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In Truth, the Forest Hears Each Sound: Sounding Nature and Ideology in New York’S Hudson Valley

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In Truth, the Forest Hears Each Sound: Sounding Nature and Ideology in New York’S Hudson Valley In Truth, the Forest Hears Each Sound: Sounding Nature and Ideology in New York’s Hudson Valley JOSHUA GROFFMAN Abstract This paper seeks an account of how sound participates in the embodied experience of a beautiful place: New York’s Hudson Valley, the region lying along the banks of the Hudson River between New York City and Albany. Opening our ears to the way currents of history have shaped our hearing in a specific geographic locale clarifies aspects of how we inhabit and value natural spaces and offers an opportunity to move past a wholly anthropocentric understanding of the environment. This paper focuses on the cognitive soundscape—the blend of sounds that come in at the ear and are then understood through cultural layouts—to analyze Hudson-Fulton March, a musical relic of the 1909 Hudson-Fulton Celebrations; soundings of the Valley in painting and prose by nineteenth-century artists; and how the Hudson Valley’s original inhabitants, the Munsee and Mahican Indian tribes, heard place in ways fundamentally different from colonizers’ hearings. Particularly at a time of rising politicization of environmental values, unpacking the American “pastoral ideology” is an important avenue for creating commonality in addressing the environmental problems we face. Introduction: Pastoral Ideology in an Age of Ecological Crisis This article seeks an account of how sound participates in the embodied experience of New York’s Hudson River Valley: by many accounts the prototypical pastoral landscape and a beautiful place. How we hear the environment, and “sound” it ourselves in cultural discourse, reflects more than simple appreciation of the natural world. Rather, accounting for the workings of the American “pastoral ideology” is an avenue for accessing some of this country’s most critical debates.1 Discourse around nature often reflects a long-running trend to locate “the essential America as exurban, green, pastoral, even wild.” It therefore frequently hinges on notions of what, and who, constitutes the “essential America,” along with contested understandings of community, politics, class, and race.2 I argue that sound—experienced as the aural dimension of place, the cultural product known as music, and conceptions between—is an ideal medium for unpacking pastoral ideology and understanding its relation to broader political currents. Such investigation is currently more urgent than ever. Even as ecological problems increasingly demand our attention, they are made more intractable by the politicization of environmental values along the “red- blue” axis. My aim is to make explicit some of the values underlying the hearing and sounding of the natural world, and by doing so, to further the project of building a common understanding of a more sustainable future. 1 See chapter 1, “Pastoral Ideology,” of Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995). 2 Ibid., 32–33. Music & Politics 13, Number 2 (Summer 2019), ISSN 1938-7687. Article DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mp.9460447.0013.201 2 Music and Politics Summer 2019 Encompassing the communities along the banks of the Hudson River between New York City and Albany, the Hudson Valley is a rich mixture of mountains, forests, rolling fields, and of course, the majesty of the river itself. European colonizers found in it a combination of natural beauty and economic potential, “a very pleasant place to build a Towne on,” in one explorer’s laconic phrase.3 The “Travel Hudson Valley” website is more effusive: Designated as a National Heritage Area, the valley is steeped in history, natural beauty, culture and a burgeoning food and farmer’s market scene. Among many attributes, it’s the oldest wine producing area in the country, and the magnificent scenery inspired artists whose works became the Hudson River School of Painters. Lonely Planet describes the Hudson River Valley as “a real city break, with leafy drives, wineries and plenty of farm-to-table foodie options.”4 The region’s proximity to New York City has long made it a vibrant piece of the larger United States economy and culture. Pastoral spaces—areas of “middle landscape” shaped both by natural beauty and human alteration—abound. More telling is the value such spaces occupy in our collective imaginations. In the tourism ad copy, “[h]istory, natural beauty, culture and a burgeoning food and farmer’s market scene” all reference the interface between non-human natural spaces and human incursion or alteration to those spaces; the area’s status as a not-city, the way it preserves the air of a sheltered (but always threatened) pastoral refuge from human-driven development, is reckoned first among its advantages. My inquiry here is an ecomusicological one, oriented towards a consideration of “music, culture, and nature in all the complexities of those terms.”5 Ecomusicology has often focused on “the affective qualities of landscapes”—the mixture of human and non-human attributes which create our embodied sense of place—and “the physical and emotional responses that music induces in listeners and how they shape our view of the world.”6 It is thus well-positioned to examine the workings of the pastoral ideology in the Hudson Valley as found within musical texts.7 Not solely within musical texts, however: instead, I follow recent work that holds the true purview of ecomusicology to be not music but sound, broadly construed, not least because the boundaries between the two terms are so contingent on cultural norms.8 As suggested by R. Murray Schafer, I hear the sounding world as a text also, a composition in its own 3 Robert Juet, “Juet’s Journal of Hudson’s 1609 Voyage, from the 1625 Edition of Purchas His Pilgrimes,” Hudson River Valley Review 25, no. 2 (2009): 59. 4 “Travel Hudson Valley,” Hudson Valley Tourism Inc., accessed December 15, 2017, http://www.travelhudsonvalley.com. https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.A2240765. See also Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe, “Ecomusicologies,” in Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature, eds. Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe (New York: Routledge, 2016). In a recent essay, Allen refers throughout to “music and sound studies” (italics mine), underscoring that the two kinds of aural experience properly belong together in the same field of inquiry; see “One Ecology and Many Ecologies: The Problem and Opportunity of Ecology for Music and Sound Studies,” MUSICultures 45, no. 1 & 2 (2018). 6 Daniel M. Grimley, “Music, Landscape, Attunement: Listening to Sibelius’s Tapiola,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 64, no. 2 (2011): 395, https://doi.org/10.1525/jams.2011.64.2.394. 7 From a wide field of possibility, notable ecomusicological approaches to representation of place through music include Denise Von Glahn, The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003); Daniel M. Grimley, Grieg: Music, Landscape and Norwegian Identity (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006); and Mark Pedelty, Ecomusicology: Folk, Rock, and the Environment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011). Germane to my reading of pastoral landscapes is Aaron S. Allen, “Symphonic Pastorals,” Green Letters 15, no. 1 (2011), https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2011.10589089. 8 Jeff Todd Titon makes an early call for the inclusion of sound—not simply music—in ecomusicological inquiry in “The Nature of Ecomusicology,” Música e Cultura 8, no. 1 (2013). In Truth, the Forest Hears Each Sound 3 right.9 I do so with a fine-grained resolution that regards as its purview all sounds within a defined locality.10 Furthermore, I am guided by the principle that what we hear in the physical world around us— its “soundscape”—and how we value those sounds we hear, is an ideological experience quite as much as music is. If we are to account for the experience of pastoral ideology, we need to grapple with the circular relationship between the soundscape of physical place and the manifestations of culture which hear, interpret, and value that place.11 In what follows, I draw in a purposely eclectic mixture of documents and varieties of accounts centered on representations of environmental sound in the Hudson Valley, demonstrating how we might integrate our hearing of the soundscape and the varieties of discourse that treat on that soundscape. Alongside an ecocritical approach to music, I refer to two fields of sound study, historical soundscape studies and soundscape ecology, for their utility in enabling rigorous, analytical approaches to soundscape. Scholars in the field of historical sound studies have excavated the soundscapes of past societies; as I seek historical antecedents to our current soundings of pastoral ideology, their methodologies for identifying and contextualizing the elements of vanished and altered soundscapes informs my own.12 Additionally, in order to theorize the link between discourses about place and hearing of the ecological place itself, I make use of several terms and concepts from the field of soundscape 9 The classic text of soundscape studies is R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1993). See also H. Järviluoma et al., Acoustic Environments in Change (Tampere, Finland: University of Tampere, 2009), which reprints the text of the seminal soundscape study Five European Villages (1976) and updates its findings. For all Schafer’s prominence, the close-read approach typified by Five European Villages is not widely used, but bears revisiting. Another important source for soundscape analysis methodology and theory is Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication, 2nd ed. (Westport, CT: Ablex, 2001). 10 Much of environmental sound studies proceeds by examining a single type or category of sound across a wide geographical and/or temporal span, as in Alain Corbin, A History of Silence: From the Renaissance to the Present Day, trans.
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