Did Music Cause the End of the World?

Abstract

This essay seeks to clarify the relationship between music and environmental violence. After a reflection on the distortions and insights that different frames of reference produce, it places music within an expansive environmental register that encompasses the entirety of human history, up to and including our current era of “slow violence,” industrial pollution, mass extinction, and global warming. Throughout, human musicking is presented as always-already entangled with nonhuman entities and processes. The essay focuses on four of music’s potentialities—its exclusivity, centripetality, instrumentality, and reductivity—and argues that the cumulative effect of musicking has been to help perpetuate a type of anthropocentrism that made industrial-scale environmental violence possible. It concludes by suggesting a number of small tactics for musical thriving in an age when, in Timothy Morton’s words, “the concept of world is no longer operational”.

Musical ecologies of grief: breathing and environmental justice in Love Ssega’s “Our World (Fight for Air)”

“…This is no doubt also bolstered by the notion that humans are a "geologic force" (Ribac and Harkins 2020), articulated through the not unproblematic term "the Anthropocene" (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). The geological paradigm the Anthropocene invites has much to offer musicological thought by way of emphasising the long-lasting impacts of human activities, including music (Daughtry 2020;Størvold 2020). Nonetheless, it foregrounds ideas of solidity and directs attention to the Earth's crust, rather than its atmosphere.…”

Introduction. Sound, Music and Violence

“…29 In his contribution, Martin Daughtry calls for a break with an anthropocentric vision of musical activity; he questions the practical and theoretical frameworks that contribute to fuelling one of the motors of modern violence: the human / nature dualism. 30 To have separated beings that should have remained together is precisely the reproach that Dante makes to the troubadour Bertran de Born when his spectre appears in the eighth circle of Hell: "His severed head he was holding up by the hair, dangling it from his hand like a lantern"; 31 divided for sowing discord, his punishment is to proceed with his brain separated from his body. Reflecting on the links between music and violence gives Daughtry the opportunity to think beyond human exceptionalism and to call for a different kind of listening to the sonic remnants of human violence.…”

The Hens, the Cock, and the Operatic Fox: Vulpine “Voice” in Janáček’s Příhody lišky Bystroušky

“…This practice usually only occurs through a reframing of the nonhuman. In other words, as Martin Daughtry explains, "a performance of [Sergei] Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf may occasionally sound like a wolf or a duck, but it doesn't look or smell like a wolf or a duck [...] [it] references the nonhuman world chiefly through sound" (Daughtry 2020). However, in this paper I intend to focus on instances of musical representation that are not meant to overtly mimic a specific animal's cry or song.…”