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Interview with Aaron S. Allen by Juha Torvinen & Andreas Engström

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Interview with Aaron S. Allen by Juha Torvinen & Andreas Engström The Study of the Music & Culture of the Environmental Crisis: Interview with Aaron S. Allen By: Aaron S. Allen, Andreas Engström, and Juha Torvinen Allen, Aaron S., Andreas Engström, and Juha Torvinen. “The Study of the Music & Culture of the Environmental Crisis: Interview with Aaron S. Allen,” Ecomusicology Newsletter II, no. 2 (2013): 3, 20-23. Made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Abstract: Aaron S. Allen is Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He serves on the faculty committee for the Environmental Studies Program. As UNCG’s Academic Sustainability Coordinator, he works to increase and improve sustainability education across the curriculum. Keywords: ecomusicology | sustainability | environmental ethnomusicology | interview Article: ***Note: Full text of article below ECOMUSICOLOGY NEWSLETTER!OCTOBER 2013 The Study of the Music & Culture of the Environmental Crisis Interview with Aaron S. Allen by Juha Torvinen & Andreas Engström JT&AE: First a personal question: why Combining both the professional and personal ecomusicology? elements is what I find to be the intellectual and AA: Because that’s how we’re going to save the individual challenges of ecomusicology. In essence, world, right? Ironic hyperbole aside, there are both it’s di$cult to connect these di&erent fields professional and personal reasons for my (environmental studies and music) in rigorous, engagement with ecomusicology. robust, and intellectually sound ways. My Ph.D. Professionally, I do think it’s of profound studies at Harvard did not allow me to pursue importance that scholars of human culture ecomusicology, but after I graduated I was contribute to understanding, and when possible, fortunate to get involved with the founding of the alleviating environmental crises. We all have a role Ecocriticism Study Group of the American to play, and even if the usual approach to Musicological Society and the Ecomusicology environmental concerns is a scientific one, Special Interest Group of the Society for humanists must not step aside entirely. We can Ethnomusicology. The professional stimulation help to understand history, to communicate combined with my personal background and a e&ectively, to empower emotionally, to raise desire to do something meaningful, even if only in consciousness, to revel in beauty, to give attention our relatively obscure world of music studies, to subjects previously ignored, and so on. As I and meant that I put a lot of time and energy, gladly, others have argued, the environmental crisis is into ecomusicology. Honestly, I don’t think that it fundamentally a crisis of culture; scientific will ever become mainstream, and that’s okay (and approaches are central to the problems and neither ethnomusicology nor musicology will solutions, but so are humanistic approaches. become mainstream either!). I do think, however, On the personal side, I think ecomusicology that ecomusicology can be very gratifying for those was a natural progression for me given my who engage in it and those who benefit from it. background in both environmental studies and music. I was born on a rural farm, and after JT&AE: Ecomusicology started to gain growing up there, in Key West, Florida (an island currency in the decades around 2000. However, that is the southernmost city in the USA), on the explicitly ecocritical music has been composed Gulf Coast of Mississippi, and in New Orleans, I and performed for about a half of a century. had a first hand knowledge of profoundly beautiful Why didn’t music scholars wake up earlier to and threatened environments. As an undergraduate environmental concerns? student at Tulane, I told my advisor that I wanted AA: I’d like to respond to that question in two to declare a joint BA in music and BS in ways. First, to agree with it and answer directly: environmental studies; he responded, “Why? So There are a variety of reasons that music scholars you can play your flute out in the swamp?” Neither did not pursue explicitly environmental agendas. the flute nor swamps were of particular interest to One is that the environmental crisis (as, we might me, but his response of incredulity combined with say, distinct from an awareness of and/or sarcasm encouraged me to seek out connections connection to the environment) has been a subject that were meaningful and not at all frivolous. of concern for only a few decades; there are of When it came time to choose a path after college, course important precedents, but many major I decided that I needed a break from my years of upheavals in the way humans relate to the world environmental activism, so I followed my interests changed in the second half of the twentieth in musicology. Continued on p. 20 ... VOLUME II, NUMBER 2! PAGE 3 ECOMUSICOLOGY NEWSLETTER!OCTOBER 2013 ... Continued "om p. 3, Interview with Allen, by Torvinen & Engström century. It’s taken, perhaps, some time for those JT&AE: It seems to me that always when a changes and the resulting concerns to filter into the new branch of research emerges it appears first relatively isolated world of music scholarship. as a unified, even harmonious field with a Another reason might be institutional, in that common goal. However, soon the branch starts universities have long struggled to reward and dispersing into diferent competing schools. encourage inter-, cross- and trans- disciplinary work. Environmentaly oriented music scholars have Although I don’t have the data to substantiate the already used at least two seemingly paralel following claim, I might hypothesize that a terms “environmental ethnomusicology” and significant reason music scholars didn’t wake up to “ecomusicology,” and for example Professor environmental issues is the perception of politics. Mark Pedelty has stated that ecomusicology has Musicology in Europe and the United States in the so far been concerned mostly with classical early part of the twentieth century was conservative music (which is actualy not quite true in a and tried to develop its status as a legitimate European context). Do you think there is (or wil scientific pursuit worthy of status as an academic be) some kind of factioning in ecomusicology? discipline (and hence as a university department or What would it be like? Or have the faculty). As a result, change has been slow. The split environmental crises become so ubiquitous that (in the United States at least) between historical they wil unite music scholars in a common musicology and ethnomusicology)which I think is cause? tremendously unfortunate and counterproductive) AA: I have a dual hope for ecomusicology: first shows some of that conservativism, as does the that it does not fracture, but second that it fuses history of the “new musicology” in the past few with many other realms of scholarly inquiry so that it decades. But I think many music scholars have been doesn’t become stale, isolated, or irrelevant. Those concerned not to represent themselves too two hopes are apparently contradictory, and politically. Environmental issues are nothing if not achieving them will be a challenge. And even if the political)and here we see the cultural status of name “ecomusicology” is not used, the approaches environmental issues as well. The openness of are what matter, be they of soundscape studies and/ ethnomusicology and the groundwork laid by the or environmental ethnomusicology and/or anything “new musicology” have both contributed to clearing else related but with a di&erent name. the ground for ecomusicology. I’ve been attending environmental conferences Second, I’d like to disagree, if I may, with the since the mid 1990s and music conferences since the premise of the question and say that thinkers have late 1990s. At most environmental conferences I get long made connections between music (or sound), a sense of sharing ideas, dialogue, and pursuing the environment (or nature, however its construed), common goals; at most music conferences I get a and human society/culture)even if not as an explicit sense of privacy, monologue, and independence. Both ecomusicology. Consider, for example, in Western cultures are admirable and have their places and culture, the ancient Greek “Harmony of the benefits and failings. Balancing the two would be Spheres,” or medieval treatises on the status of bird tricky, but I do think that the common cause will be song and musicians who imitate it, or 18th-century enough to unite ecomusicology scholars to a engagements with the natural, or Romantic significant degree. fascination with nature, etc. This is to say nothing of I might also add that before there was an the rest of the world, where in some cases, as in Asia, explicitly named ecomusicology (be that a recent there is a long written tradition of such connections, a&air, as in the past few years, or one that dates back while in other cases there may be oral traditions and to the first reference to the word that I’ve found, present understandings (rather than “scholarship” from the 1970s), we had soundscape studies. per se) and musicking (rather than “compositions”). Ecomusicology is both an umbrella term that could So while I do see some barriers to the contemporary encompass soundscape studies and it’s also a development of ecomusicology, I also understand it tributary, or descendent, of it. (Of course, these are as a longer, if not explicitly named, tradition. just names, methodologies, and the people associated VOLUME II, NUMBER 2! PAGE 20 ECOMUSICOLOGY NEWSLETTER!OCTOBER 2013 with them, for as I mentioned previously, I think understandings and new perspectives on material that something like ecomusicology, or soundscape that has both been well cultivated and may not studies if you want, has been going on for a long otherwise be well known. Here, we can find the time.) That’s when we consider ecomusicology wonder, allure, and need for not just ecomusicology holistically, as any study of sound/music and nature/ but all scholarly inquiry in general: as understanding environment and culture/society.
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