Sustainability in the Music Library

Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy examines the capacity of musiciking to cultivate ecological literacy, approaching eco-literate music pedagogy through philosophical and autoethnographical lenses. Building on the principle that music contributes uniquely to human ecological thinking, this volume tracks the course of eco-literate music pedagogy while guiding the discussion forward: What does it mean to embrace the impulse to teach music for ecological literacy? What is it like to theorize eco-literate music pedagogy? What is learned through enacting this pedagogy? How do the impulsion, the theorizing, and the enacting relate to one another? Music education for ecological consciousness is experienced in local places, and this study explores the theory underlying eco-literate music pedagogy in juxtaposition with the author's personal experiences. The work arrives at a new philosophy for music education: a spiritual praxis rooted in soil communities, one informed by ecology's intrinsic value for non-human being and musicking. Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy adds to the emerging body of music education literature considering ecological and environmental issues.

Environmental Sound Artists: In Their Own Words is an incisive and imaginative look at the international environmental sound art movement, which emerged in the late 1960s. The term environmental sound art is generally applied to the work of sound artists who incorporate processes in which the artist actively engages with the environment. While the field of environmental sound art is diverse and includes a variety of approaches, the art form diverges from traditional contemporary music by the conscious and strategic integration of environmental impulses and natural processes. This book presents a current perspective on the environmental sound art movement through a collection of personal writings by important environmental sound artists. Dismayed by the limitations and gradual breakdown of contemporary compositional strategies, environmental sound artists have sought alternate venues, genres, technologies, and delivery methods for their creative expression. Environmental sound art is especially relevant because it addresses political, social, economic, scientific, and aesthetic issues. As a result, it has attracted the participation of artists internationally. Awareness and concern for the environment has connected and unified artists across the globe and has achieved a solidarity and clarity of purpose that is singularly unique and optimistic. The environmental sound art movement is borderless and thriving.

In the summer of 2019, a group of kia'i, or protectors, made up of kanaka 'oiwi (Native Hawaiians) and their allies came together to prevent the construction of the Thirty-Meter Telescope (TMT) on the dormant volcano Maunakea. In Mele on the Mauna, Joseph Keola Donaghy explores how music, and especially haku mele, or Hawaiian language composers, played a crucial role in this defense. Musicians flocked to the mauna (mountain) to perform for the kia'i and a worldwide audience via social media. Haku mele created new songs at unprecedented levels, releasing many commercially with proceeds benefiting organizations providing support services and supplies to the kia'i. This book features over 30 of the author's interviews with individuals who participated in musical activities connected with this movement, including kia'i and their supporters, composers, musicians, and community leaders. Donaghy explores Indigenous Hawaiian concepts and theories like mana (power), mo'oku'auhau and pilina (genealogy and relationships), kapu aloha (philosophical code of conduct), and aloha 'aina (love of land, patriotism), and western academic concepts like connectedness and community building, poetics, sound(ing) and silenc(e/ing), conflict, and creativity.Mele on the Mauna illuminates how music played a powerful role in building solidarity, inspiration, and activism, reveling in the most contentious confrontations about protecting Maunakea and the outpouring of musical performances and creativity that occurred

Performing Environmentalisms examines the existential challenge of the twenty-first century: improving the prospects for maintaining life on our planet. The contributors focus on the strategic use of traditional artistic expression--storytelling and songs, crafted objects, and ceremonies and rituals--performed during the social turmoil provoked by environmental degradation and ecological collapse. Highlighting alternative visions of what it means to be human, the authors place performance at the center of people's responses to the crises. Such expression reinforces the agency of human beings as they work, independently and together, to address ecological dilemmas. The essays add these people's critical perspectives--gained through intimate struggle with life-altering force--to the global dialogue surrounding humanity's response to climate change, threats to biocultural diversity, and environmental catastrophe. Interdisciplinary in approach and wide-ranging in scope, Performing Environmentalisms is an engaging look at the merger of cultural expression and environmental action on the front lines of today's global emergency. Contributors: Aaron S. Allen, Eduardo S. Brondizio, Assefa Tefera Dibaba, Rebecca Dirksen, Mary Hufford, John Holmes McDowell, Mark Pedelty, Jennifer C. Post, Chie Sakakibara, Jeff Todd Titon, Rory Turner, Lois Wilcken

On the coast of Washington and British Columbia sit the misty forests and towering mountains of Cascadia. With archipelagos surrounding its shores and tidal surges of the Salish Sea trundling through the interior, this bioregion has long attracted loggers, fishing fleets, and land developers, each generation seeking successively harder to reach resources as old-growth stands, salmon stocks, and other natural endowments are depleted. Alongside encroaching developers and industrialists is the presence of a rich environmental movement that has historically built community through musical activism. From the Wobblies' Little Red Songbook (1909) to Woody Guthrie's Columbia River Songs (1941) on through to the Raging Grannies' formation in 1987, Cascadia's ecology has inspired legions of songwriters and musicians to advocate for preservation through music. In this book, Mark Pedelty explores Cascadia's vibrant eco-musical community in order to understand how environmentalist music imagines, and perhaps even creates, a more sustainable conception of place. Highlighting the music and environmental work of such various groups as Dana Lyons, the Raging Grannies, Idle No More, Towers and Trees, and Irthlingz, among others, Pedelty examines the divergent strategies--musical, organizational, and technological--used by each musical group to reach different audiences and to mobilize action. He concludes with a discussion of "applied ecomusicology," considering ways this book might be of use to activists and musicians at the community level.

Song Walking explores the politics of land, its position in memories, and its foundation in changing land-use practices in western Maputaland, a borderland region situated at the juncture of South Africa, Mozambique, and Swaziland. Angela Impey investigates contrasting accounts of this little-known geopolitical triangle, offsetting textual histories with the memories of a group of elderly women whose songs and everyday practices narrativize a century of borderland dynamics. Drawing evidence from women's walking songs (amaculo manihamba)--once performed while traversing vast distances to the accompaniment of the European mouth-harp (isitweletwele)--she uncovers the manifold impacts of internationally-driven transboundary environmental conservation on land, livelihoods, and local senses of place. This book links ethnomusicological research to larger themes of international development, environmental conservation, gender, and local economic access to resources. By demonstrating that development processes are essentially cultural processes and revealing how music fits within this frame, Song Walking testifies to the affective, spatial, and economic dimensions of place, while contributing to a more inclusive and culturally apposite alignment between land and environmental policies and local needs and practices.

From the gospel music of slavery in the antebellum South to anti-apartheid freedom songs in South Africa, this two-volume work documents how music has fueled resistance and revolutionary movements in the United States and worldwide. Political resistance movements and the creation of music--two seemingly unrelated phenomenon--often result from the seed of powerful emotions, opinions, or experiences. This two-volume set presents essays that explore the connections between diverse musical forms and political activism across the globe, revealing fascinating similarities regarding the interrelationship between music and political resistance in widely different geographic or cultural circumstances. The breadth of specific examples covered in Sounds of Resistance: The Role of Music in Multicultural Activism highlights strong similarities between diverse situations--for example, protest against the Communist government in Poland and drug discourse in hip hop music in the United States--and demonstrates how music has repeatedly played a vital role in energizing or expanding various political movements. By exploring activism and how music relates to specific movements through an interdisciplinary lens, the authors document how music often enables powerless members of oppressed groups to communicate or voice their concerns.

Supporting Vulnerable Performance Traditions: Keeping it Going in Contexts of Continuity and Change explores endangered forms of performance from across the world, and the aspirations of practitioners, community members and researchers to keep these traditions going.
Readers are provided with an ethnographically rich focus on specific performance contexts in diverse cultural worlds, including case studies that cover: Irish traditional song, ritual performances from southern India, Aboriginal ceremonial songs from northern and central Australia, Latin Catholic rites in multicultural Australia, and Asian-Portuguese syncretic dance in Sri Lanka. With contributors who are all scholars and/or practitioners of music, dance and other temporal arts, this book offers an inside view on the importance of these traditions for peoples' expressions of their distinct cultural identities and assertions of their uniqueness.
Supporting Vulnerable Performance Traditions contains essential insights into musical cultures in the context of continuity and change, and will be of interest to researchers and postgraduates of ethnomusicology, anthropology, performance studies and Asian studies, as well as music historians and practitioners, and musicians and culture bearers across the world.

How does sound ecology?an acoustic connective tissue among communities?also become a basis for a healthy economy and a just community? Jeff Todd Titon's lived experiences shed light on the power of song, the ecology of musical cultures, and even cultural sustainability and resilience. In Toward a Sound Ecology, Titon's collected essays address his growing concerns with people making music, holistic ecological approaches to music, and sacred transformations of sound. Titon also demonstrates how to conduct socially responsible fieldwork and compose engaging and accessible ethnography that speaks to a diverse readership. Toward a Sound Ecology is an anthology of Titon's key writings, which are situated chronologically within three particular areas of interest: fieldwork, cultural and musical sustainability, and sound ecology. According to Titon?a foundational figure in folklore and ethnomusicology?a re-orientation away from a world of texts and objects and toward a world of sound connections will reveal the basis of a universal kinship.

In Voices of Drought, Michael B. Silvers proposes a scholarship focused on environmental justice to understand key questions in the study of music and the environment. His ecomusicological perspective offers a fascinating approach to events in Ceará, a northeastern Brazilian state affected by devastating droughts. These crises have a profound impact on social difference and stratification, and thus on forró music in the sertão (backlands) of the region. At the same time, the complex interactions of popular music and social conditions also help create the environment. Silvers offers case studies focused on the sertão that range from the Brazilian wax harvested in Ceará for use in early wax cylinder sound recordings to the drought- and austerity-related cancellation of Carnival celebrations in 2014-16. Unearthing links between music and the environmental and social costs of drought, his daring synthesis explores ecological exile, poverty, and unequal access to water resources alongside issues like corruption, prejudice, unbridled capitalism, and expanding neoliberalism.

Educating Musicians for Sustainability explores the intersections of sustainability and music, investigating how sustainability affects the development and professional preparation of musicians while asking the question, 'What does sustainability have to do with music?' The volume presents a series of case studies organised according to an expanded view of the 'four pillars of sustainability', addressing cultural, environmental, economic, and social concerns. These case studies reveal a multitude of intersections, highlighting the crucial role music can play in raising awareness and overcoming the crisis of sustainability. In examining pedagogical and practical implications, aspiring musicians are encouraged to develop a broader view of the musical profession as a human endeavour, one that is intimately related to the world in which they live. Educating Musicians for Sustainability addresses the most pressing and serious problem of contemporary times - and seeks to inspire changes in attitudes and behaviour, for the benefit of all of humanity.

Historically, the music industry has not been very environmentally conscious. There is a lot of waste, too little recycling, and (let's admit it) a tremendous amount of energy expended. This book is designed to provide background information and tools to help musicians, producers, engineers, and other music enthusiasts become more sustainable and ecologically minded in their craft. It provides an informative overview of pressing environmental concerns that directly relate to the business of creating music, with first-person narratives and tangible examples of what is and isn't being done. It also highlights the key success stories of musicians working toward sustainability and provides real-life suggestions that help to inspire not only earth-conscious business practices, but also smart personal habit changes that can improve your life and the lives of your friends, neighbors, and fans, as well as all members of the global community. You'll learn about sustainable touring practices, which instruments and sound equipment are most environmentally friendly, and all about earth-friendly recording studios. Whether you are a recording engineer, touring musician, or music manufacturer, there is something in this book for you.

The sustainability of music and other intangible expressions of culture has been high on the agenda of scholars, governments and NGOs in recent years. However, there is a striking lack of systematic research into what exactly affects sustainability across music cultures. By analyzing case studies of nine highly diverse music cultures against a single framework that identifies key factors in music sustainability, Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures offers an understanding of both the challenges and the dynamics of music sustainability in the contemporary global environment, and breathes new life into the previously discredited realm of comparative musicology, from an emphatically non-Eurocentric perspective. Situated within the expanding field of applied ethnomusicology, this book confirms some commonly held beliefs, challenges others, and reveals sometimes surprising insights into the dynamics of music cultures. By examining, comparing and contrasting highly diverse contexts from thriving to 'in urgent need of safeguarding,' Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures analyzes sustainability across five carefully defined domains. The book identifies pathways to strategies and tools that may empower communities to sustain and revitalize their music heritage on their terms. In this way, this book contributes to greater scholarly insight, new (sub)disciplinary approaches, and pathways to improved practical outcomes for the long-term sustainability of music cultures. As such it will be an essential resource for ethnomusicologists, as well as scholars and activists outside of music, with an interest in the preservation of intangible cultural heritage.

In response to increased focus on the protection of intangible cultural heritage across the world, Music Endangerment offers a new practical approach to assessing, advocating, and assisting the sustainability of musical genres. Drawing upon relevant ethnomusicological research on globalization and musical diversity, musical change, music revivals, and ecological models for sustainability, author Catherine Grant systematically critiques strategies that are currently employed to support endangered musics. She then constructs a comparative framework between language and music, adapting and applying the measures of language endangerment as developed by UNESCO, in order to identify ways in which language maintenance might (and might not) illuminate new pathways to keeping these musics strong. Grant's work presents the first in-depth, standardized, replicable tool for gauging the level of vitality of music genres, providing an invaluable resource for the creation and maintenance of international cultural policy. It will enable those working in the field to effectively demonstrate the degree to which outside intervention could be of tangible benefit to communities whose musical practices are under threat. Significant for both its insight and its utility, Music Endangerment is an important contribution to the growing field of applied ethnomusicology, and will help secure the continued diversity of our global musical traditions.

Environment, craft, and meaning in the work of Appalachian instrument makers. How can the craft of musical instrument making help reconnect people to place and reenchant work in Appalachia? How does the sonic search for musical tone change relationships with trees and forests? Following three craftspeople in the mountain forests of Appalachia through their processes of making instruments, Finding the Singing Spruce considers the meanings of work, place, and creative expression in drawing music from wood. Jasper Waugh-Quasebarth explores the complexities and contradictions of instrument-making labor, which is deeply rooted in mountain forests and expressive traditions but also engaged with global processes of production and consumption. Using historical narratives and sensory ethnography, among other approaches, he finds that the craft of lutherie speaks to the past, present, and future of the region's work and nature.

Popular music's distinct circuit of "organic" folk culture, subculture, and the audience reach of the music industry is (theoretically) well placed to activate environmental awareness. Folk music encompasses traditions of organic local culture, political critique, and a broadly ecological vision and increasingly intersects with mainstream, commercial music. Here, I'll argue that hybrid subgenres - "folk rock," "indie folk," etc - are well placed to bring ecological ideas to a larger audience. After outlining some parameters for "green popular music," my case study will be the "experimental folk" of Ani DiFranco. DiFranco's mixing of folk with other genres - including rock, punk, hip hop, jazz, and electronic and environmental sound - corresponds with equally diverse "green" themes such as climate change, pollution, plastic waste, and animal cruelty. Gauging popular culture's effectiveness at nurturing environmental awareness will ultimately require large scale, longitudinal analysis of fan literature and/or social media. Rectifying an absence of audience research in ecomedia studies remains a future challenge. Nonetheless, contemporary forms of folk music do indicate that an accelerating ecological crisis - posing complex questions of lifestyle, policy, and politics - could be addressed by evolving equally complex forms of popular culture.
"The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies gathers leading work by critical scholars in this burgeoning field. Redressing the lack of environmental perspectives in the study of media, ecomedia studies asserts that media are in and about the environment, and environments are socially and materially mediated. The Routledge Handbook of Ecomedia Studies gives form to this new area of study and brings together diverse scholarly contributions to explore and give definition to the field. The Handbook highlights five critical areas of ecomedia scholarship: ecomedia theory, ecomateriality, political ecology, ecocultures, and eco-affects. Within these areas, authors navigate a range of different topics including infrastructures, supply and manufacturing chains, energy, e-waste, labor, ecofeminism, African and Indigenous ecomedia, environmental justice, environmental media governance, ecopolitical satire, and digital ecologies. The result is a holistic volume that provides an in-depth and comprehensive overview of the current state of the field, as well as future developments. This volume will be an essential resource for students, educators, and scholars of media studies, cultural studies, film, environmental communication, political ecology, science and technology studies, and the environmental humanities"