Re-Educating and Rewilding: Learning to Listen Honestly as a Music Composer/Educator
Nicholas P. Quigley, R.L.M. Resiliency Preparatory Academy and B.M.C. Durfee High School, Fall River, Massachusetts
Tawnya D. Smith, Boston University
Banner photo by Jon Flobrant on Unsplash
As musicians and educators terrified about environmental degradation, we acknowledge the need to make our practices more sustainable. Over the course of our relationship—initially that of a master’s student (Nico) and professor (Tawnya) and now as colleagues—we have become increasingly aware of the impending collapse of the unsustainable systems in which we are entangled and have discussed ways to contribute healthfully as we fulfill our niche in the social and biological ecosystems we cohabitate (Smith “Trauma of Separation” 179–180 and “Surviving and Thriving” 7). We have also engaged in a critique of Western industrial notions of extraction and dehumanization reinforced by schooling (Martusewitz et al. 1-20). To move beyond these limitations, we independently completed graduate-level expressive arts certificates (Rogers 1-3) to shift from a performance-centric music education approach to one focused on wellbeing.
As musicians and expressive arts facilitators, we turn to art to reconnect our cognitive awareness with our bodies and emotions (Smith “Spiraling to Life” 335–351). Nico (they/he) is a multi-modal musician and educator who has self-released eight albums spanning the classical, electronic, and ambient realms. Drawing on their experience as an instrumentalist, vocalist, composer, and producer, they now focus on creating electro-acoustic music integrating digital synthesis, soundscapes, and generative composition elements. Tawnya is a music education researcher who focuses her inquiry using ecofeminist, ecojustice, and ecopsycholological frameworks to consider ways that education can lead to lifeways that are sustainable, just, and foster wellbeing.
It is also natural for us to extend such opportunities to our students, who have only known a time of environmental crisis. Although repressing feelings about environmental crises may seem easier, music can remind us that we are alive and part of a greater whole—awarenesses we believe are essential to human survival and thriving. Thus, we turned to the activists and ecophilosophers Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone (8–12), who developed a community-centric curriculum to help people work through fear, anger, and despair about environmental collapse and develop what they call “active hope,” as referenced in the title of their book. Such hope is not based on wishful thinking nor denial but on taking informed and inspired actions that support the Great Turning (6–8)—that is, the cultivation of a life-sustaining society—no matter whether one feels hope or can realistically expect such an outcome.
Macy and Johnstone remind us that despite environmental catastrophes, there is much to be grateful for. They encourage us to connect with the protective quality of gratitude to not lose sight of what is at stake nor become mired in despair. In a related book, Macy and Brown’s Coming Back to Life, gratitude practice (43–54) is followed by an honest assessment of situations that leads one to feel their “pain for the world” (55–79). Next is to expand awareness (83–156) and go forth with active hope (159–238). Tawnya (Smith “Spiraling to Life” 1 and “Surviving and Thriving” 7) was the first to apply Macy’s framework to music education and consider how music engagement might support this process.
Through autoethnographic inquiry (Ellis et al. 1-5), we depict the evolution of Nico’s musicking as his creative work and relationship with natural spaces developed organically and informed his composition and teaching practices. In what follows, Nico intermixes reflections with vignettes and links to albums and their covers to depict this evolution. Following the vignettes, we jointly interpret Nico’s journey using the Macy and Brown framework from Coming Back to Life (67). We share these reflections to highlight how musicians and educators might enact active hope through positive connections with Earth, sound, and students.
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EARLY MARCH 2009, NORTH PARK, FALL RIVER, MASSACHUSETTS: LISTENING AS AN EARTH BODY
This vignette depicts how music and nature fostered a more profound sense of aliveness for Nico as an adolescent.
In high school, I remember walking in a local park while listening to music with earbuds. North Park has sprawling greens, rolling hills, and tall trees. As I walked and listened, the music led me to increase my pace as the sixteenth-note drumming built up to the melody. I was running! And jumping! The sun became exceedingly bright, and the green grass and leaves enmeshed me in the park. However, the grass was still brown, resting for the winter because it was early March.
While in North Park I accessed my feelings through music and movement and connected with my surroundings. I moved and listened as a body of and connected with Earth. Rigby (45) describes the “Earth body” as a living individual, cohabitating with all other human and non-human beings, and as Earth itself, engendering and dependent upon Earth’s various systems. Rather than seeing the present time literally, my Earth body was united with the sun’s life-supporting energy and perceived the ecosystem non-linearly. My Earth body did not see the dead of winter but the near rebirth of spring. I did not think anything of this; I was merely enjoying my free time as an adolescent. Reflecting on that experience now as a scholar-practitioner of eco-conscious arts and education, I appreciate the majesty of this memory.
My process of discovering the term “Earth body” describes what it is and how the rest of my philosophical and ecological shifts occurred. I wrote the term “Earth body,” assuming I had read it during my graduate work as an expressive arts student at Salve Regina University and that I would find the appropriate text to confirm my inclusion of the concept in this article. Ultimately, I discovered Rigby’s chapter after concluding that I had not yet read the term or concept in another text. However, Rigby described precisely what I had initially intended to convey. We arrived at the idea separately, inspired not by scholarly or professional pursuits but by organic connections with Earth. This discovery process mimics what is displayed using vignettes that I learned and unlearned simply by connecting with Earth. It was not until the end of this journey that I discovered how perfectly it aligns with Macy and Brown’s framework from The Work that Reconnects approach as articulated in their book Coming Back to Life (67).
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JULY 2018, FALL RIVER, MASSACHUSETTS: EXTRACTIVE LISTENING
In this depiction, Nico shares how they once viewed nature from an anthropocentric perspective—looking for ways that nature could benefit themself and other humans.
Red-winged blackbirds and yellow Cedar Waxwings sang and danced in shady trees on a warm July morning. I looked up with childlike awe as they enveloped me in their intricate chorus. I was light years away from the stress of work. “This should be recorded for a song,” I thought. “This could bring people such peace.”
In my early twenties, I worked to establish myself as a musician and educator. I worked several jobs to pay rent and had limited free time. I commuted all over metro Boston and rarely spent time in natural spaces. I eventually took a day off with my partner at her cottage and interviewed for a nearby teaching position. We visited the water at their cottage on the South Watuppa Pond to appreciate the scenery. My western industrial extraction economy mindset—still in survival mode—heard the soundscape not as an ecosystem I was part of but as a resource to be harvested for creative commodification.
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LATE MARCH 2019, PORTSMOUTH, RHODE ISLAND: TUNING INTO THE SOUNDSCAPE
Here, Nico shares how their practice of recording soundscapes from their environment first emerged.
“There’s no way I live here,” I thought as I walked a railroad along Mount Hope Bay. I perceived the beauty of the water and the tangled overgrowth of winter-bare vegetation. Depeche Mode played in my earbuds for miles. The external soundscape seeped in during a quiet musical moment, bringing my attention to the birds who had been with me the whole time. I removed my earbuds and listened curiously. I was in a massive sonic cocoon. “This is incredible,” I thought, and quickly started recording with my phone.
In 2018, when I started my career teaching music in my hometown of Fall River, my partner and I searched for our first apartment together. The least expensive option was a town away, an attic in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. I loved walking along the nearby railroad, passing through miles of natural spaces. I walked countless hours, mostly without direct human interaction, enjoying the escape into nature while listening to music. This is where I started recording soundscapes for fun; I intended to use them in compositions but also enjoyed the time outdoors. I felt peaceful, joyous, curious, and inspired. My body was moving and resting, and I became conscious of how my movement and breath sounded as I tried not to taint the recordings.
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MID-JULY 2019, GOOSEBERRY ISLAND, WESTPORT, MASSACHUSETTS: LEARNING TO LISTEN HONESTLY
Nico shares here how they approached nature recording from an extractive perspective as they looked for pristine soundscapes devoid of human sound and how that challenge led to philosophical and ecological shifts in their music-making and teaching.
“I give up.” “They should shut down those mini airports for hobby planes.” As I drove around Westport, I realized it did not matter how far into the wilderness I went to record; human sound would always be present, ruining my opportunities to capture soundscapes. “It’s a miracle anything survives with all this goddamn noise.” I pulled into a favorite walking space, Gooseberry Island. “I’m just going for a walk and not recording.” After walking half a mile and letting the sounds of wind, waves, and birdsongs quiet my flustered mind, I turned towards my car to fetch my microphone. “Since everywhere is ruined, that’s all I can do. That’s the piece.”
After months of walking and recording, I purchased a new microphone to make better recordings. I envisioned a piece of semi-ambient music to promote and conserve the beauty of my bioregion. Although I was more at leisure than work, I ultimately ascribed to the extraction economy goals of resourcing and commodifying. Through composition, I wanted to call others to act—a tension between extraction economy values and my desire to promote change that finally eased when I recognized its presence.
Because I desired a breadth of sounds from diverse locations without any human noise, I was drawn to notice more in what I heard. I expected the soundscapes to vary by location, but I also learned that time and seasons played similarly vital roles in determining a place’s sound. I noticed, too, that wherever my location, I was closer to people than I anticipated. Sounds from miles away alerted me to what I could not see. I began to worry about the impacts of noise pollution on wildlife. One day, after attempting to record the shore at Horseneck Beach but hearing small planes above, I went to nearby Gooseberry Island (Quigley, “An Arts-Based Response to Various Pollutions of Gooseberry Island, MA”) to regenerate. A starker artistic message emerged as I pondered the impossibility of recording non-human nature alone. I started honestly recording—accepting the soundscape of a place rather than seeking out what I thought a place should sound like.
The idea of responding to environmental degradation through music emerged naturally as I improvised on the guitar and manipulated effects to create noises they were not intended for. My feelings were externalized through this arts-based response process. I recognized in these creative moments that my consciousness was expanding and that I was learning. This, too, was my music education. It was a philosophical shift in my musicking.
Furthermore, I named the educational value—developing ecological consciousness through musicking—of these practices and imagined how to incorporate them into my teaching. It was an ecological shift in my pedagogy. I asked myself,
“How can I facilitate this kind of creativity, learning, and expansion of consciousness for my students? What would it sound like for them to create an arts-based response to environmental degradation?” This is when the idea for the Massachusetts Soundscape Project (Donovan & Lyons Elementary Schools Class of 2023) emerged, as detailed in the final vignette.
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SEPTEMBER 2019, HOME STUDIO, PORTSMOUTH, RHODE ISLAND: EXPRESSION THROUGH PLAY
Here, Nico exemplifies the interconnectedness of their compositional and teaching practices—not only how their teaching is informed by composition but also how their composition is informed by teaching.
On a Saturday morning in my home studio, I opened a leftover project file on my computer containing soundscape recordings. I started auditioning other recordings, including guitar works, soundscapes, and project files with electronic sounds. I imported an atmospheric guitar recording and layered it with the existing soundscapes. The project still had several minutes of soundscapes, so the auditioning continued until I imported another guitar recording. After fiddling with effects and mixing, I listened several times, quietly smiling.
After amassing many recordings of soundscapes and other musical ideas in the summer of 2019, I spent weekends exploring and developing them. I also recorded new sounds. I never intended to compose that way; I usually started with a new idea that would eventually remind me of a previous, unfinished work. These compositions evoked feelings I did not directly express but deeply resonated with me (Quigley, “Playing with Destroying”). I played with sound and music similarly to how I encouraged my elementary students. The extended artistic practices of mixing and matching clarified and voiced shadow emotions, including dread, grief, culpability, adoration, and tenderness.
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OCTOBER 2020, HORSENECK BEACH, WESTPORT, MASSACHUSETTS: TUNING INTO EARTH’S MUSICS
Nico describes here how their worldview expanded through the development of teaching materials using techniques initially developed as an eco-conscious composer.
Before a COVID-19 vaccine was available, my district’s hybrid learning model required that I teach my elementary students in small groups and via video chat. Aside from teaching, I spent much of my time distancing from humanity, retreating to woods and beaches. Surrounded by the shoreline’s sound, I found peace. “I wish I could experience this with my students.” “This could be a class, somehow.” I plugged in my microphone and started recording, trusting that a lesson would emerge. “A virtual field trip,” I thought. “This could be a whole series!” I tuned into ocean waves, noticing the sounds of their crashes and recessions. I perceived when they were similar, when they changed, and how the volume fluctuated. I heard the length of each crash and recession and the differences in strength between each one. “This is the lesson.”
Shevock (37) offers an eco-conscious philosophy of music education that connects to Earth, de-centers human musicking within the vast array of natural musics, and teaches about climate crises. Upon discovering his work, I was overjoyed at finally seeing a bridge between my climate anxiety and career, but I was unsure exactly how to cross it. My challenges were compounded by the early restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic (i.e., hybrid instruction and in-person choral singing bans). Hoping to reach students and bring natural spaces to them, I created a website hosting media I gathered from local reservations.
I was also beginning my intermodal expressive arts training. I started to express myself through movement and visual arts and considered sound and music in new ways. From this came interdisciplinary lesson plans with non-musical artistic practices and the media I recorded. I was still commodifying the ecosystem for professional gains, but I was no longer aiming to position the ecosystem merely as an object. I considered how people interact with and learn from ecosystems. My worldview expanded from anthropocentrism toward interconnectedness. My teaching expanded from a human-centered approach to musicking towards the inclusion of studying music of the Earth.
APRIL 2022, BLUE HILLS RESERVATION, RANDOLPH, MASSACHUSETTS: WORKING WITH STUDENTS
Here is a moment that exemplifies Nico’s challenges, confronting learned behavior and ways of thinking reinforced by feedback from the perceived majority.
“Would leaves be a biophonic or geophonic sound?” a third grader asked. “Hmm. If they are alive on a living tree, that would be a biophonic sound because those are the sounds of living things. But if they are crunchy leaves on the ground, or we hear those in the wind, we could put that in the geophonic category as part of the wind, a sound of the Earth’s systems. But we hear the living leaves as part of the wind, too. What do you all think?” We eventually lined up and headed for the nearby trail with notebooks and pencils. “You can sit with a partner as long as you listen quietly.” “Hey, that’s too far; I can’t see you over there.” A cyclist dashed past, cueing my inner critic to rant, “This isn’t music class,” “There are reasons why nobody teaches this way.”
Traditional music teacher education pedagogies can limit general music educators, and many are expected to perform a limited range of tasks within school ecosystems (Abril and Gault 5)—including producing school performances and developing standard music notation literacy. These goals do not provide much space for students to express themselves musically, constituting music miseducation that disconnects students from their imagination, culture, society, and ecosystem (Smith “Trauma of Separation” 173). Thus, I try to subvert them in my teaching. For example, as I experienced philosophical and ecological shifts through the arts-based response to environmental degradation (Quigley, “An Arts-Based Response to Various Pollutions of Gooseberry Island, MA”), I conceptualized a version that students could participate in, as described below. Similarly, in my pursuit of more humane and life-affirming teaching strategies informed by expressive arts practices, I applied what I learned in my graduate studies to my daily teaching and created a final project consisting of lesson plans generated at Salve Regina (Quigley “Expressive Arts in Music Education” 1).
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MARCH 2023, LYONS ELEMENTARY, RANDOLPH, MASSACHUSETTS: RECOGNIZING THE HEALING QUALITIES OF MUSICAL PLAY
This final vignette unveils the Massachusetts Soundscape Project, a product of Nico’s eco-conscious development as a musician and teacher leaning on Earth as a collaborator. It also shows how collaborating with students unlocked Nico’s understanding of their healing and personal development through this process.
The students were irritated that I ignored their musical inclinations in Soundtrap. “Why can’t I have the beat in it, too?” a fifth grader asked. I was burnt out after describing projected declines in Massachusetts bird populations to each fifth-grade class. Yet I remembered the aesthetic honesty I arrived at in 2019 and 2020 through the Gooseberry Island and Playing with Destroying albums. I remembered the satisfaction of playing with guitars and effects with my soundscape recordings. I realized that play was my protest. “Ok, so we will dive back into the project now, but it’s nothing like before.” I gave my students almost total freedom to work towards three broad goal options: “Tell the story of how the bird population will change, convey your feelings about what you learned through research, or imagine a different outcome.”
From 2019 to 2023, I cultivated greater self-acceptance through expressive arts and reverence for the wild. Recognizing my wild nature allowed me to see and understand who I am and where I live. I had to hike my internal forest and hear my inner ocean to feel compassion. I attempted to care for and educate my students by teaching them about their local sounds and ecosystem through a creative digital music technology project. They were to audition and download birdsong recordings, construct a soundscape collage representing a chosen bird’s present population in Massachusetts, and then a second representing that population’s projected change by 2050. This task seemed straightforward, but the students—accustomed to basic electronic production, using loops, and recording—incorporated their other musical ideas. What they were doing was creative, musical, and self-initiated, but it was not exactly what I initially had in mind. Eventually, I understood that my wild nature was called forth by what I heard and made in my compositions. I learned to access and release my anger, fear, and sadness to self-soothe and transform these feelings, as did my students (Donovan & Lyons Elementary Schools Class of 2023).
My music education was expanded through eco-conscious musical engagement, which I did not experience in my professional music and teacher education settings. However, it allowed me to bring more to the table as a teacher. My students not only learned about melody writing, harmony, instrumentation, digital synthesis, mixing, composition with found sounds, or other topics typically covered in a traditional music class. In the process, they used musical play to access, release, and transform climate anxiety while gaining a deeper understanding of their artistic identities. They applied a critical lens to what they heard and how they saw their world changing, and created music as a form of protest.
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GOING FORTH FROM AN EXTRACTION AND POWER-OVER TO AN ATTUNEMENT, EXPRESSION, AND POWER-WITH APPROACH
As these vignettes show, Nico’s awareness changed as they attuned to their Earth body through musicking and teaching. Their inclination to extract and use nature shifted from what Macy and Johnstone call the separate or isolated self (85) to a more integrated understanding. Macy and Johnstone argue that by cultivating a more ecological self (91), one can see the world through new eyes and move from a “power-over” to a “power-with” form of engagement (101–115). Nico’s philosophical shifts were precipitated by moments of attunement and gratitude for natural surroundings, as well as confrontation with pain caused by limited financial resources and access to natural spaces, sound pollution that prevented untainted nature recording, the fear and isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic and grappling with the purpose of their career amid climate anxiety.
Through feeling their pain for the world and perhaps sensing their students’ pain, Nico eventually saw with new eyes and went forth with new actions. This change was evident when Nico shifted from a power-over approach to composing, where they stopped imposing forms and structures and started to play with sound; and in their teaching, when they allowed students more freedom to convey crises and potential solutions through their compositions. Further evidence of a shift occurred as Nico started integrating expressive practices in their composition and teaching, allowing further opportunities to travel the spiral through “anger, fear, and sadness” and towards opportunities for transformation and healing. By traveling the spiral of gratitude, feeling pain for the world, seeing with new eyes, and going forth with inspired actions, perhaps musicians can bring forth musical ways to reconnect with the ecological self, maintain present awareness of their emotions even when ecological catastrophes make that extremely difficult, see with less anthropocentric perspectives, and engage in forms of active hope despite the challenges we face.
WORKS CITED
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Donovan & Lyons Elementary Schools Class of 2023. Massachusetts Soundscape Project, Q Music & Arts, 2023.
Expressive and Creative Arts. Salve Regina U, 2023, https://salve.edu/graduate-and-professional-studies/expressive-creative-arts. Accessed 25 June 2023.
Ellis, Carolyn, Tony E. Adams, and Arthur P. Bochner. “Autoethnography: An Overview.” Forum: Qualitative Social Research, vol. 12, no. 1, 2011, 1-15.
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Macy, Joanna, and Molly Brown. Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to The Work That Reconnects. New Society Publishers, 2014.
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Marks, Elizabeth, and Caroline Hickman. “Eco-distress is not a pathology, but it still hurts.” Nature Mental Health, vol. 1, 2023, 379-380.
Martusewicz, Rebecca, A., Jeff Edmundson, & John Lupinacci. Ecojustice education: Toward diverse, democratic, and sustainable communities. (3rd ed.) Routledge, 2015.
Quigley, Nicholas. P. (2019). An Arts-Based Response to Various Pollutions on Gooseberry Island, MA (Original Soundtrack), Q Music & Arts, 2019.
…Playing with Destroying, Q Music & Arts, 2020.
…Expressive Arts in Music Education: A Creative and Integrative Curriculum. 2023. Salve Regina U, CAGS final project.
Rigby, Kate. “Contact Improvisation: Dance with the Earth Body You Have.” Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene, edited by Katherine Gibson et al., Punctum, 2015, pp. 43–48.
Rogers, Natalie. The Creative Connection: Expressive Arts as Healing. Science & Behavior Books, 1993.
Shevock, Daniel J. Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy. Routledge, 2018.
Smith, Tawnya D. “Spiraling to Life: Listening and Sounding Toward a Life-Sustaining Society.” Authentic Connection: Music, Spirituality, and Wellbeing, edited by Karin S. Hendricks, and June Boyce-Tillman, Peter Lang, 2021, pp. 335–351.
…“Music Education for Surviving and Thriving: Cultivating Children’s Wonder, Senses, Emotional Wellbeing, and Wild Nature as a Means to Discover and Fulfill Their Life’s Purpose.” Frontiers in Education, vol. 6, 2021, pp. 1-10. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.648799.
…“The Trauma of Separation: Understanding How Music Education Interrupted My Relationship with the More Than Human World.” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education, vol. 21, no. 1, 2022, 172-94. http://act.maydaygroup.org/articles/Smith21_1.pdf.