An Ecomusicologist’s Manifesto
A Word for Music
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When Henry David Thoreau, in 1851, took to the lectern at the Concord Lyceum, he proclaimed to those in attendance, “I wish to speak a word for Nature.” The speech that followed was written in response to, and in the context of, the rapidly growing materialist, consumerist, and utilitarian culture reveling in the exploitation and abhorrence of wilderness, to an audience stocked with civilization’s most fervent champions. With the conclusion of his speech, he declared, “in wildness is the preservation of the world.” And with his words, Thoreau marked a turning point in American thought away from superficial talk of nature derived from excessive Romanticism, and towards a more meaningful, sincere understanding of Earth’s Wilderness as it is.
In much of the same way, I wish to speak a word for Music, for, in music is the preservation of the human spirit. Much like Thoreau, when I say this in academic settings, I often find myself speaking to the countless critics and opponents of music which dominate our musicological discourse. To explain, allow me to speak plainly on behalf of the students, colleagues, and mentors I have had the pleasure of working with and learning from over the years, that music academia has a disenchanted, even defeated, demeanor in how we talk about music, where most of the discourse leans toward critique rather than celebration of this elemental human practice.
“…I think it is a disservice towards this art that we all claim to love to be so scared to acknowledge and revere its ineffable power to move people, communities, nations, and civilizations.”
I’ve heard every argument for why this is from the side of scientism or logic, as people like to call it, and I’m still not convinced. I think it is a disservice towards this art that we all claim to love to be so scared to acknowledge and revere its ineffable power to move people, communities, nations, and civilizations. From a personal place, as someone who has had a prominent ecomusicologist chuckle at the thought that music’s aesthetic value has any part to play in the environmental crisis, or who had a colleague drop from musicology after being told this field is not a place for talking about music you like, or had a very experienced musicologist lament to me the sorry, disenchanted state of music academia he’s witnessed over the course of his long career, and just so many more… I feel compelled to speak on behalf of those, like me, who want, or need, a more meaningful musicology.
To be sure, critique has its place, and is necessary for a holistic approach to any field, but the balance has swung much too far in favor of negativity and critique in recent decades. Much like Thoreau, but without personal delusions of grandeur, I simply wish to lend my voice to a larger academic and even societal turn towards all things wild, wonderful, and indescribable, in the face of manifold existential and environmental threats we face today.
And in doing so, know that I will stumble. Learning and growing are an active process, after all. But I would rather stumble on my way towards something real, than float along a stream of docile complacency. Some musicologists or staunch academics who read this out of morbid curiosity may write me off as a clown, or on a lighter note, some may even listen and go “oh, he’s from Colorado, that makes sense” but if there’s anything I’ve learned from my near decade in music academia, it’s that nothing meaningful is agreeable to everyone. Only listening to people you 100% agree with is not a great way to navigate through scholarship, or even life — a trend I’ve noticed in recent years. Further, the most elementary study of history shows that casting anyone as a clown merely, does not preclude them from standing on the right side of history.
And so, I would like to speak a word for Music and how it exerts power over us in ways that subvert our very epistemologies — our systems of understanding the world around us — and make a case for a sincere academic confronting of music’s ineffable power to enrapture those who listen, and especially, those who create, in the context of environmentalism and ecology.
Before I return to Thoreau and those who advocate for his philosophies in academia, I want to begin with the scope of the problem that the ecomusicologist is working against in music academia today. Simply put, it is the cult of Aristotelian logic. Academia itself is built on a this very specific kind of logic that’s become a cult in which no middle ground exists between that which has been reified as “correct” or “good” for centuries in the West, and knowledge forms of the Western subaltern and elsewhere which have been deemed “bad” knowledge.
The reason we have normative thinking and subaltern thinking is a result of a renaissance “cleaning up” of European thought around the idealization of Aristotle, where hegemonic powers of high society sorted systems of knowledge into categories of “right” and “wrong” and not with the best intentions. Late platonics, astrologers, anything labeled heathen, and so forth, sorted into “bad” knowledge, with Aristotle and company sorted into “good knowledge”. This “good knowledge” became the basis of what we in the West call, logic, reason, and rational thinking. This is also a process my friend Rune Hjarno-Rasmussen at Nordic Animism calls the “Cartesianizing” of the West, a term I absolutely adore.
This insidious systemic cleansing of thought from Europe is what certified this kind of logic as the dominant, accepted way of thinking, and everything else into the waste bucket of “esotericism” or “the irrational” and later reared its beautiful head as romanticism, now begrudgingly taught in the modern classroom as if our dignified professors are embarrassed of this “regrettable episode” of European history in which our greatest artists and thinkers had enough of this repressive cult. This is the narrow, flawed, incomplete system of logic which our academic institutions are based upon, forever pledged to championing it as the right way of thinking, casually ignoring that many of the greatest atrocities of the last centuries are a result of the fruit this “logic” bore, used to justify slavery, eugenics, colonialism, environmental exploitation… all of this was justified with logic, and with science. Not with deism, animism, or transcendentalism.
This dogmatic rationality has had its fair share of opponents throughout history that you will not hear much about in core philosophy courses, people like Uexküll, Spinoza, Bergson, and more who I will be revisiting in a later essay dedicated to subaltern philosophies and epistemologies. The cult of logic has not only long outrun its course, but in memorable history, has actively worked against our own survival as a species, and continues to do so in our inability to reckon with environmental collapse by our own hand in the Anthropocene. This is why these subaltern ways of understanding the way around us are needed now more than ever, and deserve renewed attention.
So now I turn to one of my favorite scholars, in this camp, Branka Arsic, and her book Bird Relics. In this book, Arsic reframes Thoreau as a vitalist thinker — vitalism, of course, is illogical in the framework just described, as it asserts there’s a life force beyond chemicals and physics. Arsic views this transition in Thoreau’s life as a result of his beloved brother’s early death and the resulting grieving process, thereby placing Thoreau in a New Materialist context. Arsic begins her book with a firm stance similar to mine when she writes:
“Thoreau suggested that the filtering out of the fantastic from the real is generated by the dogmatic and critical epistemologies of the West, expounded from Plato to Leibniz and Kant. Those epistemologies were predicated on the idealistic understanding of truth as noncontradictory. And since the incredible couldn’t be deposited in the real in a noncontradictory manner — both because it is in itself often contradictory and because it would render reality simultaneously credible and incredible and consequently cancel the conceptual divides that generate noncontradictory, truthful thinking about the real — our thought is disciplined by mainstream epistemologies that produce a kind of magical transubstantiation: thinking is made to dematerialize what is really incredible into what is only imagined to be so.”
Now, to define what New Materialism is: the term proposes a cultural theory that radically rethinks the dualisms so central to our modern thinking and always starts its analysis from how these oppositions (between nature and culture, matter and mind, the human and the inhuman) are produced in academic work and rhetoric. Again, the process and framework I described moments ago. The Philosophy of Movement blog traces 3 different kinds of New Materialism, but notes all three “share at least one common theoretical commitment: to problematize the anthropocentric and constructivist orientations of most twentieth-century theory in a way that encourages closer attention to the sciences by the humanities.” (I would add the caveat that it’s not any sciences, but those which defy and critique normative frameworks which hinder holistic approaches to the humanities). And Arsic’s work, along with her contemporaries and predecessors, are doing just this through their work that contests the stability of the epistemological ground academia stands on.
In other words, the only reason we have a solid line drawn between the real and the imaginary, as Arsic puts it, is because Aristotle, Leibniz, and Kant drew it there, and we as a Western society have done insufficient work to move it, question it, or even eliminate it, because most of us are comfortable where it is and have spent centuries building our great society with its ethos. (I say this ironically, of course.) With this in mind, Arsic goes on to explain — using an entry in Thoreau’s Walden — that one of the ways in which we systemically demarcate the real and the imaginary borders is found in our academic tendency to use words as metaphors for what they represent, rather than literal meanings. From page 244 of Walden:
It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes as necessarily so far-fetched, through slides and dumb-waiters, as it were; in other words, the parlor is so far from the kitchen and workshop. The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly.
Arsic comments on this passage:
Living in a parlor distanced from things we believe that we are talking about — distanced from the kitchen and the workshop where life is in the making, where it is busy changing — we end up living among far-fetched metaphors. Our epistemologies have filtered the wondrous out of the real to reach a truth that has in fact relocated us in an imaginary real. Paradoxically, we have ended up living in a fantasized real from which the fantastic has been expelled.
All of this, especially this separation between word and experience, is immediately relevant to how we work as musicologists, for we ourselves are often stuck in parlors speaking of metaphors and ideas more often than we find ourselves experiencing music as something living, breathing, and entirely real. Historically, for composers and performers who immerse themselves in a living breathing music experience, music has been a matter of faith, purpose, identity, and even existence. But, as we musicologists work from the parlor, so to speak, distanced from all of this, we find ourselves similarly beginning to discuss music as a word — a metaphor — rather than as it truly is — a powerful and influential force of the world we inhabit. We are divorced from the experience, and that is a detriment to our study.
If, and only if, we are to consider what Thoreau and Arsic have claimed, we may come to realize along the way that we live in a modern society that thrives off of disenchantment, because a disenchanted populace is easier to control and exploit, as it breeds every master’s favorite disposition: nihilistic apathy. So long as we disregard an obstacle as not worth the effort to overcome, or even “imaginary” and thus unreal, then there is no reason to cross it. Indeed, apathy has been the enemy of conservation throughout history, and the only times conservations have won over utilitarian interests is when populations have been roused into passionate fervor (check Dinosaur and Grand Canyon Dam controversies). Luckily for us, while there are those who thrive off of taking the wonder out of life, we still have musicians, artists, poets, and writers among us who thrive off of keeping the wonder firmly planted in our everyday life where it belongs.
In her article aptly titled “This Enchantment is No Delusion,” Rochelle Johnson writes that we in academia have indeed gone far enough as to write off imaginative or enchanted thinking as overly romantic, idealistic, or naïve — such as the whole of Walden, for instance — as “delusional” to more easily strip them of any merit they would otherwise have if confronted with good and honest academic intentions.
Johnson begins her article by stating firmly that her and others’ work in New Materialism is to explicitly confront the problematic “scholarly tendency of recent decades to regard the pursuit of topics of enchantment as unproductive and unsophisticated” because those of us, musicians of course included, who work in the humanities have been especially susceptible to criticisms regarding the practice of naïve romanticism and “fantasies of transcendence” — claims that again, rely on the very flawed, incomplete, western positivist epistemologies of Plato et al. that we continue to nurture. Again, Johnson uses Thoreau as her muse, for he was the one who wrote “this enchantment is no delusion, rather it is fact” when he recounted an out of body experience in the face of the sublime atop Maine’s Mt. Katahdin in his essay Ktaadn.
Johnson and Thoreau both argue that this enchantment is not a product of imagination, but of sympathy — a sympathy so extreme that you feel that you are one with essence of the world around you through mindful commitment to something beyond the self — in other words, when one removes the human from the center of our understanding, and rather places it in equilibrium with what is around it as Walt Whitman would advocate for throughout Leaves of Grass (1855).
In her article, Johnson goes on to explain that enchantment is a plausible bodily response to total consciousness of inter and intra-relations of all lifeforms around oneself. She comes to call this interconnectedness “spirit” without its sacred connotations and finds that this spirit must be understood as the vital force connecting the corporeal human body, the body’s material surroundings and the realm of intellect — of thought and imagination. Where music does its “work” on us.
The most relevant part of her article regarding music is when she states “these findings in new materialism force scholars to accept as agentic matter the many ways in which human beings experience their material intra-activity: in manners sensory, emotional, and spiritual (even transcendent).” — the stuff of music — “Rather than dismissing such forms of the agentic intra-activity of matter as naïve, hopelessly romantic, or completely culturally constructed, we would benefit from exploring them as products of complex agential materiality (including the matter of culture).”
To make this matter more urgent than a simple philosophical debate, in her essay “Indigenous place-thought & agency amongst humans and non-humans”, or “First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!”, indigenous writer of the Mohawk Tribe’s Bear Clan Vanessa Watts writes how this epistemological-ontological divide unique to modern western thought is more insidious than it seems when one considers how this dogmatic rationality, the cult of logic, excludes ethnic and cultural outsiders. In other words, our current ways of thinking “rationally” — including the emphasis of human agency — is not only misguided, but carries damaging implications as well, including the way this strict divide between the “real” and the “imaginary” displaces and excludes indigenous ways of thinking and being.
In short, Watts explains the indigenous concept of “place-thought” which is the “non-distinctive space where place and thought were never separated because they never could or can be separated. Place-Thought is based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts.” She reinforces that the western epistemological-ontological divide, the cult of logic, creates a system in which her indigenous religion and beliefs cannot exist as real, and only as “imagined”, as exemplified in the fact that we often call such stories “myth”, as we often do with pre-modern belief systems all over the globe from Norway to Japan — again, bringing to mind Thoreau’s “parable of dinner” and Arsic’s position that words have been used to both subtly and overtly demarcate the real from the imaginary.
What’s important about Indigenous place-thought is, as exemplified in this chart she provides, it encourages communication and symbiosis with the land we inhabit, whereas the cult of logic creates an exclusionary relationship with nature in which only humans have agency. She goes on to explain:
The epistemological-ontological divide removes the how and why out of the what. The what is left empty, readied for inscription. Epistemology has many representations: there is Science, Christianity, Eurocentrism, Marxism, communism, etc. Ontology too contains many variables: do objects have an essence? What is in the world and how do its parts formulate a society? All of these concerns are by their very nature pursuits of human quandary and based on a capacity for reason. These distinct domains provide evidence that humans are assumed to be separate from the world they are in, in order to have a perception of it. This is one theoretical structure to understand the world and its constituents. It necessitates a separation of not only human and non-human, but a hierarchy of beings in terms of how beings are able to think as well.
The man-made distinction between what and how/why is not an innocent one. Its consequences can be disastrous for not only non-humans but humans as well. If we lay this framing atop of nature, humankind is elevated outside or above the natural world. The reasoning being that perception is a gift or trait bestowed to the human mind, and most certainly not something possessed by a stone or a river. A river may act (i.e. flow) but does it perceive or contemplate this? An Anishnaabe perspective would respond in the affirmative. As we can see from the process of colonization and the imposition of the epistemology-ontology frame, our communication and obligations with other beings of creation is continuously interrupted.
The immediate relevance of this single case study among many lies in the fact that it doesn’t only give indigenous peoples a way out of our precarious epistemological situation — this illogical divide between the real and the imaginary, for Watts goes on to explain:
“These types of historical Indigenous Events [what we would previously call “myths”] are increasingly becoming not only accepted by Western frameworks of understanding, but sought after in terms of non-oppressive and provocative or interesting interfaces of accessing the real. This traces Indigenous peoples not only as epistemologically distinct but also as a gateway for non-indigenous thinkers to re-imagine their world.”
As musicologists and lovers of music alike, I believe we should seize this opportunity presented by Thoreau, Arsic, Bennett, Watts, and so many more who work outside of musicology to re-imagine our world — that of music — in a way that we are not only uncomfortable with, but in a way that inspires us and future generations to believe in the power of our art in a meaningful way. Not through critique, deconstruction, or skepticism, but through belief that there is a power in the materiality of music that is greater than our selves, and the understanding that logic is not some celestially-derived gift of objectivity, but is a carefully constructed system of thought to validate those in power. Music deserves better, and we deserve better.
