On Teaching About Music and the Environment

Hao Huang, Composer and Pianist, Scripps College

Banner photo by Lorenzo Spoleti on Unsplash

Music is one of the most powerful media to communicate environmental messages to billions of people worldwide — irrespective of race, religion, income, gender or age.

United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Music and Environment Initiative, 2014

INTRODUCTION

Nearly a decade ago, the United Nations issued a powerful declaration about the efficacy of music to advocate for environmentalism, citing its ability to transcend humanity’s many categories of difference. Nevertheless, as the old saying goes, “the devil is in the details,” so implementation poses multiple challenges. Teaching about music and the environment jointly is an inherently interdisciplinary exercise. We might ask, then, what kind of approach will be productive? What is to be gained by teaching about music and the environment? In a world poised on the brink of catastrophic global climate change and its corresponding environmental, political, and social repercussions, humanity is at risk of losing our common interest in valuing our physical and spiritual circumstances.

Music presents potential remedies to resolving this existential crisis. Indeed, nearly a century ago, the music educator Satis Coleman (1939) taught her students about “nature’s musics” extensively, beginning by recognizing that birds teach songs to their young, and later encouraging her students to use birdsongs as inspirations for their own improvisations:

Many people go through life deaf to some of the most beautiful sounds in Nature. They walk in the woods and never hear the soft crunch of their feet on the dry leaves, the whirr of the bird that flies overhead, or even the song which the bird sings when he alights in the tree. They never think to listen to the wind blowing through the branches or notice the musical babble of the stream rushing over the stones. And that delightful little time-beater of the evening, the cricket under the leaves — all this rare music is missed….(95)

This essay builds on Coleman’s point to articulate how a program of environmentally inflected musical education can be developed to help upper-level high school and university students better understand their connections to the broader human and other-than-human communities.

ABOUT MUSIC

The academic discipline of music is inherently interdisciplinary. It incorporates studies in performance, music theory, music history, musicology, and ethnomusicology. These subdisciplines not only demonstrate disciplinary diversity, but each, in turn, embodies interdisciplinarity by combining different fields. For example, Aaron Allen (2012a) notes, “musicology itself is an interdisciplinary field, drawing on paleography, literature, mathematics, history, and cultural studies, among others, to say nothing of the performance and practice of various types of musical arts” (201).To complicate matters further, scholars and musicians have expressed disparate opinions about the meaning of music. Allen (2012b) confirms that “the terms music, culture, nature, and environment are complex terms that different people in diverse cultures—and even similar people in the same culture—can interpret in multifarious ways….” (377). Nevertheless, such multivalency is constructive because the resulting panoply of ideas, approaches, and contexts can be applied in multiple contexts.

A conventional definition of music holds that music is a conscious action of organized sound creation by human beings, to be received by listeners responding with an equally conscious act of decoding the meaning behind those organized sounds. In a 1939 Norton Lecture at Harvard, the early 20^th century composer Igor Stravinsky declared:

[T]he pleasure we experience on hearing the murmur of the breeze in the trees, the rippling of a brook, the song of a bird. All this pleases us, diverts us, delights us. We may even say: ‘What lovely music!” .…These natural sounds suggest music to us, but are not yet themselves music. If we take pleasure in these sounds by imagining that on being exposed to them we become musicians and even, momentarily, creative musicians, we must admit that we are fooling ourselves. They are promises of music; it takes a human being to keep them: a human being who is sensitive to nature’s many voices, of course, but who in addition feels the need of putting them in order and who is gifted for that task with a very special aptitude. In his hands all that I have considered as not being music will become music. From this I conclude that tonal elements become music only by virtue of their being organized, and that such organization presupposes a conscious human act. (23)

Within a decade of Stravinsky’s pronouncement, Pierre Schaeffer began to explore musique concréte, about which he wrote “the question was to collect concrete sounds, wherever they came from, and to abstract the musical values they were potentially containing” (qtd. in Reydellet 1996, 10). He often modified recordings through audio signaling processing and assembled them into abstract sound collages. In the early 1950s, composers began to explore the application of randomness in aleatory music (chance music), an experimental style that incorporated indeterminacy as a guiding principle of performance. As the composer Luciano Berio claimed: “Music is everything that one listens to with the intention of listening to music” (19). Stravinsky, however, did not attribute absolute power to intentionality. He counter proposed that listening involved a conscious attentiveness, cautioning in a 1957 interview with Deborah Ishlon, “To receive music you have to open the ears and wait, not for Godot, but for the music; you must feel that it is something you need. Some let the ear be present and they make no effort to understand. To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also” (qtd. in Walsh 2008, 339).

Complementing Berio’s definition of music as that which listeners intend to experience as music, the academic fields of acoustic ecology and soundscape ecology study the listener’s perception of sounds heard as an aural environment. As the experimental composer David Dunn and music journalist René van Peer (1999) note:

Music is a means by which humans give back and communicate to the totality of that mind. In the daily circumstances of life, we are surrounded with a fabric of sound that is the voice of a generative source. When we make music, it is to match the level of that. Music is about matching the fabric that speaks to us on a daily basis. (65)

In acknowledging these widely divergent opinions, I advocate for a holistic view of music as sounds that express and communicate life experiences that are understood by human beings, including ambient and natural sounds, as well as those from musical instruments used in all cultures and genres. After all, most practicing musicians would agree with a statement from an 1851 issue of The Literary Garland: “Music begins where language ends; it expresses thoughts and emotions, to which speech can give no utterance”  (Anonymous 472).

EXPLORING INTERSECTIONS OF MUSIC AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Drawing on ideas outlined by Hollis Taylor and Andrew Hurley (2015), I propose four relevant categories of intersections of music and the environment/ecology:

• Music that commemorates or evokes nature, time and place
• Music and environmental awareness and activism
• Soundscape studies and acoustic ecology
• Ecomusicology & zoömusicology

With regard to the first category, musical representations of nature and place abound in works such as Respighi’s “The Pines of Rome,” Grofé,’s “The Grand Canyon Suite,” and Gershwin’s “An American in Paris.” Such works incorporate specific local environmental sounds such as birds or even car horns! Broadening the scope to a general appreciation of nature, Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony speaks to his love of the countryside. As he wrote about its composition (qtd. in Wright, 2018):

How glad I am to be able to roam in wood and thicket, among the trees and flowers and rocks. No one can love the country as I do… my bad hearing does not trouble me here. In the country, every tree seems to speak to me, saying “Holy! Holy!” In the woods, there is enchantment which expresses all things.

The list of well-known Western classical works that evoke and commemorate the physical particularities of a specific place might also include Années de pèlerinage (Suisse) and (Italie) by Franz Liszt, whose melodies and textures evoke the Alps and alpine lakes; “The Blue Danube” by Johann Strauss II, with its rippling rhythms suggesting the graceful flow of that river; and the burgeoning springtime sounds of birdcalls and wildlife in Copland’s Appalachian Spring. These represent but a sampling among myriad similar examples.

Of course, music that commemorates or evokes special qualities of place is not restricted to the West. Despite being a Western-trained classical pianist, composer, and writer, I can attest to the transcultural impact of natural environments on diverse musics across time and place. As an immigrant Chinese Hakka American child, I listened to traditional classical Chinese music that conveyed a sense of the natural world as home to a person who needed one. This included 瀟湘水雲 (“Mist and Clouds Over the Xiao-Xiang Rivers”) from the Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE) and 平沙落雁 (“Wild Geese Descending on the Sandbank”) from the end of the Ming Dynasty in the early1600s CE. Memories of those works ultimately impelled me to write this article about music and the environment, and I’m ever mindful of how they might help others. (A selection of relevant traditional classical Chinese music can be heard in Shuishan Yu’s 2009 CD, Guqin Music: The Pure  Sound of Mountain and Water).

Of course, these works by no means represent a full list of non-Western environmental music. Other traditions that similarly often refer to nature and place include Kankyō Ongaku (ambient music), a Japanese genre of music that emerged in the 1980s in reaction to rapid urbanization; Australian Aboriginal Songlines that “sing” memories of the thousands of species of plants and animals along traditional walking routes through the indigenous Outback; and forms such as the “Adowa” (antelope) dance of the Ashantis (Abrokwaa 1999). In yet another ethnomusicological example, Steven Feld (1994) describes the relationship between music cultures and the environment in his work with the Kaluli people of the Bosavi forest in Papua New Guinea. He conceives of that relationship as one of symbiosis, a reciprocity between the musical sounds of the Kaluli people and the bird songs of the forest: “My interpretation showed how Bosavi birds turn into Kaluli  singers and weepers, how Kaluli singers and weepers turn into Bosavi birds, and how all of this is a local ecology of ‘voices in the forest”(4). Such musical crossings of species identify and anticipate the core principles of zoömusicology. They expand the aspiration of crosscultural understanding and respect to cross-species awareness and reverence.

As for my second category of music that raises environmental awareness, we can identify numerous popular songs that have addressed environmental problems. Turner and Freedman (2004) cite examples such as Woody Guthrie’s “Dust Bowl Blues,” a song that evokes the midwestern drought of the 1930s; Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi, which calls out the destruction of nature through mass tourism; and Stan Rogers’ “Make and Break Harbour,” a song about the collapse of the Atlantic Cod fishery. Similarly, Shevock and Bates (2019) note that in “Mercy, Mercy Me [The Ecology],” Marvin Gaye asks, “Where did all the blue skies go?” and draws our attention to mercury in fishes, radiation, and overpopulation. And, of course, there’s Malvina Reynolds’ “God Bless the Grass,” a song made famous by Pete Seeger that reminds us that the “will” of deep-rooted grass “is to grow.”

These diverse musical works demonstrate that, despite the claims of Foucauldian discourses of power, musicians are not “fully administered” by oppressive systems of language and society: their creative power of musical invention allows them to be, in Tawnya Smith’s terms, culture makers as well as culture bearers. As Smith (2021) argues, “Culture making within the environmental and cultural commons aligns with Shevock’s vision of an eco-literate pedagogy where music is connected to ‘local places,’ is ‘connected with nature in meaningful and ethical ways,’ promotes ‘ecological consciousness by ritualizing and creating music rooted in soil,’ and connects music makers to the planet by connecting the local to the global” (8). This presents a paradigm shift for musicians to act as co-creators of an ecological soundscape. And it allows music educators to assume roles not only as teachers of how to value and make beautiful sounds, but as caretakers of a performance art that can be used to rally people to confront the dangers of environmental destruction.

The third category of soundscape studies and acoustic ecology began in the mid-1960s, when Michael Southworth (1967) and Murray Schaffer (1977) each proposed the concept of soundscape as an immersive experience that draws on the natural acoustic environment. Soundscapes can draw from natural sounds such as animal vocalizations (biophony); the sounds of weather and natural elements (geophony); and the environmental sounds created by humans, both acoustic and mechanical (anthropophony). Such sounds offer powerful tools that could help human beings viscerally relate to their surroundings. Soundscape art and soundscape studies can, in turn, “make explicit the patterns and changes in our sounding world” and “raise awareness about the state of the world, as revealed through sound” (Cummings and Miller 2007). Indeed, musicians and music educators share common ground in teaching audiences and students to listen conscientiously with detailed focus so that they may become more mindful of their physical environment and its transformations.

Hildegard Westerkamp (2002) describes the relationship between soundscape and acoustic ecology thusly:

[O]nce we have accepted the acoustic ecology arena as the basis from which soundscape composition emerges, one could perhaps say that its essence is the artistic, sonic transmission of meanings about place, time, environment and listening perception…. [E]ach soundscape composition emerges out of its own context in place and time, culturally, politically, socially, environmentally and is presented in a new and often entirely different context….(52)

As these comments suggest, understanding the various parameters of a soundscape requires insights from several fields, including acoustics, ecology, and enthnography.

This provides a segue to the fourth category that centers around ecomusicology, which involves the study of music, culture, and nature from text-based and performatory perspectives. Pedelty et al. (2022) provide historical background: “ecomusicology is… a twenty-first-century phenomenon born of twentieth-century social and biophysical crises that have resulted from centuries of Western colonial and industrial projects” (4-5). They further define ecomusicological research as environmental, relational, systemic, explanatory, and crisis-oriented, integrating the disciplines of musicology, ethnomusicology, popular music studies, and acoustic ecology as well as environmental studies.

Aspirations to gain a holistic awareness of an ecological sound environment lead towards the field of zoömusicology, which studies the musical qualities of sound and communication as generated and recognized by non-human species. To quote Hollis Taylor (2011), “Zoömusicology is the human valorization and analysis of the aesthetic qualities of non-human animal sounds.” This calls into question the definition of music as a product of conscious human organization of sounds that limits music-making and listening to humankind, which bespeaks a solipsistic form of anthropomorphism. Taylor and Lestel (2011) contend that “Eurocentric and anthropocentric musical assumptions and preoccupations have resulted in a paucity of studies of the sonic constructs and concomitant behavior of other species by musicologists” (57). By proposing to enlarge the scope of musical inquiry from cross-cultural to cross-species examination, zoömusicology’s objectives are analogous to environmental concerns that extend beyond impacts on human beings to those on other living organisms. An unexpected bonus may be that we humans may finally learn to listen to what Stravinsky referred to when he asserted that “a duck hears also.”

IDENTIFYING PRODUCTIVE INTERDISCIPLINARY MODELS OF THINKING AND TEACHING ABOUT MUSIC AND THE ENVIRONMENT

The sine qua non of interdisciplinary teaching is to make clear distinctions between interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, which are often indistinctly differentiated in the liberal arts. Interdisciplinary teaching has been occasionally conflated with multidisciplinary pedagogical methods while fundamental differences between encouraging disciplinary integration and maintaining disciplinary integrity have not always been respected. For the purposes of this essay, I draw upon definitions outlined by Choi and Pak (2006) to advocate for an interdisciplinary teaching that examines and integrates connections between disciplines into a coordinated and coherent whole, whereas multidisciplinarity extracts knowledge from different fields of study but operates within disciplinary limits. A common temptation found in interdisciplinary teaching exists in extracting knowledge from different fields of study without making a serious effort to synthesize them thematically or theoretically. I concur with Machiel Keestra’s (2016) assessment that interdisciplinary approaches must integrate different disciplines by exploring links between subject theories, methods, results, and/or models (32). The primary challenge music teachers face is to find ways to use methodologies that integrate insights from diverse academic disciplines and experiential knowledge to produce socially relevant wisdom.

Reflecting on the ways that interdisciplinarity can inform eco-literate music pedagogy can guide teachers towards a philosophy of convergence that combines cultivating ecological consciousness by using methods and practices from different disciplines, and connecting those under the umbrella of valuing and preserving human and non-human life. Such teaching objectives offer opportunities to integrate subareas in music such as performance, sound studies, zoömusicology, and music education with biology, chemistry, anthropology, communication studies, bioacoustics, geography, political science, and sociology. Shevock (2015) suggests that in so doing, music educators can move beyond a focus on the purely sonic aspects of music to recognize and share the social and ecological inspirations connected to “musicking.” For instance, we can move beyond discussions of “why these notes” to a broader dialogue about what motivates musicians to make this music, whether individually or as a member of a group confronting the cultural, psychological, or economic impacts wrought by environmental damage. Music teachers can similarly explore the social and ecological circumstances involved in the creation of a musical work, an approach that could draw on data from social and natural sciences. This may lead to another question: What is to be done in our broader society?

A soundscape ecology approach to music learning offers environmental educators a chance to better balance an environmental literacy curriculum that often concentrates on the natural, physical, and social sciences at the expense of the arts and humanities. It can facilitate interdisciplinary connections between the biological and acoustical sciences in order to respond to the dual impulses of resistance and adaptation to climate change. For example, the emerging cross-disciplinary field of bioacoustics investigates sounds produced by or affecting living organisms. There are clear musical implications to such an approach. As Smith (2021) suggests, music education can expand the notion of music to include sounds created by people from other cultures as well as those generated by other-than-human beings. Listening and “musicking” in these unorthodox ways may enable students to become more aware of and attuned to the environmental conditions needed for humans and non-humans to flourish in our shared ecosystems.

CONCLUSION

To recapitulate, I argue for a program of interdisciplinary teaching that involves exposing high school and university students to both Western classical and World Musics that commemorate or evoke nature, time, and place – not only in their subject matter, but in terms of their musical sound as well. Such teaching involves discussing how composers and performers achieve those objectives. It also involves listening to popular music that encourages topical environmental awareness and activism through its lyrics. Exploring acoustic ecology and soundscape studies that center around transdisciplinary connections between music and the natural environment can encourage direct engagement with natural environmental sounds while also offering inroads into the scientific and historical context of those sounds. This may be a challenge, but if done well we will be sharing with high school and university students perspectives from ecomusicology and zoömusicology that can help them move beyond self-centered anthropomorphic thinking to develop deeper connections to the non-human species who inhabit our shared environment.

By teaching ways to listen to music about nature and music drawn from sounds of the natural environment, high school and university music educators can encourage students to become alert to interconnections between music, culture, and nature while simultaneously approaching our environmental crisis through a musical lens. Raising student awareness of the many music genres that convey environmental messages will not only enrich their sound worlds, but may also develop their ecological consciousness. Music educators may, in turn, find teaching music in this way self-benefiting and gratifying since it counters widely-held reservations about the relevance of music as a nonessential luxury. Teaching about music and the environment demonstrates that music can be scientifically, politically, chronologically, and ethically relevant. Finally, teaching about listening to and making music that relates to an environment in the context of a specific time and place can make students more keenly aware of sounds from local landscapes, which may lead to deeper understandings of how much there is to lose if we do not act to protect the students’ habitat from environmental degradation and climate change.

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