IMS Musicological Brainfood 4, No. 2 (2020)
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IMS Musicological Brainfood 4, no. 2 (2020) This edition of IMS Musicological Brainfood ex‐ in the second journey. As with the first recipients plores musicology’s relationship with the envi‐ of the IMS Guido Adler Prize, we asked the 2019 ronment in two journeys. The first is led by recipient, Margaret Kartomi, to write about her Daniel M. Grimley as he takes us across the life and travels, and her perceptions of change landscape of COVID-19. His short provocation, in our discipline over the past sixty years. Her “Moving upon Silence,” should awaken our si‐ unique perspective, shaped by her upbringing in lence as musicologists. We have been advocating Australia, her studies in East Berlin, and her re‐ a global musicology, but to truly listen to the search in Indonesia, provides us with a view of world around us, a global musicology should be musicology with open borders, and one that is as “earthy” as it is socially attuned to different never far from the political, social, and environ‐ cultures—the two, in fact, are inseparable, as mental issues. Her long career as a musicologist Grimley reminds us. This is clearly demonstrated inspires us to be explorers. Daniel M. Grimley Among the most unexpected and disconcerting violence rather than address its systemic and in‐ side effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been stitutional origins. And for others, silence has the silence that has accompanied much of the been an opportunity to reconnect or reattune, to lockdown. Despite the creative flowering of im‐ attend to environmental sounds and ambient promptu balcony concerts and online musical noise in new and defamiliarized contexts, and to events that it has in some places provoked, the take stock in relation to surroundings that seem quietness of much of the pandemic has often irrevocably changed and transformed: the sud‐ seemed deafening. As countries emerge tenta‐ den lack of aircraft or road traffic, the memory tively (or, in some cases, recklessly) out of the of a loved-one’s voice, or the mute response to quarantine measures imposed to try to contain historical injustice. Silence in the bewilderingly the global spread of the infection, there is an op‐ contradictory era of COVID-19 simultaneously portunity to reflect on the meanings and values signals despair, hope, isolation, and immersion. of that silence. For some, it is indelibly associated The ambiguous quality of this silence has with absence: the agonizing loss of friends and been captured by a number of initiatives and relatives or of patterns of work and sources of artistic schemes. The Dawn Chorus Project led income that have sustained livelihoods and by sound artist Bernie Krause, for instance, is ex‐ maintained well-being. For others, especially in emplary in its acknowledgment of the human the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests fol‐ catastrophe caused by COVID-19 and its urgent lowing the brutal killing of George Floyd, silence call for environmental restitution. “The dramatic can only mean condonement or complicity, an silencing of human activities that it has caused,” act of amnesia or betrayal that perpetuates such Krause writes of the pandemic on the project 3 IMS Musicological Brainfood 4, no. 2 (2020) website, “is also making the voices of nature re‐ destroyed any continuity with past generations, sound on an unprecedented scale. In this unique and the disruptions faced since.”4 This uncanny situation in the spring of 2020, the idea was born absence strangely foreshadows the COVID-19 to make the birds’ voices heard.”1 Supported by pandemic. As for Krause, it is the “passionate, the Bavarian Museum of the Life Sciences and species-rich dawn chorus” celebrated in Cu‐ Environment and the Nantesbuch Foundation, sack’s recordings that becomes Chernobyl’s the Dawn Chorus Project has created a citizen “keynote,” and which serves as one of the areas science platform onto which users can upload “definitive sounds.”5 For its former inhabitants, sound recordings of the dawn chorus in their sound, and landscape are inextricably bound up neighborhood, creating, Krause suggests, “a with their experience of displacement and the worldwide birdsong concert for the sciences and legacy of enforced resettlement, even in cases the arts.”2 Traced onto a global sound map, the where they have in fact returned to their original inventory of recordings is a moving testimony homes and dwellings. Their singing superficially both to nature’s resilience and to the virus’s in‐ suggests some form of Romantic idyll: ternational reach. As a contemporary record of habitat loss and biodiversity, it has particular sci‐ Oh my beloved village, entific value: it offers an auditory snapshot of our The silence of your marshes, The breadth of your skies, current relationship with the natural world, the Your songs, acoustic veil of the anthropocene. Yet the data And your fields caressed by the sun. also conceals the intractable realities of class and social inequality. The geographical distribution But in the striking strength and richness of their of recordings as of August 2020 speaks all too voices, beautifully captured by Cusack’s micro‐ vividly of persisting asymmetries of power and phone, there is a deeper undertone of fracture human resource: the South African examples, for and loss. Such intensity ultimately points to a instance, are drawn almost exclusively from the hollowness, the desolation and emptiness of protected areas within Table Mountain National what has been left behind: peeling wallpaper in Park, but there is nothing from the shanty settle‐ a bedroom, broken glass, or a deserted Kinder‐ ments of Khayelitsha, Langa or Gugulethu. Lis‐ garten. tening to the dawn chorus in the sylvan sur‐ Perhaps such silence should not come as a rounds of Constantia or Rondebosch assumes a surprise after all, since in some ways it has al‐ very different social-political register from that ways lain at the heart of a particular western of the Cape Flats. landscape epistemology. The emergence of a dis‐ Sound artists, ethnomusicologists, and other tinctive landscape aesthetic, or way of thinking music scholars have for many years insisted that about the culturally sedimented relationships it matters where we listen, and that the silence between land, environment, and human agency, which might prevail is inevitably shaped and de‐ coincided in the early modern period with the termined by particular cultural-historic legacies. invention of perspective as a visual means of so‐ Peter Cusack’s eloquent essay in acoustic jour‐ cial-political representation. In its elevation of a nalism, Sounds from Dangerous Places,3 echoes viewer’s privileged point of spectatorship, per‐ this preoccupation with music, sound, land‐ spective encoded highly asymmetrical hierar‐ scape, and environment. Traveling through the chies of authority, control, and domination. It ruins of abandoned Samosel villages within the was preoccupied by boundaries, borders, map‐ Chernobyl evacuation zone in Ukraine, two ping, and directionality. Yet despite its attempt decades after the disaster at the nuclear reactor to conceal or obscure less desirable or regulated which spread radioactive material over wide elements of its scenic prospects, perspective has parts of northern and western Europe, for exam‐ always hinted at or suggested precisely that ple, he writes: “the quiet is absolute. Traffic and which it has sought to dominate or remove. Mu‐ planes are unthinkable. Only birds and wind can sic has responded intensively to such impera‐ be heard. But there is a strong sense of absence tives: the empty sounds and silences that answer too, of those who lived here, of the disaster that Orfeo’s lamenting calls in Monteverdi’s epony‐ 4 IMS Musicological Brainfood 4, no. 2 (2020) mous opera, for example, are landscape’s shady in its own way, a living thing, meaning that it acoustic mirror, the real sonic reflection of the also passes away.”6 Positively embracing the sunlit Arcadian realm from which Eurydice has fleeting contingency of musical events might, in been erased. Though Orfeo can return from the other words, prompt a different way of relating underworld, his landscape is now broken and to the environment, through landscape, by ac‐ bereft. Musical enchantment merely belies the knowledging our own transience, permeability, loss that lies within. It sounds what perspective and interconnectedness. Hence, Watkins writes, seeks to exclude. music’s “acoustic manifestation of dynamic pro‐ Similar moments of silence puncture or un‐ cesses and patterns . finds meaning in beauty derpin later musical evocations of landscape. for no other reason than that it is here, now. The The hollow octaves that frame the final bars of flower will soon wilt, the music someday go Haydn’s F Minor Variations, Hob. XVII:6, for ex‐ stale.”7 ample, suggest precisely that same emptiness, Silence amid COVID-19 assuredly offers a as do the halting gaps between the musical oar place for solace, or a moment to grieve. But it is strokes in “Die Stadt” from Schubert’s Schwa‐ also an injunction, not merely to remember and nengesang and the strangely opaque bars that re‐ record past histories of exclusion or loss, but to sound in the final number, “Lualåt,” from Grieg’s attend to and accept responsibility. Only then, Stemninger, op. 73. In each case, landscape ap‐ in landscape, can we begin to hear again. pears not so much as a void or abyss, but as blank space, a series of vanishing points that might References equally indicate infinite extension, convergence, 1 Dawn Chorus Project, accessed August 31, disappearance, or departure. In the era of the 2020, https://dawn-chorus.org. COVID-19 pandemic, it is easy to hear those 2 Ibid. blank spaces only negatively, bound up with the 3 Peter Cusack, Sounds from Dangerous Places collateral damage of a largely mishandled global (London: ReR Megacorp, 2012).