Abstract
This book examines sound in eco-film and fiction to illuminate music’s active potential in narrating climate crisis. Music can work as more than background, provoking discomfort and even violence amid planetary crisis. Though the role of sound in environmental art installations, in animal studies, and in Earth-focused musical compositions is gaining more attention as climate-crisis anxieties rise, music’s critical function in post/apocalyptic narrative deserves investigation, too. Heard, imagined, interrupted, voicing, or resisting violence, music carries presence—even in its lack—that can incite both visceral and critical responses, showing that they are not mutually exclusive. Music can work as an agent, inviting a state of critical vulnerability in audiences, readers, and listeners, raising the stakes for their concern with climate change in an embodied way.
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Notes
- 1.
Jason Samenow, “Red-Hot Planet: All-Time Heat Records Have Been Set All Over the World During the Past Week,” in The Washington Post, July 5, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/2018/07/03/hot-planet-all-time-heat-records-have-been-set-all-over-the-world-in-last-week/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2348492e58a1. Web, accessed July 6, 2018.
- 2.
In his article “Ecology as Pre-Text? The Paradoxical Presence of Ecological Thematics in Contemporary Scandinavian Quality TV” (Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, Vol. 10, No. 2 [2018], 66–73), Jørgen Bruhn addresses media products that include ecological disasters with vague causes and consequences, such as the Norwegian series Okkupert.
- 3.
Joseph Stromberg, “What Is the Anthropocene and Are We in It?” in Smithsonian, January 2013, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-is-the-anthropocene-and-are-we-in-it-164801414/. Web, accessed March 29, 2018.
- 4.
See Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
- 5.
See E. Ann Kaplan, Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2016).
- 6.
Jørgen Bruhn, draft of material presented at IEAT research centre, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, May 2016, 8–9.
- 7.
Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin, “Art & Death: Lives Between the Fifth Assessment & the Sixth Extinction,” in Davis and Turpin, eds., Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015), 11. See also Bill McKibben, Earth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2010).
- 8.
Vincent Normand, “In the Planetarium: The Modern Museum on the Anthropocenic Stage,” in Art in the Anthropocene, 65.
- 9.
See Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe, eds., Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature (New York: Routledge, 2016).
- 10.
See Kate Rigby, Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virgina Press, 2015).
- 11.
The term “transmediality” refers to elements of one medium that can cross over into another, for example, musical rhythm imitated in a prose text. See Irina Rajewsky, “Intermediality and Transmediality: Unbraiding Converged Theories,” lecture materials, Freie Universität Berlin, http://www.uta.fi/ltl/en/transmediality2016/materials/Rajewsky_Powerpoint_Helsinki_161101.pdf. Web, accessed March 29, 2018.
- 12.
See Jørgen Bruhn, “Heteromediality,” in Lars Elleström, ed., Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 225–236.
- 13.
Sabine Frost, “Looking Behind Walls: Literary and Filmic Imaginations of Nature, Humanity, and the Anthropocene in Die Wand,” in Sabine Wilke and Japhet Johnstone, eds., Readings in the Anthropocene: The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond (New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), 62–88. See also Caroline Schaumann and Heather I. Sullivan, eds. German Ecocriticsm in the Anthropocene (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
- 14.
See David Abrams, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York: Random House, 2010) and Charles Foster, Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2016).
- 15.
See Mark Pedelty, Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2012).
- 16.
Sebastián Verea, “Sounds of the Anthropocene,” in C-EENRG Working Papers, University of Cambridge, 2017-2, 6. See also http://theanthropoceneproject.net. Web, accessed March 29, 2018.
- 17.
See Joe Palca, “Climate Scientist Tries Art to Stir Hearts Regarding Earth’s Fate,” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, February 16, 2015, https://www.npr.org/2015/02/16/386064582/climate-scientist-tries-arts-to-stir-hearts-regarding-earths-fate. Web, accessed March 29, 2018. See also https://www.thecrossroadsproject.org. Web, accessed October 13, 2017.
- 18.
Michelle Comstock and Mary E. Hocks, “The Sounds of Climate Change: Sonic Rhetoric in the Anthropocene, the Age of Human Impact,” in Rhetoric Review, Vol. 35, No. 2, 2016, 165.
- 19.
See Heidi Hart, Hanns Eisler’s Art Songs: Arguing with Beauty (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2018).
- 20.
See Sybille Krämer, Medium, Messenger, Transmission: An Approach to Media Philosophy, trans. Anthony Enns (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015).
- 21.
Ibid., 33, 135–143.
- 22.
Jean-Luc Nancy, conversation with John Paul Ricco, in “The Existence of the World Is Always Unexpected,” trans. Jeffrey Malecki, in Art in the Anthropocene, 85–92.
- 23.
See Stacy Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics & Pleasures in Posthuman Times (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
- 24.
See Jelena Novak, Postopera: Reinventing the Voice-Body (London and New York: Routledge, 2016).
- 25.
Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 33.
- 26.
Christine L. Marran, Ecology Without Culture: Aesthetics for a Toxic World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 6.
- 27.
Lidia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 53.
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———. “How Do ‘We’ React to the Anthropocene? Scientific Concepts Transformed into Media Products—And Affects.” Draft of Material Presented at IEAT Research Centre, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, May 2016.
———. “Ecology as Pre-Text? The Paradoxical Presence of Ecological Thematics in Contemporary Scandinavian Quality TV.” Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 10, no. 2 (2018): 66–73.
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Verea, Sebastián. “Sounds of the Anthropocene.” In C-EENRG Working Papers, University of Cambridge, 2017-2.
Yuknavitch, Lidia. The Book of Joan. New York: HarperCollins, 2017.
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Hart, H. (2018). Introduction. In: Music and the Environment in Dystopian Narrative. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01815-3_1
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