Impact — Winter 2024

Editorial Statement

Dear Readers,

Welcome to the Winter 2024 issue of Impact: The Journal of the Center of Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning. The following essays explore interdisciplinary connections that link musical ideas and experiences to the environments that humans and non-human species inhabit. Readers will quickly note the range of approaches adopted in these essays, including insights from teacher training programs, psychology, critical theory, and the performing arts. Despite the differences, each essay is informed by an underlying assumption that musical engagement can help us make better sense of our current moment of ecological crisis.

In our first contribution, Lindsay A. Fleming and Daniel J. Levitin of McGill University argue that environmental, behavioral, and music psychologists can draw upon research into how music influences our emotions, moods, and connections with others to help create workable and evidence-based climate action programs. Music, they argue, can be an important contributor to “successfully engaging the public in climate action,” a goal they hope will be furthered by deeper research into music psychology.

In the second contribution, Nicholas Quigley of R.L.M. Resiliency Preparatory Academy and B.M.C. Durfee High and Tawnya Smith of Boston University share their experiences as mentee and mentor, respectively, to offer a deeply personal account of how Quigley came to a richer understanding of music pedagogy while engaging with students in the natural world. Their vignettes, photographs, and linked recordings bring key first-hand teaching perspectives to this issue.

In the third contribution, Christian Morgner of the University of Sheffield draws on recent critical theory and a close reading of a song by the heavy metal band Metallica to draw a distinction between a pre-modern conception that placed music within the sphere of natural philosophy and more recent developments where the earlier presumed connection between music and the divine has been broken. As he argues, self-referential music, in which environmental concepts are drawn directly from the music itself, offers both possibilities and challenges for musicians and activists.

In our fourth essay, Hao Huang, a composer and Professor of Music at Scripps College, outlines a plan for interdisciplinary music education for advanced high school and college students. Drawing on fields such as ecomusicology and zoömusicology, he argues that a well-developed interdisciplinary music education program can help students develop a richer connection to the non-human world, a connection much needed as we collectively face the loss of nature in the wake of global warming.

In the final essay, Maine-based librettist and poet Megan Grumbling of the University of New England shares her experience working with contemporary composers to create operas with environmentally-inflected themes. The lyrics and linked recordings in her essay remind us that the performing arts can awaken us to the fragile natural beauty of our shared planet. The essay musically takes us into the world.

Since its first issue in 2012, Impact has been committed to publishing essays and reflections that cross disciplinary boundaries. The essays in this issue remain true to that spirit, with contributors utilizing citation formats and methodologies appropriate to their fields. Taken together, they offer a multifaceted vision of how music, song, and imaginative thinking can offer both warning and hope at a time of ecological crisis. Above all, we hope these pages will inspire teachers, researchers, and performers to embrace the many ways that talking about, listening to, and making music might lead us toward a more sustainable future.

Best,

Adam Sweeting,

Associate Professor of Humanities
Boston University College of General Studies
Guest Editor