary.com (accessed on 10 October 2009).Google Scholar
Leopold, A. 1949. A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Levitin, D.J. 2007. This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. New York: Plume.Google Scholar
Li, W., Yu, H., Yang, J., Gao, J., Jiang, H., Feng, M., Zhao, Y., Chen, Z. 2010. Anxiolytic Effect of Music Exposure on BDNFMet/Met Transgenic Mice. Brain Research 1347: 71–79.Google Scholar
Mâche, F.B. 1992. Music, Myth, and Nature, or, the Dolphins of Arion. Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers.Google Scholar
Mann, C. 2005. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
McCann, J.C. 1999. Greenland, Brownland, Blackland: An Environmental History of Africa, 1800–1990. Oxford: James Currey, 79–107.Google Scholar
McLuhan, M. 1967. The Medium is the Massage. Berkeley, CA: Gingko Press.Google Scholar
Morton, T. 2007. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Pinker, S. 1997. How the Mind Works. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Plato. 2003. Republic, trans. K. Quincy. In Plato Unmasked: The Dialogues Made New. Spokane, WA: Eastern Washington University Press.Google Scholar
Poole, J., Payne, K., Langbauer, W. Jr., Moss, C. 1988. The Social Contexts of some Very Low Frequency Calls of African Elephants. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 22: 385–392.Google Scholar
Potter, C. 2003. Debussy and Nature. In S. Tresize (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Debussy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ramachandran, V.S. 2000. Mirror Neurons and Imitation Learning as the Driving Force behind ‘the Great Leap Forward’ in Human Evolution. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran/ramachandran_index.html (accessed on 12 November 2009).Google Scholar
Reznikoff, I. 1995. The Sound Dimension of the Painted Paleolithic Caves. In E. Tarasti (ed.) Musical Signification: Essays in the Semiotic Theory and Analysis of Music. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 541–557.Google Scholar
Richards, K. 2010. Life. New York and London: Little, Brown, and Company.Google Scholar
Rudy, P. 2007. Timbral Praxis: When a Tree Falls in the Forest is it Music? Organised Sound 12(1): 5–13.Google Scholar
Sacks, O. 2007. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.Google Scholar
Takemitsu, T. 1995. Nature and Music. In D. Rothenberg and M. Ulvaeus, eds, The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001, 189.Google Scholar
Taylor, H. 2009. Location, Location, Location: Auditioning the vocalizations of the Australian pied butcherbird. Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology 9(1): 14–16.Google Scholar
Thompson, E.A. 2002. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Wallin, N., Merker, B., Brown, S. 2000 eds. The Origins of Music. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Williams, R. 1980a. Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Williams, R. 1980b. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Worster, D. 1988. The Ends of the Earth: Perspectives on Modern Environmental History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar