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Sabine Feisst
To cite this article: Sabine Feisst (2016): Music and Ecology, Contemporary Music Review, DOI:
10.1080/07494467.2016.1239383
Article views: 12
INTRODUCTION
Music and Ecology
Sabine Feisst
Derived from the Greek οἶκος (house) and λογία (study of) and coined by biologist
Ernst Haeckel in 1869, ecology has become an increasingly popular concept and a buzz-
word in musical discourse over the last few decades. This comes as no surprise; ecolo-
gically motivated art dovetails public debates about environmental degradation, climate
change, and the growing desire for sustainable ecosystems. As is common in the huma-
nities, in music the scientific term ecology is understood and used in a broad sense,
reflecting, on the one hand, the idea of interconnections of organisms and their relation-
ship with inorganic components in a specific environment, and on the other hand, a
critical or activist attitude towards human impact on the environment.
Examples of ecologically inspired music abound throughout the centuries in both
non-Western and Western cultures, in rural and urban areas around the globe. In
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Western composers from John Cage to
John Luther Adams have explicitly evoked ecology as a metaphor for some of their
works. In the late 1960s Cage announced: ‘Music, as I conceive it, is ecological. You
could go further and say that it IS ecology’ (Cage, 1981). For much of his compo-
sitional career, Adams has been ‘in search of an ecology of music, believing that
music can contribute to the awakening of our ecological understanding’ (Adams,
2009). In 2011 he won the Heinz Award in the Environment for creating innovative
works addressing environmental concerns. Since the late 1960s composers, including
Luc Ferrari, Maggi Payne, and Libby Larsen, as well as artists in the popular music
arena such as Pete Seeger, have created works that articulate environmental activism.
At the same time R. Murray Schafer, Hildegard Westerkamp, and Barry Truax among
other artists have explored acoustic ecology examining the sonic make-up of environ-
ments and pioneered acoustic communication and soundscape studies at Simon Fraser
University in Vancouver (Schafer, 1977). Yet others, including Pauline Oliveros and
Garth Paine, engaged in ecologically inspired performance and listening techniques,
creating site-specific music based on a profound engagement with place and many
hours of deep or whole-body listening (Paine, 2014).
Musicologists, in particular ethnomusicologists, have analysed music making
through the lens of ecology for several decades. Their scholarship has more recently
been classified as ecomusicology (conflating ecology and musicology), now a rapidly
growing field of interdisciplinary inquiry centring on the interrelationships between
music, culture, and nature, often using methods developed in literary ecocriticism.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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