American Functional Music and Environmental Imaginaries

Anthropogenic Moods: American Functional Music and Environmental Imaginaries

A dissertation presented to

the faculty of

the College of Fine Arts of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Joshua J. Ottum

April 2016

This dissertation titled

Anthropogenic Moods: American Functional Music and Environmental Imaginaries

JOSHUA J. OTTUM

has been approved for

Interdisciplinary Arts

and the College of Fine Arts by

Marina Peterson

Associate Professor of Performance Studies

Elizabeth Sayrs

Interim Dean, College of Fine Arts 3

ABSTRACT

OTTUM, JOSHUA J., Ph.D., April 2016, Interdisciplinary Arts

Anthropogenic Moods: American Functional Music and Environmental Imaginaries

Director of Dissertation: Marina Peterson

This dissertation investigates how functional music, utilitarian commercial music composed to create moods, shapes environmental imaginaries in late twentieth- and early twenty-first century America. In particular, the study considers how functional music operates in specific media contexts to facilitate sonic identifications with the natural world that imbricate nature with modalities of contemporary capitalism. As human- driven changes to the planet have ushered in the Anthropocene, an investigation of the relationships between musical sound, moods, and environments will draw out the feelings and imaginaries of the era. In doing so, this study amplifies these attenuated sounds, aiming to open the conversation to new ways of listening in an age of increasing environmental fragility. 4

DEDICATION

Dedicated to Vanessa and Baby Ottum

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation is the product of explicit and implicit guidance from family, friends, and faculty. I couldn’t have asked for a better advisor in Dr. Marina Peterson.

She has taught me how to examine things with a wider lens than I imagined possible. The ways I see, think, and especially listen, have been completely reshaped as a result of engaging with her. The biggest lessons I’ve learned have not been directly expressed.

Rather, my newly formed impulses to maintain focus, imagine unimaginable scenarios, and just do the work have come from just observing the way she works. I am better thinker, artist, and person as a result. I am also grateful to Dr. Michael Gillespie for opening up the world of film and presenting a model of interdisciplinarity I aspire to.

Chris Dobrian, Michael Dessen, and Cecilia Sun have all been incredibly supportive from afar reminding me of the importance of continually weaving all parts of my creative, scholarly, and personal identities into one, fluid mix.

Friends like Ian, Par, Adam, Brian, and Mike have all been excellent sounding boards and supporters along the way. We’ve known each other since third grade and as recently as 2012. In each case, I can say that the shape of this project has been affected by each one of you. My family has been supportive as usual. More than a few eyebrows have been raised at my pursuits, but encouragement and support has been there all along.

Finally, Vanessa: who knew we’d meet at a candy shop by the ocean, move to

Ohio and bike past deer, and then end up in Bakersfield just up the road from 18 family members who signify the glory of Californian pioneer stock! You’ve made my life incredibly rich and remind me daily about the virtues a thing called joy. 6

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Abstract ...... 3 Acknowledgments ...... 5 List of Figures ...... 8 Introduction ...... 9 Interpellation through Functional Music and Media ...... 14 Environmental Criticism and the Anthropocene ...... 25 Chapter Outline ...... 29 Chapter 1: Sonic Lubricants: Listening to Petrocultural Narratives in Oil Company Advertisements ...... 32 Refining the Message ...... 36 Domesticating Petroculture ...... 54 Clean Exhaust ...... 58 Human Energy ...... 63 The End of Oil? ...... 73 Chapter 2: Consumption and Dissolve: Imagining Environments with New Age Music 78 Healing Histories ...... 83 Hearing the Machine in the Garden ...... 89 Dr. Steven Halpern’s Sonic Supplements ...... 95 Disappearing on a Windham Hill ...... 108 Making Space for Nobody ...... 118 Articulating Anonymous Environmental Imaginaries ...... 129 Fading Out ...... 138 Chapter 3: Meteorologists as DJs: Listening to The Weather (Channel) ...... 142 A Channel Devoted to the Weather? ...... 146 Sound Rhetoric ...... 155 Sounding the Brand of Weather ...... 159 Televisual Sound ...... 164 Smooth Jazz ...... 168 The Weather Channel Presents ...... 175 7

Nostalgic Listening in the Anthropocene ...... 180 Endless Refrain ...... 189 Chapter 4: Sounds Like Garbage: Listening to Eco-Catastrophes ...... 191 Deterritorializing Pop ...... 194 Tuning in to the Far Side ...... 200 Beyond Good and Bad ...... 203 Beyond Nostalgia and Apocalypse ...... 209 Dissecting the Earworm ...... 212 Trying to Locate a Disaster ...... 216 100% ...... 228 Compost Listening ...... 233 Conclusion ...... 235 Bibliography ...... 240

LIST OF FIGURES

Page Figure 1: Bob Kurtz wears a mask...... 39 Figure 2: Kurtz’ dinosaurs melt into the earth...... 42 Figure 3: Different forms of energy extraction...... 43 Figure 4: “So go easy, and America’s energy will go a lot further.” ...... 44 Figure 5: "Gertie Just Loves an Auto." ...... 50 Figure 6: Ration Bored opening sequence...... 51 Figure 7: Blurring colors with sound...... 52 Figure 8: "I'm a Necessary Evil!" ...... 53 Figure 9: “...dirty exhaust into good clean mileage.” ...... 61 Figure 10: Winsor McCay’s Technocracy...... 77 Figure 11: Dr. Steven Halpern’s Chakra Suite...... 98 Figure 12: Iasos’ Inter-Dimensional Music...... 105 Figure 13: Steve Roach’s Structures from Silence...... 107 Figure 14: Anonymous environments and artists...... 116 Figure 15: Climbing out of the frame...... 116 Figure 16: See what you love to hear...... 123 Figure 17: Foregrounded environments, erased bodies...... 125 Figure 18: Far Side Virtual...... 201 Figure 19: Plastic Pollution...... 207 Figure 20: Plastic Island...... 208 Figure 21: Message from the Gyre...... 223

INTRODUCTION

Energetic synthesizer tones introduce a voice describing Chevron’s developments of a pollution-free gasoline additive. Fake flutes flutter across a bed of nature sounds as a yoga mat is unrolled in the living room. A nylon-string guitar triplet plays against a smooth jazz groove as a broadcast of local weather conditions emanates from television speakers. A jarring series of ringtones fill an elevator, alerting the listener to the presence of a dispersed garbage patch in the ocean. In each instance, music promotes particular affective relationships with natural environments, encouraging the solidification of environmental narratives through temporary states of feeling.

These are the sounds of functional music, utilitarian commercial music composed to create moods. Crucial to these sounds are the ways in which they slip between foreground and background, offering flexibility to listen actively or hear in a state of distraction. In either case, they are hailing, or interpellating, the subject into a reciprocal relationship with the contours of capitalist ideology.1 The history of commercial functional music begins with Muzak, a corporation whose aim was to create sonic environments that regulate mood in order to increase productivity.2 Piping background music into military hospitals, factories, shopping malls, and eventually the domestic space of the home, found the company relying on a complex infrastructure of wiring and

1 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (Monthly Review Press, 1972).

2 Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy Listening, and Other Moodsong (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004).

10 speakers to create an omnipresent quality. Muzak would unobtrusively bathe the listener with “light music” featuring instrumental tunes reminiscent of familiar, but not too familiar, melodies and arrangements. Part of the nature of functional music is its ubiquitousness, as used in contexts ranging from internal corporate media to advertising.

The ubiquity of functional music is demonstrated by its prevalent use to provide moods for media depictions of environmental phenomena: disasters sound dramatic, natural resources industries hum right along, and images of endangered species are bathed in melancholic chord progressions. Moreover, a crucial, and curious, dimension of functional music is its categorization and use as background music for media that present and shape the contours of contemporary environmental thought. In each case, these submerged sounds fuel particular meta-narratives: music for gasoline commercials encourages consumers to continue living fossil-fueled lives, while the soothing tones of

New Age music intertwine spiritual healing with an upwardly mobile agenda.

This dissertation investigates how functional music works in concert with environmentally-related media to shape environmental imaginaries in late twentieth- and early twenty-first century America. In particular, the study considers how functional music operates in specific media contexts to facilitate sonic identifications with the natural world, a world in which the very idea of nature has dramatically changed shape.

Such changes are due to human-driven changes ushering in a new geologic era known as the Anthropocene.3 In this new era, nature becomes imbricated with the results of global

3 Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The Anthropocene,” Global Change Newsletter No. 41 (May 2000): 17-18. Accessed February 5, 2016, http://www.igbp.net/download/18.316f18321323470177580001401/NL41.pdf 11 demands for energy as experienced as the material effects of contemporary capitalism.

Some have even argued that a more appropriate term for the era would be the

“capitalocene,” which understands capitalism as a “world ecology, joining the accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the co-production of nature in dialectical unity.”4 Regardless of the term, significant changes have come about in our understanding of how human activity affects the planet. This investigation of the relationships between musical sound, moods, and environments draws out the feelings and imaginaries of the era. In doing so, this study amplifies these attenuated sounds, aiming to expand the conversation toward new ways of listening in an age of increasing environmental fragility.

The project begins against the historical background of the start of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s, tracking how functional music develops alongside emerging environmental concerns. Such issues took center stage as the publication of

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb coincided with catastrophic events such as the Santa Barbara oil spill and the Love Canal disaster. The study examines functional music and sounds in various media settings in order to better understand particular moods that become attached to depictions of the environment through sound. New Age music exemplifies this confluence of moods and natural environments by sonically framing nature as both containable and all-consuming. The

4 Jason W. Moore, “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis,” http://www.jasonwmoore.com/uploads/The_Capitalocene__Part_I__June_2014.pdf 12

Weather Channel uses smooth jazz to infuse the weather with particular moods, suggesting an aesthetic controlled nostalgia which imbues representations of non-living nature. Functional sounds of a set of oil company commercials perpetuate a modern mobilized, fossil-fueled life. Finally, vaporwave, a subversive form of functional music, mutates the aesthetics and practices of functional music, effectively turning the sounds and practices inside out. In each case, temporary states of feeling are sounded out to construct environmental imaginaries reflecting the anxieties of life in the Anthropocene.

The dissertation draws on the multidimensionality of the word environment to explore functional music’s equally complex character. The act of encircling of spaces, which is at the root of the word environment, reflects functional sounds as they infuse aural space in order to produce particular moods and actions. Environ, the root of the word, can be taken as a plural noun, one’s environs or surrounding area, and as a transitive verb, actively encircling, surrounding, or enclosing. The tension of the word environ is further complicated with the addition of the suffix ment, denoting a resulting state or product. Thus, inherent to the word environment is a flux between actively encircling and containing through enclosure. This flux of passively surrounding and actively enclosing reflects tensions inherent to functional music as a means to better sounding out the anxieties of the Anthropocene. Comfort and control in the midst of slow-moving disasters are aesthetically bound up in the current age and it is functional music’s capacity to reflect and sonically shape these politics. The emergence of words such as environmentalist and environmentalism in the late 60s and early 70s speaks to a social movement with a concern for the protection of nonhuman elements that is at its 13 core anthropocentric.5 Finally, business environments and computer desktop environments forgo connections to the natural world, emphasizing the characteristics of particular cultural practices and their surroundings. These multiple understandings of environment, beyond its use as one’s natural surroundings, reflect the changing shape of environmental imaginaries as constructed through the use of functional sounds.

Studies of advertising music, Muzak, and ubiquitous music consider how functional music can be used and listened to. I draw on Sterne and Vanel’s work looking at how functional music creates cultures specific to the commercial sphere. Additionally,

I build upon Kassabian’s claim that distributed subjectivity arises from listening to ubiquitous music. This experience of multi-located listening sensitized the listener to the nuances of how sound helps to construct environments.6 Still, there remains a gap in research on functional music and its relationship to imaginaries of the natural world.

While the aforementioned studies consider music that is intended to create moods, or

“temporary states of mind or feeling,” they do not directly address relationships between functional music and natural environments.7 I place specific forms of functional music in dialogue with media depictions of the environment, considering how their practices of

5 Oxford Dictionaries, s.v., “environment,” accessed January 19, 2016, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/environment

6 Anahid Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

7 Oxford Dictionaries, s.v., “mood,” accessed January 19, 2016, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/mood

14 production, distribution and circulation work in counterpoint to form environmental imaginaries.

Interpellation through Functional Music and Media

Functional music is used within the commercial sphere making it crucial to explore the relationship between the music and practices of advertising and commerce.

This dissertation draws on work that engages with the histories and ideological aims of functional music as well as the particular qualities of the genres of functional music under analysis. Insofar as the media contexts of these distinctly utilitarian sounds often work in conjunction with the moving image, it is necessary to also draw upon studies of film and television music and sound as well. Lanza’s history of Muzak is useful for its attention to the product’s aim to create sonic environments that regulate mood in order to increase productivity.8 This study builds upon Lanza’s work by expanding definitions of functional music beyond the practices of the Muzak Corporation. Vanel writes an alternative history of functional music connecting Satie’s furniture music, Muzak, and

Cage’s Muzak Plus, examining the overlaps in the utopian possibilities of each project.9 I connect Vanel’s work with my own by considering themes which emerge in the 1960s with library music, New Age music, the environmental movement, and countercultural advertising practices.

8 Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy Listening, and Other Moodsong (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004).

9 Herve Vanel, Triple Entendre: Furniture Music, Muzak, Muzak-Plus (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013).

Althusser’s idea of interpellation guides the study as it gives shape to the process of subject formation in a capitalist system. Through a kind of hailing, or interpellation, the individual recognizes herself as a subject within an ideological matrix.10 As Althusser defines ideology as “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence,”11 subjectivity is brought about in the circulatory, simultaneous experience of interpellation. The aesthetics of functional music reflects this infectious process of neoliberal capitalist subject formation through its ubiquitous and attenuated role in society. By not actively hailing the listener, the braiding process of imagined and real conditions is smoothed out through the encouragement of temporary states of feeling, one passing to the next.

Kassabian’s idea of “ubiquitous listening” suggests that much of our listening habits are enacted in states of distraction.12 Drawing on ubiquitous computer network models and affective theory, the author opens the conversation to consider new perspectives on how distributed listening practices can lead to alternative ways of engaging with ubiquitous sounds. From its point of production, the aims of functional music are to affect the listener in the service of particular, often commercial, goals. I build on Kassabian’s work by analyzing how functional music is produced for and consumed in states of distraction.

10 Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (Monthly Review Press, 1972).

11 Ibid, 162.

12 Kassabian, 2013.

Sterne’s article on functional music in the Mall of America argues that sound is a form of architecture, essential to the project of generating the capitalist space of the mall.

As music is piped through the “sonorial circulation system” of the mall, consumer subjectivity is shaped, thereby encouraging particular relationships with the commercial sphere.13 I build on Sterne’s article by considering how functional music engages with environmental phenomena both at its sites of production and consumption.

Scholarship on film sound informs this study as many of the media contexts under examination include TV commercials and broadcasts, music videos, and documentary films. In specific, the dissertation draws upon work which attends to the oscillating dialogue between sound and image, as opposed to studies on film soundtracks which often separate the music from the visual elements. Gorbman speaks of functional music and film music as serving similar purposes: “...neither is designed to be closely listened to. Both employ familiar musical language, both bathe the listener in affect. [The] goal is to render the individual an untroublesome social subject.”14 Gorbman’s work on film music informs this study as functional music is analyzed within visual contexts.

Chion claims that film sound provides “added value” to the moving image, infusing imagery with a kind of natural presence, which, in turn, obfuscates the

13 Jonathan Sterne, “Sounds Like the Mall of America: Programmed Music and the Architectonics of Commercial Space.” In Ethnomusicology Vol. 41, No. 1 (Winter 1997): 22-50.

14 Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 5.

17 importance of sound in the filmic experience.15 Functional music is designed to add value to visual media experiences, encouraging listening habits which do not directly engage with the sounds themselves. In conjunction with this critical work on film sound, I build on Rodman’s semiotic analysis of American narrative television music by attending to specific sonic-televisual devices such as bumpers, audio logos, and intratextual sonic identifications.16

Sonic identifications attach particular sounds to images, effectively branding the audiovisual experience. Studies on advertising music have recently begun to emerge and are crucial for understanding the methods of functional music production, distribution, and consumption. Taylor’s work on advertising music and capitalism informs much of this project. His studies on the domestication of electronic music,17 history of advertising music,18 and exoticism in commercial music,19 historically situate functional music alongside developments in advertising practices and the environmental movement. In

15 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 5.

16 Ronald Rodman, Tuning In: American Narrative Television Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

17 Timothy Taylor, “The Avant-Garde in the Family Room: American Advertising and the Domestication of Electronic Music in the 1960s and 1970s,” in The Oxford Sound Studies Handbook, ed. Karin Bijsterveld and Trevor Pinch (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

18 ______, The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music and The Conquest of Culture, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012).

19 ______, Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007). 18 particular, Taylor’s work on the centrality of mood in 1960s advertising practices helps to develop perspectives on oil company commercials and library music. Kurpiers’ dissertation on advertising music provides detailed ethnographic accounts of music selection and composition in the context of media production houses. The author’s ethnographic work informs my examination of the production, circulation, and consumption of functional music.

Equally crucial to the project is to contextualize functional music within the broad histories of American advertising practices since 1960. Thomas Frank’s Conquest of Cool

(1997) is useful for its contextualization of mid-60s advertising practices and their connection to counterculture. I build on this work by placing aesthetics of functional music in conversation with developments in the advertising industry as it reacts to developments in the environmental movement. Martyn Lee’s Consumer Culture Reborn:

The Cultural Politics of Consumption (1993) works in conjunction with Frank’s project by highlighting the role of the commodity in the development of new practices of consumption. Special attention is paid to Lee’s history and theorization of post-war consumption in the United States as well as the emergence of new forms of consumption in the 1980s. These texts, along with Fink and Taylor’s work on capitalism, consumption, and music, guide the argument that functional music plays a critical role in shaping understandings of the environment which are sympathetic to life in a capitalist society.

A unique form of functional music often put to use in advertising contexts is known as production library music: music recorded and cataloged to be stockpiled for future use by media producers. Very little research exists on what is colloquially referred 19 to as library music. Notable exceptions include the work of Fink and Tagg. Fink explores library music as a signifying system which aids in the production of heteronormative corporate subjectivity.20 Furthermore, his study of American minimal music as cultural practice is useful for my examination of the production practices of functional music.21

Tagg’s work on library music consists of interviews with composers and producers and considers the theme of nature as a musical mood category.22 This dissertation intervenes in this gap of scholarship on library music, expanding on the dialogue between library music and its relationship to the environment.

Alongside theoretical approaches to library music, I examine technical literature, such as print and digital catalogs. The evolution of cataloging music by mood and theme is traced in order to gain insight into the hybridization of technological and environmental phenomena. Along with this examination of the technical aspects of cataloging practices, I discuss the niche of publications and fan websites devoted to library music artwork. These sources are valuable as they contribute to my multitextual analysis of library music, a distinct form of functional music that is a business-to- business commodity.

20 Robert Fink, "Orchestral Corporate." Echo: a Music-Centered Journal 2, no. 1 (2000).

21 Robert Fink, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

22 Philip Tagg, "Nature as a musical mood category." IASPM Norden’s working papers series (1982).

While library music draws on multiple genres of music to create immediate relationships between moods and musical sounds, specific genres of functional music will be examined at length due to their intertwined relationship with the natural world. The genre of New Age music arose in the mid-seventies in America during the expansion of the modern environmental movement. The term finds its roots in multiple religious and spiritual communities, all of whom connect the natural world with healing and positive development. While an ample amount of criticism uses New Age as an example of how not to sound, writings about the musical practice itself are more difficult to locate.

Exceptions include work by Berman who describes the development of the genre by examining dedicated radio formats, record labels, and music festivals.23 McGowan’s extensive liner notes for the recently released I Am The Center compilation of American private issue New Age (2012) are helpful for grounding an alternative history of the genre. This project adds to the small amount of scholarly work on New Age (see Hall,

Hall, Hibbett, Zrzavy) by considering how the music constructs particular conceptions of the environment.

In addition to New Age music, smooth jazz maintains a unique position as a music that is bound up in depictions of the natural world. In this case, I analyze smooth jazz as it functions in alongside weather broadcasts on The Weather Channel. While

23 Leslie Berman, “New Age Music?” in Not Necessarily the New Age, ed. Robert Basil, (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1988), 252–68.

21 studies on smooth jazz have considered the effects of its presence as a radio format24 and its sexualized aesthetics25, there are no studies on the genre’s relationship to the environment. Mareck’s research on the aesthetics and rhetoric of The Weather Channel software provides a useful building block to explore smooth jazz in the context of weather forecast programming.26 To ground this section in studies on background music,

I will draw on the work of Sterne, Vanel, and Kassabian to examine sociocultural aspects of this form of functional music as it relates to The Weather Channel.

The aesthetics of library music, New Age, and smooth jazz are often directly associated with business and consumer environments. Vaporwave dissects these shiny production values and reflects on the consequences for the natural world through the use of a variety of uncanny sonic manipulations. Harper and Reynolds have done the most thorough investigations of vaporwave to date. As a strictly digital, internet-based form of functional music, fan forums have produced a swath of writing, yet there remains a gap in how this musical style refers to and constructs particular relationships with the environment. The work of Harper and Reynolds is of use as it makes connections

24 Simon Barber, "Smooth jazz: a case study in the relationships between commercial radio formats, audience research and music production," in Radio Journal: International Studies In Broadcast & Audio Media 8, no. 1 (April 2010): 51-70.

25 Kristin McGee, "Promoting Affect and Desire in the International Industrial World of Smooth Jazz: The Case of Candy Dulfer," in Jazz Perspectives 7, no. 3 (December 2013): 251-285.

26 A.F. Mareck, “Acquiring Biospheric Literacy: Discursive Tools, Situated Learning and the Rhetoric of Use,” in Rhetorics, Literacies, and Narratives of Sustainability, ed. Peter N. Goggin (New York: Routledge, 2009), 132-149.

22 between vaporwave and capitalism and provides extensive interviews with artists and label owners. This dissertation contributes to this discourse by placing vaporwave in dialogue with ecocritical texts.

Studies in musicology and ecocriticism have recently converged in the field of ecomusicology, a field of musicological study that “considers musical and sonic issues, both textual and performative, related to ecology and the natural environment.”27 The present study presses toward the goals of ecomusicology by supporting the “study of music, culture, and nature in all the complexities of those terms.”28 While ecomusicological studies by Guy and Stimeling have taken up music that makes direct references to environmental issues and work by Pedelty and Allen consider the environmental effects of musicking, I contribute this discourse by bringing functional music into the conversation.

Ingram’s The Jukebox in the Garden: Ecocriticism and American Popular Music

Since 1960, a survey of American pop music and its relationships between nature, environmental politics, and technology, stands as the only study of its kind. In his study,

Ingram produces a broad survey of multiple American popular music genres through a variety of ecocritical and ecophilosophical frameworks. While Ingram examines the New

Age writings of Lone Wolf Circles and June Boyce-Tillman, the author pays very little attention to New Age music itself. As such, I contribute to and critique Ingram’s project

27 Aaron S. Allen, “Ecomusicology,” in The Grove Dictionary of American Music, 2nd ed., ed. Charles Hiroshi Garrett (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

28 Ibid.

23 by taking up a form of musicking that operates at the foundations of popular culture, playing a crucial affective role in naturalizing cultural understandings of the environment.

The relationship between sound and the environment has been central to work on sound studies since the R. Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape: The Tuning of the World.

Schafer calls for a retuning of the world through an increase in hi-fi, or “natural,” sounds and a reduction in lo-fi sounds, such as moozak.29 The author’s sense of moozak, or

“schizophonic music...in public places,” certainly includes the ubiquitous sounds of functional music.30 Investigating Schafer’s work gives perspective on the project of acoustic ecology and its characterization of functional music as a prime example of a sonic pollutant. By allowing the seemingly opposing fields of acoustic ecology and functional music to speak back to each other, I expand environmental perspectives on functional music, or moozak, by interrogating Schafer’s project.

Work by Paul Carter points toward the affective consequences and possibilities of new modes of listening through states of distraction and mishearing.31 This work is referenced as I consider the possibilities of listening to vaporwave as a subversive form of environmentally-engaged musical activism. Dyson’s work focuses on the role of sound and its relationship to the idea of immersion as it is often invoked in discussions of new

29 R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, (Rochester: Destiny Books, 1977), 272.

30 Ibid.

31 Paul Carter, “Ambiguous Traces, Mishearing, and Auditory Space,” in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity, ed. Veit Erlmann (New York: Berg, 2004).

24 media theory and practice. The author argues for the importance of sound’s phenomenological quality as a decentered and embodied experience.32 Dyson’s work informs this project as I investigate how appropriated functional music destabilizes cultural conceptions of the environment. This attention to ways of listening is balanced with long-held interest within sound studies on the role of sound as it relates to the natural world.

Finally, Kahn’s recent study on sound and energy provides a way to connect environmentally-oriented research in sound studies with functional music. The author’s notion of transperception, a way of hearing the distance traveled within a sound, acts as a model to consider the sociocultural spaces traversed as functional music interacts with and produces environments.33 By emphasizing the complexities of how the natural world is socioculturally construed, my research opens space to hear functional music with a more nuanced way of listening. In short, bringing functional music into dialog with work on sound and the environment exposes relationships between the sounds and material phenomena that permeate daily life.

32 Frances Dyson, Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

33 Douglas Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 162.

Environmental Criticism and the Anthropocene

Cheryl Glotfelty explains that ecocriticism is “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment.”34 Since the emergence of environmental literary studies in the late 1980s, ecocritical practices have expanded across disciplinary boundaries outside of the humanities engaging with media history, sound and music studies, art history and so forth. I ground this study in a dialogue with several important strands of ecocritical thought, including work on petrocultures, ecomusicology, weather studies, and climate change discourse.

To begin with, I consider ecocritical texts that speak specifically to my investment in functional music as a naturalizing, or domesticating, sonic agent and a ubiquitous, often unconscious, musical presence. The concept of domestication as taken up by

Cronon (1996), considers the ways in which the wilderness was shaped through the domestication of the sublime.35 Buell’s work on the environmental imagination is of particular use for its emphasis on the characteristics which emerge from environmentally- attuned texts.36 The multiple contexts of functional music also engage with Heise’s focus on the global scale as a crucial response to ecocritical emphases on local perspectives and

34 Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.), xviii.

35 William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. by William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1996), 69-90.

36 Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

Morton’s sense of dark ecology.37 Heise’s work realigns ecocritical perspectives, considering perceptual changes in sense of place as globalized networks reconfigure relationships to the planet.38 The present study takes up this charge by looking at functional music as it attempts to smooth the complexities between the use of the environment in a neoliberal capitalist system. The dissertation engages with Morton’s work on dark ecology by pointing toward the subversive practices of vaporwave as exemplary of prioritized aesthetics of ambivalence and irony.

In order to connect the literary focus of ecocriticism with audiovisual media contexts, I look to work on ecocinema by Rust, Ingram, and Willoquet-Marcondi as a way to engage functional music with discourses that stem from work in film studies. Rust argues that a proper ecocinema theory considers all films as capable of presenting

“productive ecocritical exploration and careful analysis can unearth engaging and intriguing perspectives on cinema’s various relationships with the world around us.”39 I engage with ecocinema studies in order to connect commercial media and music with ecocritical traditions and film studies.

Work on how the environment is depicted in literature, film, and music analyzes depictions of multiple phenomena to be considered part of the natural world. The

37 Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).

38 Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

39 Ecocinema Theory and Practice, eds. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani and Sean Cubitt (New York: Routledge, 2012), 3.

27 centrality of fossil-fuels, a naturally occurring source of energy, to the modern world is particularly notable as this study seeks to problematize sociocultural divisions between natural and synthetic environments. Petrocultural studies take up sociocultural relationships to petroleum, asking how this natural resource has shaped daily life in the modern world. This work considers oil-related media in an attempt to articulate cultural relationships to petroleum through the work of LeMenager,40 Ziser,41 and Szeman.42

Further studies on petrocultures include the work of political theorist Mitchell

(2011) and critical geographer Huber (2013), with the former looking at the driving force of carbon to shape political environments and the latter considering the role of petroleum as it figures a regime of consumption particular to postwar American life. While these studies engage with cinema, print media, and literary texts, no research has been done on how music and sound relate to the petrocultural sphere. My project intervenes by listening to how functional sounds tease out related modes of production that occur across lines of petroleum and functional music industries.

The effects of burning carbon on the atmosphere has led to increased attention on the role of humans in relation to changes in climate. This study takes up connections between weather, climate, and functional music, remaining invested in the relationship

40 Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

41 Michael G. Ziser, “Home Again: Peak Oil, Climate Change, and the Aesthetics of Transition,” in Environmental Criticism for the 21st Century, ed. Stephanie LeMenager, Teresa Shewry, and Ken Hiltner (New York: Routledge, 2011), 181-195.

42 Imre Szeman, “System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster,” in South Atlantic Quarterly 104:4 (2007): 805-823.

28 between musical sound and sociocultural constructions of these phenomena. Mareck’s work on the rhetorical natures of the discourses used in The Weather Channel Desktop application is useful for its emphasis on the cultural production of myths relating to weather as well as the effects of situated learning in relationship screen-based depictions of weather cycles.43 I add to this discussion by amplifying the aesthetics of smooth jazz music as embedded within The Weather Channel’s products, particularly focusing on the

Local on the 8s segments, which depict weather conditions with music every 10 minutes.

Situating functional music as a common tone within a contrapuntal exchange between music studies and environmental media studies foregrounds the ubiquitous background sounds of daily life. These functional sounds do not clamor for attention through shocking harmonic progressions and exotic timbres. Instead they settle into auditory environments, embedding themselves to such an extent as to appear natural. This seemingly simple process of music suggesting audible tints on environmental phenomena reflects a similarly submerged, but equally powerful, process of human involvement in the current shape and future of the planet.

Human species domination and advancement puts particular stresses on conceptions of saving a planet so thoroughly entwined with the material consequences of these actions. As Dana Luciano puts it, “…the Anthropocene story takes as its origin not simply human indifference to nature, but human disregard for other human lives.”44 The

43 Mareck, 2009.

44 Dana Luciano “The Inhuman Anthropocene,” Avidly: A Los Angeles Review of Books Channel, March 22, 2015. http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2015/03/22/the- inhuman-anthropocene/ 29 complexities of this thought that humanity has spread an “inhuman humanism” presses against mere considerations of violence done to the planet as a collective, united act of humans. As Luciano points out, the relevant issue facing us is that “the ‘Anthropocene’ was not brought about by all members of the species it names.”45 Rather, it has been those in positions of power to sustain the capitalist order, polluting infrastructures, and histories of violence which has contributed to the shape of the current era. This series of decisions are sounded out through the structural model of functional music as a device of comfort and control, fulfilling illusions of safety and insulation from the potential forms of chaos surrounding the listener daily.

Chapter Outline

Chapter 1 begins by asking about the role of functional music in a petroleum- based society. In particular, I analyze the music in American oil company TV commercials to better understand how functional music perpetuates the use of fossil- fuels. By listening to Chevron commercials, I consider the ways in which functional music is used at particular moments in environmental history in America, including the emergence of the environment as an issue in the 1960s, the 1973 oil crisis, and current anxieties about the role of oil in an era of anthropogenic climate change.

This chapter examines how functional sounds make audible the cultures of

America as a petroleum-based society. In order to do so, I look at specific advertising campaigns by multinational energy corporation Chevron. Attending to the sonic

45 Ibid. 30 scaffolding of mid- to late-20th century petroculture, I examine how these campaigns sound out the changing politics of a petroleum-based society grappling with increased public concern for the environment and the effects of a volatile market. In this way, environmental imaginaries are built up through the use of functional sound, impacting consumer relationships with oil and its cultures.

Chapter 2 discusses New Age music, a distinctly personalized form of functional music which imbues the natural world with spiritual qualities in order to promote well- being and success. Emerging in the wake of the second-wave of the environmentalist movement in the United States, New Age music emphasizes utopian ideals of relaxation, inner-peace, and ecological harmony. Idealized depictions of the natural world are often used as a visual, textual, and aural referent within the New Age context, drawing boundaries and enforcing particular conceptions of the natural world.

By listening to how this form of functional music imagines environments, I argue that New Age thrives on and reflects anxieties of the Anthropocene through its recurrent slippage between the amplification and erasure of the self. This argument fuels the following questions: How do the spiritual dimensions of New Age music harmonize with nonhuman environments as a means to shape consumer subjectivity? What are the consistent sonic and visual aesthetics of New Age? What are the consequences of the formation of New Age subjectivity as it represents and consumes the natural world and its resources?

In Chapter 3, I examine The Weather Channel’s use of smooth jazz, investigating how this form of functional music imbues abiotic nature with particular affective 31 qualities. In addition, I explore the role of functional music in station IDs, transitions, and

“Local on the 8s” forecasts, arguing that it acts as a kind of sonic suturing device that eases televisual transitions. With a focus on intradiegetic space of the channel, I pose questions about how functional music smooths digital constructions of a natural world, a world in which sound is crucial to the construction of a particular kind of weather that affords the perpetuation of modern life. Furthermore, I argue how generic codes of smooth jazz and other generic codes typical of the channel cloak the televisual space with connotations of a privileged socio-economic subjectivity. Finally, I explore the enthusiastic fan culture of The Weather Channel and its relationship to music through nostalgia and aestheticization of weather through emulation software and customized constructions of weather broadcasts.

Chapter 4 investigates the consequences of using the practices and aesthetics of functional music in a subversive way. In particular, I focus on the work of vaporwave artist James Ferraro, examining how his emphasis on environmental disasters opens new ways to imagine functional music’s relationship to the environment. I argue that this work mutates functional music’s productive, mood-regulating character, in favor of amplifying the uncanny aspects of functional music production practices in order to highlight the sublime aspects of ecological catastrophe and global capitalism. This chapter opens space for questions of how to make sonorial sense of life in the

Anthropocene.

CHAPTER 1: SONIC LUBRICANTS: LISTENING TO PETROCULTURAL

NARRATIVES IN OIL COMPANY ADVERTISEMENTS

“At Chevron, a lot of things eat into every dollar before it becomes profit.” The inviting timbre of Kemal Amen Kasem floods the screen as an animated dollar bill floats through the air. The voice of America’s Top 40, better known as Casey Kasem, cues the listener into the scarcity of profits that accompany an industry built on resource extraction. Submerged beneath the sounds of the affable, guy-next-door begins a barely audible chiming of celeste and analog synthesizer, churning out a tonic to dominant bassline. The chugging rhythms serve to propel a narrative exploring the myriad expenses incurred in the production of oil.

The mood is jolly and upbeat as the bill floats to fill the screen. The Chevron logo has been integrated into the one-dollar bill, taking the place of where the number one usually resides. The first actor to take a bite out of the dollar is referred to as “our old friend,” a dinosaur whose creaky growl is unleashed as it quickly rises out of the ground to munch on the bill. The torn currency continues to float through a pumpjack, refinery, cash register, and Uncle Sam’s hand. At the end of the journey, with only a “penny and a half profit on every gallon of crude oil and petroleum product sold,” America’s favorite

DJ reminds the listener that “putting profits back to work” is the Chevron way.

This narrative of scarcity emerged in the late-1970s when America had experienced a lack of gasoline that kept millions of drivers off the road. The crisis came alongside increasing public concern about the fragility of the environment. Through a series of animated spots posing as economic history lessons, Chevron was able to refine a 33 new narrative of corporate responsibility and environmental awareness. The power of functional sounds to produce new conversations and relationships with energy production cannot be underestimated. As we will see, it is the sounds of these spots, and others, which propel the changing shape of oil culture through the shifting terrain of the energy industry.

This chapter examines how functional sounds both shape and are shaped by the cultures of America as a petroleum-based society. In order to do so, I analyze how sound infuses images with particular moods in specific television campaigns by multinational energy corporation Chevron. Working as sonic scaffolds of mid- to late-20th century petroculture, these campaigns sound out the changing politics of a petroleum-based society grappling with increased public concern for the environment and the effects of a volatile market. Achieving the delicate balance of an advertising narrative takes attention to the subtle, and not so subtle, ways that sound affects temporary states of mind, or moods. The concept of ‘attitude toward the ad’ was formulated in the late-1970s to consider the emotional consequences of consumer engagement with an advertisement.46

Musical and nonmusical functional sounds play an important role in this exchange by

“effectively conditioning preferences between products.”47 In this way, environmental

46 Steven P. Brown and Douglas Stayman, “Antecedent and Consequences of Attitude toward the Ad: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Consumer Research 19 (1992): 34-51.

47 Adrian C. North and David J. Hargreaves, “Music in Business Environments,” in Music and Manipulation: On the Social Uses and Social Control of Music, ed. Steven Brown et al. (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 112.

34 imaginaries were shaped through the polyphony of functional sounds and moods and environmental narratives woven by oil companies, thereby impacting consumer relationships with oil and its cultures.

The earliest campaign, emerging in January of 1970, touted the benefits of a revolutionary fuel additive, F-310, which promised to “help toward cleaner air” by turning “dirty exhaust into good clean mileage.” The campaign used the voice of astronaut Scott Carpenter and landed the corporation in hot water with the Federal Trade

Commission. The corporation then released a series of animated spots in the late-70s, in the wake of the OPEC oil crisis. The campaigns promote radically different means to justify the ends. In both cases, the campaigns depict a petro-powered American life in full control of the atmosphere, “the wildest venue around.”48 Finally, in 2007, the company began work on its award-winning “Human Energy” campaign, featuring spots and documentaries about diverse sets of the global population who engage with the corporation’s mission to provide energy to the world.

Here I examine how functional sounds were crucial to the ways in which a petroleum company engaged with the environmental movement of the 1960s and ‘70s.

Through an analysis of the functional sounds (voices, electronic sounds, and music) of these narratives, I argue that they embed particular moods within narratives of consumption and sacrifice that became central aspects of American petrocultures during this time. These sonic engagements are flexible as they are apt to both amplify and

48 Michael G. Ziser, “Home Again: Peak Oil, Climate Change, and the Aesthetics of Transition,” in Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Stephanie LeMenager, et. al. (New York: Routledge, 2011), 187. 35 attenuate contradictory messages about energy and the planet. The F-310 campaign promises a cleaner atmosphere through variations on a familiar theme of internal combustion. The animated campaign amplifies a flipped, but equally influential, narrative touting environmental connection to a fragile planet. Finally, the human energy campaign uses musical sounds and images to conflate human beings with natural resources, firmly situating living and nonliving beings under the umbrella of energy.

Hearing how the complexities of oil production and consumption take shape within American culture requires special attention to the transformational conditions central to the multifunctional role of petroleum in today’s society. Broadly speaking, the substance itself takes the form of liquid, vapors, and solidified forms of hydrocarbon mixtures. The liquified form, which is refined and separated through distillation processes, further transforms it for multiple consumptive contexts. By listening to

Chevron’s deployment of functional sounds in moments in environmental history, I consider how such sounds are uniquely distilled and circulated to resonate with particular petrocultural concerns. I am particularly interested in how themes of catastrophe and exuberance, consumption and sacrifice, are sounded out in these moments.

In order to analyze how sounds function in oil company commercials, I look to the material transmutation which continually shapes petroleum and its myriad artifacts as a guiding metaphor. Just as oil eases the inherent tensions of mechanical infrastructure, functional music in oil commercials acts a sonic lubricant, allowing the flow of diverging petroleum-based narratives in a culture built on its use. By listening to this selection of

Chevron commercials, I consider the ways in which functional music and sounds 36 lubricate shifting priorities of petroculture as expressed during the emergence of the environment as an issue in the 1960s, the 1973 oil crisis and the role of petroleum-based forms of energy in the 2000s. These dynamics are placed in the context of current anxieties about the role of oil in an era of anthropogenic climate change.

At stake in sounding out the aesthetics of a particular set of oil-related artifacts is the opportunity to broaden the scope of the emerging field of petrocultural studies. As it focuses mainly on visual and literary depictions of the relationship between oil and culture, the critical field of petroculture is intent on bringing to the surface the politics of an energy source which coats innumerable aspects of modern society. By considering the sounds which emanate from a set of oil-related media such as engines, voices, and background music, I aim to open up new perspectives on what it sounds like to live in a petroleum-based society. In analyzing these specific depictions of oil culture through several Chevron ad campaigns, I bring the sounds of voices, machines, and musically organized tones into counterpoint, I consider the consequences of how these signals imbue the development of American environmental imaginaries with petro-based culture.

Refining the Message

A sprightly bassoon motif in Eb opens the scene as a green globe bubbles up with blue matter against a burnt orange background. The figure oscillates between tonic to dominant in 6/8-time, setting up a foundation to modulate up a whole-step to F minor.

The motif repeats, introducing a chromatic leading tone to solidify the modulation, which gives way to a dominant cadence that descends back to the tonic. As the A-section of the binary form unfolds, the bubbles’ blue matter transforms into a slop of interconnected, 37 cartoon dinosaurs. The exaggerated features are described by a creaky male voice:

“Uhh...once upon a time, there was a dinosaur, a brontosaurus, a pterodactyl, and some weird looking sea creatures n’ plants….” The curious voice is peppered with overdubbed tracks of the same voice gurgling, screeching, belching, and other abstract sonifications of the process of evolution.

“Well, before long, the whole bunch became part of a layer of organic material.”

At this point the A theme ends with an ascending melody from the dominant to the tonic, balancing out the previously descending line. Accompanying the solo bassoon is a descending blob of living creatures sinking into the planet, with a humorous last gasp from a dinosaur, poking its head up in exasperation. The effect is reminiscent of the

“Grandfather theme” in Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. Just as the composer responded to the Central Children’s Theater in Moscow’s invitation to introduce young people to the instruments of the orchestra, Chevron capitalizes on the potential of sound to dramatize situations. Through the use of simplistic and predictable melodic lines, the economic and environmental stakes of energy exploration and production are refined in the name of accessibility. Charged with this task was an American animator by the name of Bob Kurtz.

“You had the Santa Barbara Oil Spill. When we met with the Chevron people...they said (they) can’t even go out to dinner parties because they’ll be accused of ruining the environment.”49 My phone conversation with Bob Kurtz reveals a quirky

49 Bob Kurtz, in discussion with the author, July 2015.

38 character with timbral complexity, not unlike the voiceover artist hired to do the animated spots for Chevron. The animator was happy to discuss the series of spots but quickly showed his political leanings by being proud of the artistic work, but disassociating himself from big oil. “The message was pretty good. The company got letters, compliments from the Sierra Club and the Energy Commission,” claimed Kurtz in our conversation.50 The emphasis on the animated spots as public service announcements rang throughout the interview as Kurtz continually noted his standards to only do work he

“believes in.”51

Interviewed some 40 years earlier by Mother Jones magazine during the time the spots were running, Bob Kurtz was queried on his feelings about his personal intersection between art and commerce. Kurtz was equal parts guarded and frank: “We don’t go around making judgments for every client...that’d be kind of silly. Let’s take Standard

Oil. Somebody, if they were politically active, might say, ‘Hey, I’m not gonna work for

Standard Oil.’ But we did a commercial for Standard Oil, which dealt with ecology, with the use of gasoline.”52 Donning a mask in the magazine spread, Kurtz maintains his animated anonymity.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid.

52 Eric Mankin, “How to Melt a Dinosaur.” Mother Jones (September/October, 1977), 38. 39

Figure 1: Bob Kurtz wears a mask.

The institute was a hotbed for animation and was soon merged with the Los

Angeles Conservatory of Music to become the Disney-backed California Institute of the

Arts. It was here that a professor got Kurtz a job animating for Disney for a few short years. After leaving the Magic Kingdom, Kurtz set out to create short films such as The

Put-On and My Son the King. The films played well at festivals but earned Kurtz next to nothing. After scoring his first commercial in the early 70s, the illustrator began to work steadily as a commercial animator for television spots and title sequences for big-budget 40

Hollywood films.53 Kurtz’ style is particularly informed by the early title sequence work of David H. DePatie and Friz Freleng, two former Warner Brothers employees who headed up DFE Films. The look of DFE work perfectly sums up the bold expressionism of late-50s and early-60s animations: cool pastels paired with bright hues, jagged edges and clean lines which often morphed from one object into another. In terms of the animation’s connection to sound Freleng’s ability to time animation to the music was unmatched.54 Kurtz and Friends created upwards of 50 dinosaur spots for Chevron during the late-70s and early-80s. Robert Peluce, a former student of Kurtz at Chouinard, was named lead designer on the spots through a series of internal competition to win the account. As Kurtz tells it the design shop had long been aiming to do a metamorphic narrative and Chevron was the first for which the idea resonated.55

In lieu of commissioning a custom score for the 30 second and one minute spots,

Chevron opted for an economical approach, using production library music bought for a one-time, blanket fee. These stock sounds served as rhythmic and aesthetic templates for

Kurtz & Friends to fashion their award-winning spots. In this way, the ecology of stock music in animated commercials served as both a template for animation and as a

53 Kurtz has animated a series of anti-tobacco spots for the California Department of Health Services as well as introductory credit animations for Hollywood films such as City Slickers and the 2006 remake of The Pink Panther.

54 Bob Kurtz and Eric Goldberg, “An Animated Trip,” featurette from The Pink Panther (Culver City: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2006).

55 Robert Goldrich. “Robert Peluce.” Shoot May 14, 2004. Accessed August 3, 2015. http://shootonline.com/node/31808

41 curatorial model which shares a surprising amount in common with the oil industry itself.

As speculative sounds composed and stockpiled for myriad audiovisual scenarios, production library music is ubiquity made audible, mirroring the embedded presence of oil and its byproducts.

What shines about the spots are the ways in which they merge organic material with capital. Dinosaurs become fuel, which, in turn, becomes jobs, which, in turn, becomes money to spend. As the Mother Jones interviewer writes, the spot featured “60 seconds of continuous transformations beginning with a group of dinosaurs looking surprised as they melt down into a pool of crude oil.”56 As a series of more than 700 individual drawings, “Dinosaurs” paints a picture of metamorphosis reflecting both the

“potentialities of animation (as well as) for Standard (oil).”57 In the course of a minute, a series of abstract concepts spanning millions of years are compacted into a generation- friendly narrative which acts as a lesson in basic economics, ecology, and conservation.

56 Mankin, 35.

57 Ibid, 36.

Figure 2: Kurtz’ dinosaurs melt into the earth.

In this way, Chevron’s answer comes in the form of splitting apart a view of oil as singular commodity. In following the animated morphing of crude made into energy then into dollars, the company effectively re-unites the often divorced social relations which make oil and the idea of oil possible. As Matthew Huber notes, “the hydrocarbon complex assemblage of crude oil is only commodified through the refining process, which by its very nature creates numerous petroleum products.”58 By enacting the refinement process through animated depictions of organic material turning into machines which produce energy and capital, the dinosaur spot sounds out the continual metamorphosis inherent in petrocultural media.

58 Matthew Huber, “Refined Products: Petroleum, Neoliberalism, and the Ecology of Entrepreneurial Life,” in Journal of American Studies, 46 (2012): 296.

Figure 3: Different forms of energy extraction.

As Dinosaur continues toward its conclusion we are reminded through the creaky timbres of the narrator: “The next time you jump in your car, remember: Some prehistoric creature gave his or her all for that tank of gas.” Scarcity is implied through the copy as a dinosaur moans out of a gas tank door.

Figure 4: “So go easy, and America’s energy will go a lot further.”

The sprightly bassoon carries the message to its final conclusion: “So go easy, and

America’s energy will go a lot further.” The scarcity is thus amplified by telling the consumer how to behave. The corporation is teaching the consumer through the sounds of what Michel Chion refers to as the acousmetre, or “phantom character” so deeply tied to the understanding of film as a sound art.59 In Chion’s conception of the term, the

“acousmetre is this acousmatic character whose relationship to the screen involves a specific kind of ambiguity and oscillation….”60 This audible, invisible figure is neither

“inside nor outside the image,” but remains in a liminal zone, retaining specific kinds of supernatural powers.61 For Chion, these powers consist of 1) the power of “seeing all,” 2)

59 Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, ed. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 128.

60 Ibid, 129.

61 Ibid. 45 the power of “omniscience,” and 3) the “omnipotence to act on the situation.”62 In this way, the creaky voice of the narrator in Dinosaur, as well as the raspy howls of the dinosaurs themselves, retain an aural residue of the acousmetre. They are in on the deep geologic history, the realities of the petroleum-based economy, and the nuanced environmental consequences of petrocultural activity.

Pertinently, Chion adds to the magical character of the acousmetre “the gift of ubiquity.”63 Indeed, the voices of the acousmetre in the Dinosaur spot as well as the

Dollar Bill spot flows through the time-stretched realities afforded by the flexible medium of animation. This flexibility mimics the endless elasticity of petroleum and its myriad products. By hearing this mutability, the listener arrives at a better understanding of the potential for functional sounds to animate environmental imaginaries as made manifest in petroleum-based society.

Writing about the role of music in advertising, David Huron points toward the features of structure and continuity as essential to the process of effectively broadcasting the intended message. In “tying together a sequence of visual images and/or series of dramatic episodes,” music in advertising acts as an effective and affective gel which links particular messages with visual signifiers to further solidify the message.64 The Kurtz

62 Ibid, 129-130.

63 Ibid, 130.

64 David Huron, "Music in Advertising: An Analytic Paradigm," Musical Quarterly 73, no.4 (1989): 558.

46 spots do just this as they inject functional sounds into the mix, making audible the politics of the petrocultural environmental imaginary.

As television music scholar Ron Rodman notes, commercials, at their essence, are closed texts, aiming to “have consumers and producers participate in the act of commodity exchange.”65 This closed situation presents a briefly enclosed semiotic universe which plays by its own rules in order to achieve a particular point. Winfred Noth conceives of a ‘masked commercial,’ or a scenario in which “the appeal for commodity exchange has been obfuscated by the surface text of the ad...thus hiding the true intent of the ad.”66 Kurtz and Friends’ dinosaur spots work in a seemingly opposite direction from the masked text, lifting the veil on the deep infrastructure that enable modern capitalism, consumption, and the larger ecological picture of planet earth. Yet, this exposed method of “teaching” through advertising is one of the most effective ways to mask the political consequences of the production of a commodity. As Chevron educates its public, it is able to infuse the lesson with instrumental, anonymized sounds reflective of an impenetrable capitalist project. By not offering up the question of alternatives to oil,

Chevron soothes the listener through flexible sounds and the equally limber accessibility of animation. In doing so, Chevron solidifies the inevitability of a continued reliance on privatized transportation and oil by connecting the light mood of the youthful bassoon

65 Winfred Noth, “Advertising: The Frame Message,” Marketing and Semiotics (Berlin, New York, and Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter, 1987): 617.

66 Ronald Rodman, “Strategies of Imbuement in Television Advertising Music,” in Sound and Music in Film and Visual Media, edited by Graeme Harper, Ruth Doughty, Jochen Eisentraut (New York: Continuum, 2009): 618.

47 figure with the resonant image of dinosaurs as emblems of ancient planetary life forms.

Through the transformational power of cartoons, the message is clear: temporarily drive less so you can drive forever.

Gilles Deleuze further expands the bounds of animation as it relates to cinema. In presenting the concept of the movement-image, Deleuze holds that "cinema does not give us an image to which movement is added, it immediately gives us a movement-image."67

He locates the cartoon as particularly successful in exemplifying this mobility, noting that

“the drawing no longer constitutes a pose or a completed figure, but the description of a figure which is always in the process of being formed or dissolving through the movement of lines and points taken at any-instant-whatevers of their course.”68 In this way, the permanently active animation “does not give us a figure described in a unique moment, but the continuity of the movement which describes the figure."69 The continuity of both dinosaurs transforming into organic matter and on-the-go automobilized life coalesces in the always-already forward progress of petroculture.

These observations, then, demonstrate the unique ability of animation to mimic the transmutational properties of both sound and petroleum-based products as they move and morph through the environment. As mobile forms of energy, both sound and petroleum thrive on pressure. Air is moved in waves to create sound just as petroleum is

67 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 2.

68 Ibid, 5.

69 Ibid. 48 distilled into fractions through boiling processes. In the case of petroleum commercials, this consistent pressure is audible through functional music and sounds, ever-present and unrelenting. In each case, the function of the form of energy is mobilized resulting in specific consequences.

Chevron’s animated dinosaur commercials do similar work by reaching back into the Mesozoic Era, connecting histories of organic matter to present-day habits of oil consumption. By injecting their product with a materiality through the tones of production music and animated movements of Kurtz and Friends, the campaign successfully anthropomorphized their product, simultaneously engaging with the heightened environmental awareness of the 1970s and a form of greenwashing that encouraged consumers to choose a brand of gasoline which promoted an awareness of environmental history. Through the use of functional music as a sonic lubricant, the message of unquestioned continual use of oil-reliant, privatized transportation is paradoxically amplified through the casually authoritative timbre of the male voice and a playful bassoon. Indeed, sound in the background distributes the real message.

Delving deeper into the history of American animation, we find a continual pattern of animated engagements with petroleum and its surrounding cultures. From the dinosaur to the automobile, petroculture remains intertwined visually and sonically with the codes of animation. In 1914, American animator Winsor McCay produced an animated short film featuring a likeable and unwieldy dinosaur named Gertie. Before finding its cinematic context as Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), the series of over 10,000 drawings was projected on vaudeville stages with the animator himself interacting with 49 the animal. As one of the first American animators of commercial significance, McCay set the stage for the incorporating fantastical creatures, both real and imagined, into the mundanity of daily life.

The plot of the film finds McCay and his colleagues out for a joy ride in an automobile until they receive a flat tire in front of the American Museum of Natural

History. The museum features a brontosaurus skeleton and McCay sets up a dinner wager that he can animate the dinosaur, effectively bringing it to life. The film intercuts within the live action, with title cards taking the place of McCay’s original live interactions with the film. McCay wins the bet and his friend pays for dinner. The essential role of the car to get McCay and his friends to the museum integrates emergent automobility into the equally fresh world of animation in America. Indeed, McCay’s vaudeville promotional posters feature two cars, one at the dinosaur’s feet, the other perched on Gertie’s head. In the lower right corner, McCay spells out the playful animal’s feelings: “Gertie just loves an auto.” This iconic image speaks to the lure of a nascent, personalized industry in the process of affixing itself into everyone’s minds, including the mind of a likeable dinosaur. In the original performances, after screening the setup with friends arriving at the museum, McCay would break the fourth wall and engage with the dinosaur. By memorizing the physical movements of Gertie, McCay would command the animal to move in a variety of directions, thus astounding audiences with his own physical enactment as a kind of acousmetre. 50

Figure 5: "Gertie Just Loves an Auto."

McCay’s omniscience and ubiquity as both entertainer and groundbreaking animator set the stage for the braided relationship between American animation and the automotive love-affair which has held the culture in rapt attention for a century. As 51 dinosaurs stick their heads out of Chevron’s gas tanks, Sinclair Oil takes the creature as its logo and Exxon reminds us to “Put a Tiger in Your Tank!” the animated, animal kingdom remains deeply connected to the history of American petroculture. A particularly resonant example of animal animation in dialogue with the sounds and shapes of petroculture is found in the 1943 Woody Woodpecker cartoon Ration Bored.

Figure 6: Ration Bored opening sequence.

As the last in the series of Woody Woodpecker Cartunes to feature the voice of

Kent Rogers as Woody, it also served to be the last episode without Woody popping through an angled wooden tree stump. These finalities are significant in that they mark the end of the Walter Lantz Production team’s search for a consistent brand for their flagship character. Ration Bored stands as the final document of a Woody with more angular features, harsher narrative frameworks, and rash behavior. The end of the opening sequence finds Woody busting through the windshield of a car covered with 52 ration cards. Composer Darrell Calker provides the customary triplet-heavy theme followed by the knocking of Woody’s bill, manifest through repetitive rhythms on woodblocks. As the concluding whole-tone motif lands on an F dominant seventh flat nine chord, Woody appears, racing along in a car, wind bleeding the colors of his bright red head and brilliant blue shirt. The dragging color streams across the screen as his car motors along against a rural mise-en-scene. Calker’s jarring motif is played by muted trumpets moving in dissonant parallel harmony. The sounds of car culture are amplified as alternating major third motifs signify passing car horns subjected to a doppler effect.

Woody screeches to a halt as he encounters a sign: “Conserve Gas and Tires: Is this trip really necessary?”

Figure 7: Blurring colors with sound.

Appearing in 1943, during a period of gas rationing in the United States during

World War II, the sign would be familiar to citizens making daily use of their 53 automobiles. Uncharacteristic of Woody’s typical antics, he reads the sign aloud in shrill timbre. Suddenly he turns to toward the viewer, morphing into a devilish character and exclaims, “Sure it’s necessary! I’m a necessary evil!” The joy of speeding along in an automobile sounds out the personal rights and freedoms of an automobilized, privatized citizen of the United States. As Sarah Frohardt-Lane argues, the government-sponsored gas-rationing programs during World War II helped to conflate consumption and restraint in order to solidify a narrative of “unlimited driving as the ultimate reward after years of sacrifice.”70

Figure 8: "I'm a Necessary Evil!"

70 Sarah Frohardt-Lane, “Promoting a Culture of Driving: Rationing, Car Sharing, and Propaganda in World War II,” (Journal of American Studies 46 2012), 355.

Moral entitlement to drive endlessly is stretched to the limit in the realities of

“Ration Bored.” Woody and his enemy, a large police dog, chase each other around, finally plummeting down a hill into a huge gasoline storage tank. The tank explodes and they end up as angels in at the ration board in heaven. Woody taunts the police dog and races off through the clouds. This time our anti-hero doesn’t need any fuel. Indeed, the ideal heavenly scenario is a reality of endless mobility.

Domesticating Petroculture

Whether it is the temporally flexible narratives of Chevron’s animated commercials or Woody Woodpecker’s uncontainable mobility, these animated engagements with petrocultural history reflect the mutable identity of the substance itself.

Sound furthers this elasticity by suturing otherwise incoherent phenomena together into a fluid exchange of narratives and capitalist agendas. In doing so, functional music in oil commercials lubricates submerged agendas to uncritically accept a petroleum-reliant society. As functional music resists critical engagement through unobtrusive timbres, harmonic content, and mixing strategies, it accomplishes the task of perpetuating the meta-narrative that life without oil is no life at all.

In Chevron’s “Dollar Bill” spot, the velvety tones of America’s Top 40 DJ smooth out the unbelievably complex trajectory of a drop of oil. Calker’s score in

“Ration Bored” imagines the sounds of car horns on an unpopulated road in the country.

By suspending belief, the centrality of oil in everyday life remains cloaked in sounds that function to bring cohesion to chaos. For Michael Ziser, this chaos takes the form of excessiveness: “As a huge technological leap, ubiquitous commodity, basis for new 55 forms of wealth and power, and pervasive infrastructural context for cultural production, oil is aesthetically and ideologically excessive.”71 This excessiveness combined with the absolute ubiquity of the substance firmly situates it in the realm of the sublime. Imre

Szeman figures Kant’s idea of the sublime “as a domesticating process that renders what might well be alien to thought amenable to existing schema. The fact that the sublime fails is, then, not an issue, since its capacity to control and contain filmic images of dramatic scale drains [it] of its effects.”72 Functional music acts in a similar way as it drains critical questions of about oil’s necessity by smoothing out the engagement to promote continued used in a variety of ways.

Building on 1970s anxieties of the fragility of oil-reliant infrastructure, the task of

Chevron and its advertising firm BBDO, was to infuse the very fuel that enabled modern life with a deeper connection to geologic time. Animation in the mid and late 1970s was primed to deliver such a message. Pairing the sounds of Casey Kasem’s Top 40 voice with Bob Kurtz’s kaleidoscopic biological lessons allowed children (future baby boomers) and the WWII generation to reconnect to the primacy of automobility to the

American experience.

In a special issue of the Journal of American Studies, authors Ross Barrett and

Daniel Worden point toward the lack of critical engagement with oil: “the unsettling material effects of petro-capitalism helped to ensure the invisibility of oil in much of

71 Michael Ziser, “Oil Spills,” PMLA, Vol.126, 321.

72 Imre Szeman, “Crude Aesthetics: The Politics of Oil Documentaries,” (Journal of American Studies 46 2012), 436-437.

56 nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, they also seem to have dissuaded artists, cultural critics, and academics from engaging overtly and explicitly with the oil industry.”73 This point compels the authors to begin the work of dissecting petroleum industries and their surround cultures. As a ubiquitous presence in modern experience, it is necessary to consider how the substance and its products shapes our experience on the planet. The centrality of oil is celebrated by direct stakeholders within the industry. In their account of oil’s essential presence in our daily lives, Gavin Bridge and Phillipe Le

Billon equate liquid hydrocarbons to a treasure, or wild animal, to hunted and brought to submission. As they note, “crude inhabits tiny gaps in ancient sediments and often must be compelled to the surface.”74 The unique historical characteristics “must be erased by refineries if oil is to behave as required in engines, power stations, and production lines.”75

These visions of conquest mimic long-held relationships between the exploratory cowboy and the discovery of precious natural resources such as gold and oil. Films like

Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007), based on Upton Sinclair’s Oil!

(1927), recounts the high stakes of this commitment to petroleum as a source of life in modern society. In a notable scene from the movie, Daniel Day Lewis’ character Daniel

Plainview soaks local preacher Eli Sunday in a pool of oil after Sunday accuses him of

73 Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden, “Oil Culture: Guest Editors’ Introduction,” Journal of American Studies (46) 2012: 270.

74 Gavin Bridge and Philippe Le Billon, Oil, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013): 1-2.

75 Ibid, 2.

57 poorly constructing a blown oil well. The moment serves as both baptismal metaphor and deep humiliation. These extreme moments replay key narrative characteristics of petroleum and its cultures: catastrophe and exuberance. Frederick Buell’s claims that characteristics of catastrophe and exuberance infuse the role of oil as “an essential prop underneath humanity’s material and symbolic cultures.”76 Oil’s identity as something which brings about both life and death underscores its direct connection to chemical elements such as oxygen and carbon dioxide. This catastrophic exuberance of this

“essential prop” is sounded out in multiple ways. While the high-tension of Johnny

Greenwood’s Messiaen-influenced melodramatic score to There Will Be Blood paints an unresolvable picture of oil’s consequences, so too do the measured voices and functional sounds of corporate energy company commercials. The difference lies in the solidification of corporate narratives to unquestionably accept the use of fossil-fuels as opposed to the dramatized sounds of urgency depicted in numerous environmentally- attuned Hollywood films.

Patricia Yaeger challenges chronological approaches to the history of literature by asking “what happens if we sort texts according to the energy sources that made them possible?”77 Yaeger builds on Fredric Jameson’s idea of a political unconscious, which calls attention to the ideologies of form inherent in a text, by asking about the stakes of an

76 Frederick Buell, “A Short History of Oil Cultures: Or, the Marriage of Catastrophe and Exuberance,” Journal of American Studies 46 (2012), 274.

77 Patricia Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow, Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources,” PMLA, Volume 126, Number 2, March 2011: 305.

58 energy unconscious: “the writer who treats fuel as a cultural code or reality effect makes a symbolic move, asserts his or her class position in a system of mythic abundance not available to the energy worker who lives in carnal exhaustion.”78 In Yaeger’s energy unconscious, “each resource instantiates a changing phenomenology that could recreate our ideas about the literary text’s relation to its originating modes of production as quasi- objects.”79 Mapping the energy unconscious into the realm of functional sound demands taking up questions of how timbre, rhythm, and pitch coagulate to make audible the cultural centrality of oil. By amplifying these aspects, the functional sounds of petroculture work in counterpoint to sound moments of robustness and fragility within cultural imaginaries of oil and the environment.

Clean Exhaust

“Standard Oil of California has developed a new gasoline additive: formula F-

310, an important step toward cleaner air!” The resounding tones of the announcer’s voice forgo Casey Kasem’s warm timbre in favor of an aggressive authoritarianism. This is the sound of a corporation disseminating vital, life-changing information through radio broadcasts framed as educational moments. In January of 1970, Chevron, then Standard

Oil of California, launched a series of television and print ads proclaiming the benefits of their F-310 additive. With no evidence of the physical existence of the F-310 commercials, the listener must fill in the aural gaps, imagining through print media and

78 Ibid, 309.

79 Ibid, 309-310.

59 the singular radio spot. The ads came in response to corporation losing nearly 7 percent of its market share, watching competitor Shell Oil become the biggest seller of gas in

Southern California (the largest market in the state).80

“For a full report…,” the announcer takes a quick breath, increasing the urgency of the message, “...we switch you to astronaut Scott Carpenter at the Standard Oil

Richmond Refinery.” The thickly veiled harmony of a communications system swells into the audio field. Milliseconds into the sound, an oscillating electronic motif appears, rising and falling in pitch, giving the feeling of a warped gear system running on overload. The moment is further interrupted by a rhythmic electronic tone repeated frantically, evoking a cross between a futuristic telephone ringer and morse code.

“I’m standing beside a huge complex of pipes and machinery where the remarkable new gasoline additive Formula F-310 is being produced.” The high-pitched beeping continues halfway through the copy then disappears. Even though Carpenter claims to be amongst the churning infrastructure of a massive oil refinery, the soundscape is noticeably quiet. Perhaps the devolution of electronic sounds was too distracting to get this environment-altering information across. “F-310 reduces exhaust emissions entering the air from dirty engines.” Carpenter’s voice is higher in pitch than the introductory announcer who switched the listener to the on-location astronaut. Carpenter’s long breaths take the momentum out of the radio spot as the listener imagines him reading the

80 Fair Trade Commission Decisions, Findings, Opinions, and Orders, July 1, 1974 to December 31, 1974, Vol. 84, 1401-1493.

60 copy for the first time. Authority gives way to the sound of astonishment with the latest advances in petroleum technology.

“Road tests prove just six tanks full of Chevron gasolines with F-310 sharply reduce dirty exhaust....” This statement of fact is attenuated by Carpenter’s monotone delivery against the still silent hiss of a voiceover booth. “...one of the most long-awaited developments in gasoline history.” The astronaut takes another long, wavering breath.

“And since dirty exhaust is wasted gasoline, Chevron with F-310 changes dirty exhaust into good clean mileage.” The slippage between clean air and clean mileage comes to the fore as Carpenter pounds out the newly read copy.

With the sonic field uncomfortably sparse, Carpenter wraps up his earth-changing message with a double negative: “There isn’t a car on the road that shouldn’t be using it.”

The stripped down nature of the spot, featuring a brief sonification of “switching” listeners between voices, speaks to the thinly veiled greenwashing inherent in the F-310 campaign. Hearing functional sounds in oil commercials as sonic lubricants requires attention to sounds that aim to avoid critical engagement. The sound of connecting the announcer to Carpenter implies Chevron’s mastery of telecommunicative processes which further support their credibility as a groundbreaking, pollution-eradicating energy corporation. But such sounds cannot function to completely obscure the truth.

On December 29, 1970 the Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint against

Standard Oil of California (SoCal) and the advertising firm Batten, Barton, Durstine, and

Osborn (BBDO) to cease and desist. Claims that the Chevron’s new F-310 additive

“reduces exhaust emissions” were found to be egregious, and the FTC’s sweeping charge 61 of 11 counts of false advertising reflects this. Just as some sounds are too high or low for the human ear to detect, the same remains true for air pollution’s visual traces. Four years later, when the case was finally resolved, a consent order was agreed to by SoCal and

BBDO to only market the environmental effects of oil use with a series of disclosures and caveats akin to a pharmaceutical ad. The 1974 consent order demonstrated that a dissonance can be legally maintained between audiovisual and textual depictions of environmental issues as they are incorporated into oil company marketing practices.

Indeed, interjected, small-font text is no match for the authoritative voice of a white, male astronaut proclaiming the benefits of clean emissions as dirty air fills up a balloon next to a clear, seemingly “emission-free” balloon.

Figure 9: “...dirty exhaust into good clean mileage.”

These sounds, mixed with images of clean exhaust, filter through complexity toward a message of black smog replaced by clear emissions. The fictions woven in the campaign reflect how both functional sounds and the production of oil embrace practices of speculation, scenario planning, distillation, and refinement. In this way, make-believe narratives of petrocultural media sound out the politics and aesthetics of a form of energy bound up in a constant drama of excess and scarcity, both fueling human endeavor and remaining at the mercy of human agency.

Matthew Huber hones in on the internalization and refinement of petroleum as an essential condition to the development of consumer capitalism in postwar America. In his ecological critique of capital, Huber argues that “nature is not only seen as something

‘produced’ by capitalism or as an external, uncommodified ‘condition’ of production.”81

Instead, material nature “is constitutive of and internal to the productive forces and social relations of capital.”82 This ecological understanding of capital is embodied in Kurtz and

Friends’ spots which feature a compressed life cycle of organic matter, essentially showing how one form of life (dinosaurs) becomes the fuel to enable modern fossil- fueled life. Further, the F-310 campaign finds Carpenter infusing a paradigm-shifting gasoline additive with his authority as a space explorer. Carpenter sounds out the possibilities of something right out of a science-fiction novel: cleaning up the air through driving.

81 Matthew T. Huber, Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013): xviii.

82 Ibid.

Human Energy

A breathy synth pad fades in creating a stark atmosphere. The notes, C-G-Bb, create an asignifying harmonic pallet. The chord could be major or minor, but the listener is held in suspension. The words “tapped energy” flash onto the screen in a cool, silver digital hue. On cue, a C major chord resounds on a closely mic’d piano. It is a simple harmonic triad in the upper-register, a delicate sound used by Hollywood composers to signal fragility. Wide, horizontal arrows blur across the words, adding a prefix “un-” as an Eb to F chord sequence resounds. Eb is defiantly outside the C major harmonic reality, yet the shift works, evoking an air of progress. The message is that untapped energy will emerge out of a bleak, tapped-out scenario.

While the progression instantly speaks to the flexibility of the message, the mood remains cold. What unfolds are a series of shots that delve deep into materialized environmental anxieties: shots of icebergs, smoggy city-scapes, burning oil fields, traffic, and so forth. The omniscient narrator, an authoritative, white-sounding voice, begins:

“...and outside, the debate rages: oil, energy, the environment. It is the story of our time.”

The images continue: pumpjacks, a drop of crude on a desert floor, anonymous refineries along highways. The synth pad and piano continue their spaced out major-to-minor motif.

“...and it leaves no one untouched,” the confident, booming male voice resounds.

Tracking shots of Koyaanisqatsi-esque traffic persist. “Because make no mistake…,” the narrator asserts with a tinge of authoritative warning, “this isn’t just about oil companies….” The chord progression modulates through Eb to F once more landing on the subdominant of F as the dynamics swell as a string section appears with the synth 64 pad. This compositional move keeps the listener in a state of unresolved hope: subdominants often give way to dominants which submit to the tonic, or home key. To keep the listener in harmonic purgatory prolongs the urgency of the narrative, deepening the tension in the process. “This is about you and me…,” a series of rapid-fire shots of generationally and ethnically diverse people appear, finally settling on a white teenage girl in the kitchen as morning light streams through the windows. The world is waking up to the message.

The final case study of this chapter examines how the aesthetics of Chevron’s recent Human Energy campaign sounds out an environmental imaginary built on the integration of machines and humans, corporations and individuals. Crucial to this campaign are the basic elements of minor and major harmony built up and blurred through functional music. In this case, the aptly titled piece “Symbiotic” by soundtrack composer Paul Leonard-Morgan operates as the musical backdrop for the cohesive message of human energy. There are some crucial ways the piece makes use of compositional techniques to oscillate between the competing narratives at work within the Human Energy campaign.

As the narrator goes on to explore the astounding population numbers of the planet and its projected growth, he soothes the listener with a simple, anxiety-producing statement: “...everyone of us will need energy to live.” A plane takes off, runners move across a what looks to be a rural African landscape, and a father looks at his newborn child. The melodic content finally arrives as a simple figure cascades between the notes 65 of a C major scale. The mood has moved from the stress of statistics and facts to a profound question posed against a home-key backdrop: “Where will it come from?”

The strings swell again as a woman peers out of a taxi cab window toward the sky. This is where Chevron comes in. Shots of helicopters, oceanic oil platforms, and rigs appear. “This is our challenge each day…,” the narrator delivers with a hint of condescension. “Because for today, and tomorrow, and the foreseeable future, our lives demand oil.” In this moment, the narrative tables have turned as the message goes from standing accused to a microaggressive mode of accusation. The spacious arpeggios continue.

As the ad copy unrolls Chevron’s multi-modal energy production models, scenes of white technicians and white businessmen at conference tables unfold. The music continues moving forward. “That an oil company can practice and espouse conservation…,” speaks the narrator as a wide shot of birds fly over an estuary. “Yes, we are an oil company. But right now we are also providing natural gas, solar, hydrogen, geothermal...because we live on this planet too.” The arpeggios reside for a close-up of woman holding a child looking directly into the camera. The corporation is a person too.

The narrator’s voice wavers as he begins to list a litany of the kinds of people

“we” are: “...not corporate titans, but men and women of vision...liberals and conservatives, pipeline workers and geologists, husbands and wives, part-time poets and coaches.” The arpeggiating figures have returned with more resolve. The orchestral strings swell as the melodic figure increases in frequency. “Tell us it can’t be done, then 66 watch us as we tap the greatest source of energy…,” the narrator emotes as a baby takes its first steps toward its mother, “ourselves.”

Leonard-Morgan’s “Symbiotic” was originally composed as production music, pre-recorded and performed for future use. The album containing “Symbiotic” is entitled

Filmtales and most likely consists of pieces that didn’t make the cut for the composers commissioned work for film and television. The Human Energy spots were bound to the narrative dynamics of pre-existing functional music, relying on the sounds to weave together personal and corporate interests.

The symbiotic relationship of individuals and corporate interests sounded out by the campaign reflects what Frederick Buell calls a new era of “American exceptionalism.” For Buell, the new exceptionalism:

…leaves the frontier and invests itself in the modernity of the US, and the gap between it and the world outside modernity becomes reinscribed as a gulf between advanced and developing or backward places. This new societal exceptionalism promotes a new notion of individualism, which in turn becomes a new place for oil-electric cultural invention. In popular and also high-cultural discourse, people’s bodies and psyches are refigured as oil-electric-energized systems….83

These individuals-as-systems are embedded in the material realities of petrocultural aesthetics. Such aesthetics are bound up in vertically-charged systems such as refineries and drilling rigs. This physical infrastructure is reflected in early shifts in extraction culture as, according to Buell, J.D. Rockefeller “transformed extraction culture into a

83 Buell, 286.

67 vertically integrated monopoly that stifled this resurgence of American individualism and frontier spirit.”84

The Human Energy campaign uses functional sounds to pulverise divisions between barrels of oil and human beings, profits and environmental concerns, global and local histories. The stark hue of “Symbiotic” uses subtle shifts in harmony to draw the listener into a cooperative unity with an accusatory corporate message. In her book

Storytelling in Business: The authentic and fluent organization, Janis Forman provides an account of Chevron’s Human Energy campaign as an example of corporate best-practice behavior. By drawing from perspectives of numerous actors throughout the company’s infrastructure, Forman argues that the brand concretizes its credibility through emotion- driven stories. In this way, these humanizing narratives are steeped in the potentiality of sound.

In the process of building the Human Energy campaign, we find a series of audiovisual conflations taking place. At a US Chamber of Commerce meeting in June of

2004, Chevron CEO David J. O’Reilly first articulated the stakes of the “New Energy

Equation.” For O’Reilly, the challenges of the present day involve: “Increased global demand for energy accompanied by increased difficulty in meeting this demand as sources of energy dry up and geopolitical complexity accelerates.”85 Taking into account the stark realities of energy production and consumption, O’Reilly expanded the scope of

84 Ibid, 283.

85 Janis Forman, Storytelling in business: The authentic and fluent organization (Stanford University Press, 2013), 104.

68 the equation to include the general public as significant players within the unfolding drama. “Americans must begin to think about energy in the same way they would think about national security, or education, or healthcare….”86 By connecting energy politics to safety, intellectual growth, and continued health, O’Reilly further expands Matthew

Huber’s notion of petroleum and other sources of energy as akin to a life-enabling phenomenon, or lifeblood.

Chevron’s answer to to the New Energy Equation can be found in the Human

Energy campaign. If the equation presents the complexities of the energy problem, the campaign provides an answer in the form of the abstract idea of human energy. The corporation’s response implicates human beings alongside the forces embedded within natural, non-renewable resources. Infusing the situation with functional music the meta- narrative of Human Energy places the audience of the commercial as energetic pawns within the larger economic goals of corporate profit interests.

As a primary component of the campaign Chevron produced an array of spots sounding out the specific stories of human energy from a variety of actors embedded within in its corporate infrastructure. The stories themselves connect human beings to barrels of oil, in the aptly titled moniker of “Follow the Barrel” stories. As Forman notes,

“the ‘follow the barrel’ stories give...human dimension while dramatizing the enormous distance in space and proportion between offshore drilling operations and pumping gas at the local station.”87 By compressing this distance and the political complexities of oil

86 Ibid, 106.

87 Ibid, 118. 69 production through the sounds of human voices and submerged functional music, the corporate message obfuscates reality in the name of branding cohesion.

This phenomenon of embedding human beings within the broader project of harnessing energy is clearly articulated in copy associated with the campaign: “Finding newer, smarter, cleaner ways to power the world begins with this one energy source we have in abundant supply: the power of Human Energy.”88 The stakes of human energy are outlined with emphases on both sound and vision. As Forman notes during the launch of the campaign: “Even guidelines for visuals emphasize the need to link them to Human

Energy: ‘When choosing or shooting photography, strive to make conceptual and visual connections to Human Energy themes of people and progress.’”89 Indeed, by choosing an array of sites and sounds, Chevron amplifies diverse engagements with energy in the name of solidifying a cohesive, and thereby attenuated, message of cooperative human energy. Buell further expands on this contrapuntal phenomenon, which began to take shape as oil transitioned from Westward expansion frontierism, to the vertically- integrated refineries of Rockefeller: “Together, oil and electricity wrapped people within their many infrastructures— roads, pipelines, telephone lines, power cables— even as it began doing something else of great cultural importance: reaching into and restructuring people’s private worlds, identities, bodies, sense of geography, emotions.”90 Coagulating

88 Ibid, 111.

89 Ibid, 117.

90 Buell, 284.

70 the human being with mechanized petroleum infrastructure shares an affinity with texts and sounds of science fiction as it imagines worlds intertwined with technology which simultaneously contain promises of apocalypse and salvation through oil. This recurrent transition between two narrative modes underscores the inherent flexibility of petroleum as a source of energy and political volatility.

Writing about the aesthetics of transition, ecocritic Michael Ziser considers the changing yet familiar shape of cultural imaginings as they confront the crude realities of living in a society dependent on fossil-fuels:

...current representations of an end to the hydrocarbon age...replay key aspects of the oil-shock culture of the 1970s and early 1980s rehearsing that era’s classic bioregionalist themes of utopia, apocalypse, geographic constriction, tribalization and...informational networking in their struggle to conceive the traumatic loss of a fossil-fuel subsidy that has underwritten an economic culture of near-constant growth.91

Ziser argues that these familiar themes of bioregionalism through science fiction narratives and emphases on the power of networked technology to fix and unite societies are updated in the latest versions of a two-prong approach to environmentalism. The first prong emphasizes localist tendencies which play on Ehrlich’s classic The Population

Bomb which posits that “the human population will overshoot the carrying capacity of the global environment and crash precipitously….”92 Such notions underscore long held environmentalist ideals to “reclaim the natural world as a place in which one may be left

91 Ziser, 182.

92 Ibid, 185.

71 alone by society and history.”93 The second prong appears to depart from such visions of regional burnout in favor of a globalized view of ecological interconnectedness. This view, dubbed by the media as ‘environmentalism 2.0,’ “maintains a tempered optimism borne of a faith in the power of the digital age to preserve a global ecology reduced to its virtual, disembodied elements.”94

The tensions between these two views of an increasingly fragile environment share a surprisingly similar conception of space. The term ‘glocal’ reflects the paradoxical relationship held with the environment as both under and beyond our control.

As Ziser puts it, in reference to the fragility of the atmosphere, “we cannot...act upon the atmosphere without implicitly acknowledging that the atmosphere—the wildest venue around—is in fact in some sense already under our control and hence ‘dead’ in the traditional environmental sense.”95

Exploring the shape of these responses to the realities of non-renewable resources depicts an environmental imagination transfixed on maintaining a narrative of control amidst chaos. This call to “Think globally, act locally,” coined by either David Brower or

Rene Dubos, reflects this attempt to hold up a sense of shared scales; a view “in which the ultimate interconnectedness of all the components of the terrestrial ecosystem ultimately overpowers the spatial differences and material distances that resist such

93 Ibid.

94 Ibid, 186.

95 Ibid, 187.

72 connection.”96 What is made clear through the counterpoint of global and local scalar paradigms are the consequences of the fragile, resource-dependent infrastructures which support them. The aesthetics of these fluid transitions and their scalar counterparts are uniquely reflected in the ambivalence of the Human Energy campaign.

As Forman notes, the resulting consistency through a multiplicity of voices is due to the company’s “explicit guidelines for voice—a set of key attributes linked to Human

Energy but broad enough to allow for personal expression….”97 This balance of personal and organizational expression is bound up in a sonically-engaged projection of corporate identity. The “Chevron Voice Brief” was authored by Joerden Legon, web-editor for

Chevron.com. The brief instructs those appearing in web-based narratives of human energy on the proper tone by which to express particular engagements with the theme.

Legon emphasizes the importance of telling stories with “a tone of voice that is human, accessible and friendly, while at the same time direct, focused, and indicative of business savvy.”98 By adopting a “quietly heroic” tone, employees are encouraged to express an approachable story of the company’s importance to society.

Legon specifically outlines five “key voice attributes” that employees should adopt in their unique expressions of human energy: human, accessible, direct, savvy, optimistic, and grounded.99 These characteristics are embedded within the pressing issue

96 Ibid, 187.

97 Forman, 118.

98 Ibid, 120.

99 Ibid. 73 of the brief and campaign as a whole: “...does the content sound like it’s coming from a real person, someone who has an engaging voice and who doesn’t use standard, monotone, corporate-speak.”100 Through continual recourse to sound, the importance of the aural dimension within petrocultural discourse is further solidified. Whether it is through relentless minimalist piano lines, hovering subdominant chords, or the emphasis on sound in the development of oil company commercials, the sonic process of solidifying (meta)narratives is essential to the shaping of petrocultures.

The End of Oil?

Hovering within the Human Energy are the minimalist figures of eco-apocalyptic narratives, due in large part to its Philip Glass-inspired score. But a shift in hue bridges minor key harmony with major key colors to answer the apocalypse with resounding calls for corporate cooperation. Of course, to some this sounds like the ultimate soundtrack to hybridization between the individual and corporate self. Oil has long been associated with moments of excess and scarcity. Whether it is the pain caused at the pump by the

OPEC “crisis” or the historically low gas prices at the time of this writing, the substance endures swift identity shifting in the public imagination. Such events are par for the course within the dramatic narrative of petroculture and media representations.

In 2014, the BP Statistical Review of World Energy found the United States touting the largest increase in production in the world, churning out 1.6 million barrels per day. With increased drilling in states such as Wyoming and North Dakota, the

100 Ibid. 74 country the first “ever to increase production by at least 1 million b/d for three consecutive years...taking over from Saudi Arabia as the world's largest oil producer.”101

With gas averaging around two dollars a gallon, consumers are free to explore the pleasures of inefficient vehicles such as large SUVs and trucks once again. Imre Szeman notes that “disaster discourses are necessarily anticipatory, future-oriented ones— narratives put into play in the present in order to enable the imagined disaster at the end of oil to be averted through geopolitical strategy, ration planning, careful management of resources, the mobilization of technological and scientific energies, and so on.”102

Szeman identifies three common narratives that circulate as a response to the end of oil: strategic realism, techno-utopianism, and eco-apocalypse. The first narrative maintains an interest in “engaging in the geopolitical maneuverings required to keep economies floating in oil.”103 Here we find Chevron’s animated features at their best. Through good humor and neighborly warmth, the anxiety-ridden “need for nations to protect themselves from energy disruptions” hinges on “securing and maintaining steady and predictable access to oil.”104 The friendly dinosaur and chugging synths soothe the listener into an easy trust in a corporation that has its logo on the dollar bill.

101 BP Statistical Review of World Energy, 2014. http://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world- energy/2014-in-review.html

102 Imre Szeman, “System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster,” South Atlantic Quarterly 104:4, (2007), 808.

103 Ibid, 810.

104 Ibid.

The second narrative, techno-utopianism, privileges technology as the savior.

Szeman notes that the “natural temporal flow of scientific discovery will resolve the energy and environmental problems we have produced for ourselves.”105 As astronaut

Scott Carpenter made clear for the F-310 campaign, the problem of air pollution will be fixed by continued driving...just with a new additive! Indeed, “mankind produces only such disasters as technology can solve; the disaster arises only when the conditions in which to repair it are already in the process of formation.”106 Finally, the familiar trope of the Hollywood dystopian narrative is that of the eco-apocalypse. This filter on the environmental imagination “understands that social and political change is fundamental to genuinely addressing the disaster of the end of oil—a disaster that it relates to the environment before economics.”107 The answer for the eco-apocalyptic subject lies in massive societal and infrastructural change. However, “since such change is not on the horizon or is difficult to imagine, it sees the future as Bosch-like—a hell on earth, obscured by a choking carbon-dioxide smog.”108

The later work of pioneering animator Winsor McCay deals with the flexibility of human and nonhuman forms of energy through the lens of eco-apocalyptic imagery.

McCay’s strip Dream of the Rarebit Fiend finds 19th-century laborers grappling with

105 Ibid, 814.

106 Ibid.

107 Ibid, 815.

108 Ibid.

76 constant states of fatigue as a result of a rapidly industrializing society. Toward the end of his career, McCay published a cartoon in the San Francisco Examiner entitled

“Technocracy,” McCay paints a disturbing portrait of the newly coined term outlined by

William Henry Smyth. In short, the movement pushed for a democratic vision led by scientists and technicians to address the need of society. In this moment of increased mechanization of labor, bodies came to be seen as operating at a loss as compared to the relentless drive of modern machinery. As Scott Bukatman puts it, “the metaphor of the machine was strenuously applied to the laboring bodies of the industrial age. In the discourse of production, fatigue replaced idleness as the enemy of productive labor; the avoidance of work was less significant than the body's productive limits.”109

A comic drawn toward the end of McCay’s life finds a mechanized dinosaur destructively tromping through the urban landscape, emitting carbon out of a smokestack in its head. Gertie once held the auto she so loved in this spot. But the machine has now taken over the body and its gears move the beast on a mission to decimate bastions of manual labor in favor of petroleum-fueled progress. What does this sound like?

109 Scott Bukatman, The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animated Spirit (Berkeley: UC Press, 2012), 36.

Figure 10: Winsor McCay’s Technocracy.

CHAPTER 2: CONSUMPTION AND DISSOLVE: IMAGINING ENVIRONMENTS

WITH NEW AGE MUSIC

Imagine a listener unfolding a yoga mat on the living room floor. She has been suffering unrelenting pain through chronic arthritis. Her Bay-Area naturopathic doctor has prescribed a strict vegan diet, an array of herbal supplements, yoga three times per week, and Dr. Steven Halpern’s Self-Healing 2.0. In the “Secrets of Relaxation and

Sound Healing” portion of Halpern’s liner notes, the ailing subject reads that “the body is a self-healing instrument.” The listener is made aware of subliminal messages such as

“[Y]ou have the power, ability, and desire to accelerate your own healing.” Finally she is told to “...take a deep breath, close your eyes, and let the music carry you into your own private oasis of serenity and inner peace.”110

I imagine another listener across town, searching for releases on the Windham

Hill label on the streaming music service Spotify. He finds that only thematically organized samplers and greatest hits appear on the service. The themes, curated by label- owner William Ackerman, are titled Relaxation, Summer, and December appear with soft-focus pictures of idyllic environmental scenes. December is familiar to the listener both visually and sonically: reverberating, overdubbed tracks of digitally recorded piano, stark white cover with thin helvetica font framing a snowy rural scene. He closes his eyes and remembers fragmented moments from past holidays.

110 Dr. Steven Halpern, liner notes to Self-Healing 2.0, Steven Halpern, Inner Peace Music IPM 2046, CD, 2012. 79

The aforementioned vignettes hear functional music at work, as we imagine how it achieves its goal of transporting listeners to places and places to listeners. Here nonhuman environments maintain a central role, taking the place of individual artists, and encouraging a sonically-engaged, communal relationship with the natural world. The producers of New Age, a central form of functional music, aim to position ideas of growth, health, or escape as embodied within the sounds.

These aims are not without their tensions. Suzanne Doucet, promoter and owner of America’s first (and now defunct) music store dedicated to New Age, deftly articulates the genre’s tensions in the midst of the genre’s solidification in the late-80s:

[T]he popularity of New Age music presents quite a paradox. The irony of the push for its economic success becomes apparent when one examines its original purpose, which is to slow down the listener, to relax, balance, and heal...In direct contrast, almost every success-oriented business, including the music industry, operates by overstimulating [sic] and exciting the intellect and the senses, focusing on performance and personality, concerning itself with numbers rather than quality. New Age music, now a major part of the music industry, has become subject to the disease it was trying to heal.”111

This chapter argues that the inherent flexibility and ambiguity of the New Age genre sounds out the multidimensional character of concepts crucial to the Anthropocene such as the sublime, the wilderness, and climate change itself. The resonant dimensions of this form of functional music harmonize with nonhuman environments as a means of shaping neoliberal consumer subjectivity. Through an exploration of two approaches exemplified by Ackerman and Halpern, I will outline distinct narratives that provide opposing views of how environmental phenomena function within the New Age context. This

111 Bob Doerschuk, introduction to New Age Musicians, ed. Judie Eremo (Cupertino: GPI Publications, 1989), vii. 80 exploration of the particular kind of environmental imaginary conveyed by forms of

American New Age music is driven by a general lack of attention to the genre within music and sound studies. As scholars Omri and Marianna Ruah-Midbar put it, “[T]he absence of a significant body of research on such a prevalent and influential phenomenon constitutes a political act of exclusion.”112 This attention to New Age’s perennial exclusion from critical musicological inquiry is further noted by another scholar who claims that “New Age music is somewhat unique from other music genres in its overwhelmingly negative deployment as a source of contrast from which authentic works are distinguished, as well as in its representation of a perceived way of life….”113

This chapter places the New Age genre in dialogue with pressing conversations about the role of the human species in a geologic age in which human impacts are having significant impacts on the fate of the planet. Through an examination of two distinct forms of American New Age music, I interrogate their depictions of natural environments, arguing that these sonic practices serve to naturalize connections between serene moods and depictions of nature in the context of a culture of neoliberal capitalism.

To do this, I build upon Matthew Huber’s conception of a neoliberal cultural politics of life, a notion of “life as a product of your entrepreneurial choices.”114

112 Omri Ruah-Midbar and Marianna Ruah-Midbar, “The Dynamics of a Cultural Struggle in Academia: The Case of New Age Music Research,” Cultural Analysis 11 (2012), 77.

113 Hibbett, 283.

114 Matthew Huber, Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012): 301.

By listening to how this form of functional music imagines environments, I argue that New Age thrives on and reflects anxieties of the Anthropocene through its recurrent slippage between the amplification and erasure of the self. The centrality of the self reflects the central tenets of neoliberalism which emphasizes the individual, freedom, and rational choice. As David Harvey puts it, “human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade.”115 In order to hear these neoliberal resonances, I consider the consistent sonic and visual aesthetics of New Age in order to get at the consequences of the formation of New

Age subjectivity as it represents and consumes the natural world and its resources.

Drawing on a framework developed for literature, I bring these cultures of sound into dialogue with broader histories of environmental literary criticism. In The

Environmental Imagination, Buell sums up four of the characteristics essential to what he defines as an environmental text: 1) “the nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history,” 2) “human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest,” 3) “human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation,” 4) “some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text.”116 In addition, I take up Leo Marx’s seminal work on

115 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005): 2. 116 Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995): 7-8. 82 the relationship between technology and nature. In connecting these foundational characteristics of environmentally-oriented American literature with particular forms of

American New Age music, I aim to consider how these sounds conceptualize the relationship of the human to the environment and thus stand as sonic “environmental texts”.

The first form of New Age I will explore, embodied through the music and writing of Dr. Steven Halpern, positions the natural world as a kind of vitamin to be figuratively ingested. The result is ‘sound health’: a balancing of the chakras, a holistic medication for a frantic world. Halpern’s brand of New Age speaks of a nonhuman environment placed in concert with cascading Fender Rhodes keyboard arpeggios which press toward a reality in which nature is there to be consumed. For Halpern, this musical medication fuels positive growth of physical, spiritual, even monetary gains.

The second form of New Age music figures the nonhuman world in reverse. The world of William Ackerman’s Windham Hill records presents an environment imaginary in which nature dissolves, or consumes, the human. With artist anonymity and stock natural imagery as central promotional components, Windham Hill presents an environment where music functions as an escape into hi-fidelity oblivion. While this project carries the wanderlust torch of exotica and other forms of easy listening,

Windham Hill takes it to a new level: instead of escaping to an imaginary island populated by exoticized others, or blasting off in a spaceship to the moon, Ackerman and

Co. open the field for the listener to occupy a familiar but unknowable environment. In

83 essence, it is the very nature of a stock photo of nature. It is somewhere you might have been, wish to return to, but will never be able to find. We begin with a history of the genre in order to lay out the ways in which a relationship between human and nonhuman environment has been central to the genre since its inception.

Healing Histories

Since its inception, the sonic system of New Age music has been loosely connected to pseudo-Eastern philosophical and visual aesthetics. This unique musical movement emerged in “alternative healing communities in the USA in the late 1970s,” touting beliefs “in the ultimate cultural evolution of human societies through the transformation of individuals.”117 The genre’s resulting sonic qualities include, but are not limited to, minimal harmonic movement, reverberant studio production, and spare rhythmic motifs. Based in Northern California, figures like Dr. Steven Halpern, and Will

Ackerman released albums in 1975 and 1976, solidifying their roles as pioneering figures of the genre. These artists share sonic and aesthetic connections in their marketing approaches through their consistent reference to the natural environment. By self- releasing and self-promoting their records, the artists spearheaded the sonic and visual aesthetics of the genre developing the template for the soon-to-be ubiquitous presence of the music through the 80s to the 2000s.

117 Diane Schreiner, "New Age," Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press, accessed March 25, 2014, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/40613

Appearing over a decade before the experiments of Ackerman and Halpern, jazz clarinetist Tony Scott collaborated with Shinichi Yuize and Hozan Yamamoto to create

Music for Zen Meditation (and other joys). This is often cited as the first New Age record, in that it melds the functional purposes of relaxation and meditation with ecologically oriented attributes of zen practice. As proclaimed in the liner notes by

British philosopher Alan Watts, “Zen is a way of living...through which people experience themselves, not as separate beings, but as one with the whole universe, of which every individual is a unique expression.”118

The New Age movement conceives of spirituality in environmental terms as exemplified by Watts’ insistence that the role of the Zen artist who “puts both his skill and his instrument...at the disposal of the Tao, the Way of Nature, so that his art becomes as natural as the clouds and the waves— which never make aesthetic mistakes.”119 Watts concludes his commentary by honing in on the sensation of when the “separate ‘I’ gets rid of itself.” This emptying out of oneself intertwines enlightenment with environmental phenomena, thus creating a listening state wherein “hearing the sound of a flute...lets the player play whatever tune he likes.” Watts instructs through anthropomorphic language

“letting your mind go until there is no one to let go of it, but only Waters flowing on and on by themselves; Flowers of themselves growing red.”120 This posture of surrender

118 Alan Watts, Liner Notes, Music for Zen Meditation (and other joys), 1964 by Verve Records, V6-8634, LP.

119 Ibid.

120 Ibid. 85 places an explicit faith in the forces of nature, dissolving the human body and agency in the process.

Yet, as we will see, this meditational method of emptying oneself out is not the only option. An alternative proposed by New Age music is to literally fill oneself with musical sound, with particular musical intervals and timbres playing roles akin to that of a vitamin supplement. This ability for New Age music to ‘go both ways’ underscores its salient characteristics of flexibility and multi-functionality, its unique ability to flow in, out, and through contexts of spirituality and commerce. From its earliest iterations, as heard and seen in Tony Scott’s Music for Zen Meditation (and other joys), this form of functional music remains flexible, prescribing specific uses, as well as the opportunity for other joys.

And still, the term goes back even further, perhaps most famously emerging in the early-nineteenth century work of William Blake. In his preface to “Milton: A Poem,”

Blake writes in prophetic mode announcing that “all will be set right” when the “New

Age is at leisure to pronounce.”121 As Ryan Hibbett notes, Blake’s argument for “the mythological and literary supremacy of the Bible over classical literature,” works as a paradoxical call-to-arms to move forward by reaching back to the earliest texts of

121 William Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. David Erdman (New York: Anchor, 1997): 95.

86 culture.122 In this way, “Young men of the New Age” will achieve true spiritual insight.123

These Blakean ideals of seeking spiritual truth through the production of artistic expression, free from the shackles of the fashions of the day — “Suffer not the fashionable Fools to depress your powers”124 — have resonated throughout the New Age genre since its inception in the mid-20th century. Yet New Age music, and its surrounding cultures, has continually kept a finger on the pulse of the “fashions of the day,” innovatively adapting an incredibly diverse range of sonic and visual styles into its ever-evolving identity. Indeed, as Hibbett rightly notes, the concept of New Age as a broad system of aesthetics and beliefs has been in a “centuries long dialectic— as a persevering attempt to recode existing bodies of knowledge, such as religion and science, in a language that better suits a given population’s needs….”125

While these poetic connections between East and West imbue the history of the genre, I maintain an interest in specific forms of the music which have elided this history in favor of an engagement with the capitalist system. In both of the following cases, nature is produced as a commodity imbued with accessible, near supernatural powers.

These powers form a rich counterpoint, placing consumerism and the natural world in a

122 Ryan Hibbett, "The New Age Taboo," Journal Of Popular Music Studies 22, no. 3 (September 2010): 284.

123 Blake, 95

124 Ibid.

125 Hibbett, 287.

87 mutually beneficial harmony. With an ear bent toward the aesthetic dimensions of neoliberalism, I will interrogate the consistently redrawn boundaries between nature, individuals, and the promises of the capitalist system as they are made manifest in the work of Ackerman and Halpern. At times, the music makes use of natural imagery and text to imbue it with spiritual qualities in order to promote well-being and success. In other modes, New Age reflects a less prescriptive approach, maintaining the centrality of the natural world as an ambient focus.

Emerging in the wake of the second-wave of the environmentalist movement in the United States, New Age music was initially marketed in bookstores, gift shops, and health food stores. Whether the music is explicit in its aims, the store helped to brand

New Age music with utopian ideals of relaxation, inner-peace, and ecological harmony.

Indeed, nonhuman environments are positioned as essential and sacred referents within the New Age context, drawing boundaries and enforcing conceptions of the natural world as nonhuman.

Record collector and visual artist Anthony Pearson illuminates this paradox of bodily presence and erasure evident in the work of Halpern and Ackerman: “Everybody holds back and creates this very even thing to sort of extinguish the self. So, you don’t see the designers, and you don’t see everything come to the forefront. Everything is kind of tapered in this way. Which is very odd, because then the ideas behind it are always about trying to tend to the self: self-improvement, self-realization. There is this very 88 strange conflation of the self and the non-self, or obliterating the ego.”126 This chapter builds up on Pearson’s insights by considering how these multidirectional processes create different moods associated with the construction of environmental imaginaries.

As moods are central to the project of all commercial forms of functional music, we must consider how these signs and codes work in the spiritual-consumerist sphere of the New Age music under examination. As Hibbett notes, “mood music...assimilated various strands of music, from classical and jazz to broadway and world music, to a mass

American audience enjoying phonographs, televisions, and international vacations in the postwar era.”127 The trajectory of New Age builds upon and inverts mood music’s penchant for assimilation by eschewing familiar tunes in the name of originals, and in the process, further domesticating the sounds of new electronic musical technologies by infusing their presence into an acoustic instrumental dialogue.

This dialogue resounds with metaphorical overtones, touting promises of healing and recovery from the world outside the living room, thereby naturalizing relationships between technology, spirituality, and the environment in the process. As Joseph Lanza notes, while “Beautiful Music supplies ghost tunes of originals...space music [New Age] distills the ghost tune’s mood, its sound, and a smidgen of its style and reprocesses it into an ‘original’ composition once again, this time unanchored to any distinct emotional or

126 Anthony Pearson, “P.I.N.A. — Private Issue New Age, The Last Undiscovered Genre of Rare Records.” Contra Mundum I-VII, edited by Alex Klein et al (Oslo Editions, 2010), 53-54.

127 Hibbett, 292.

89 historical context.”128 These dialogs between technological and natural, real and imagined environments situate New Age music at a nexus of converging priorities. This tension is brought out to similar effect in Leo Marx’s work on the role of human-made machines and their relationship to conceptions of the natural world in American literature. I briefly explore this work as a way contextualizing how the New Age music under analysis takes up these conflicting relationships.

Hearing the Machine in the Garden

The role of nonhuman nature in the world of New Age music rests on paradoxes of where and what nonhuman nature actually is. Halpern positions it as a controllable phenomenon to be ingested. Windham Hill’s aesthetic conjures up a different view, evaporating both artist and audience into the anonymity of an unspecified environmental scenario. By situating New Age explorations of environments within literary discussions on the different forms nature can take, I pay particular attention to the shape of the pastoral tradition. First, we deal more broadly with location, and lack thereof, within the

New Age imaginary.

In her analysis of the aesthetics of New Age, musicologist Susan Grove Hall argues that a “basic quality of nature is location, and New Age composers barely distinguish inner space from outer….”129 This is such a troublesome concept for Hall that she concludes that “this music cannot be usefully described in terms of reference to

128 Lanza, 189.

129 Susan Grove Hall, “New Age Music: An Analysis of an Ecstasy,” Popular Music and Society Vol.18, No.2 (1994): 25.

90 nature.”130 While Hall rightly hones in on the inherent ambiguity of where nature might be located in the New Age context, I argue that it is just this lack of clarity which is quite

‘useful’ in understanding the ways in which New Age relates to life lived in the

Anthropocene.

The dislocation of the human from a stable physical environment into a destabilized imaginary one has remained a characteristic of functional music throughout the late 20th century. Brian Eno’s articulation of doubt in his Music for Airports along with exotica artists such as Lex Baxter and Martin Denny taking listeners to imaginary lands and galaxies reflects such investments. While New Age mimics the otherworldly experience of electronic ambient music where “the performer and the sense of music as performance are erased,” there remains a crucial connection to everyday, domestic experience.131

Windham Hill domesticates nature by attaching its imagery and text to the technologically wired context of the living room. This pure mixture of technological and organic environments promises something beyond what is ‘naturally’ possible. As espoused in the copy from Windham Hill’s Western Light video series:

If you’re into good music and great sound, you’re probably already a Windham Hill fan. And now you can experience Windham Hill’s music in a brand new way. This special videocassette features breathtaking visual interpretations of classic Windham Hill performances. Western Light will sweep you along on an awe-

130 Ibid.

131 Ibid, 28.

inspiring look at some of the most incredible natural wonders in America, from the Grand Canyon to Monument Valley. It’s not like being there, it’s better….132

The promise of arriving at a better experience through technological mediation forms its own hybridized pastoral ideal. The listener is free from the complexities of modernity through an all-out embrace of cutting-edge technological possibility.

In The Machine in the Garden, Leo Marx distinguishes between two forms of pastoralism, one that is popular and sentimental and the other imaginative and complex.133 The popular and sentimental form is embraced in both high (literary) and low

(advertising) realms expressing a “yearning for a simpler, more harmonious style of life, an existence that is ‘closer to nature’....”134 We can locate this more harmonious lifestyle as the lingua franca of New Age music. The cohesive and vague branding practices of

Halpern and Windham Hill work as a “soft veil of nostalgia that hangs over our urban landscape,” a landscape that recalls the “once dominant image of an undefiled, green republic, a quiet land of forests, villages, and farms dedicated to the pursuit of happiness.”135

132 Western Light, directed by Stephen Verona, (Hollywood, CA: Paramount Home Video, 1985), VHS.

133 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 5.

134 Ibid, 6.

135 Ibid.

The move toward rural fantasy is theorized by Leo Marx as “an urge to withdraw from civilization’s growing power and complexity.”136 New Age covers, song titles, and dependable musical attributes reflect an investment in simplicity and respite. The living room, the hi-fi, and a record by Windham Hill will soothe the modern subject who is bombarded all day with the noises of industrial activity. This attraction to pastoralism is the “felicity represented by an image of a natural landscape, a terrain either unspoiled or, if cultivated, rural.”137 Marx goes on to say that this is a move, however consciously or unconsciously, away from the artificial, which includes the human-made arts, “using this word in its broadest sense to mean the disciplined habits of mind or arts developed by organized communities.”138

The New Age music analyzed in this chapter remains ambivalent regarding the binary setup by Marx. Through the use of synthetic nature sounds and electronic instruments, this form of functional music embraces, and thereby conflates, the technological and urban alongside the mysteries of ‘unspoiled’ rural and wild nature. In doing so, it speaks to the impossibility of having one without the other. The role of New

Age as functional music is to provide some form of respite, or escape, from the day-today realities of life in a capitalist system. Such a transaction with the unfamiliar takes the

136 Ibid, 9.

137 Ibid.

138 Ibid.

“music of escape [and turns it] inward upon itself as a means of making manifest the everyday here-and-now as something open and strange.”139

Recounting Hawthorne’s 1844 journal entry on Sleepy Hollow, Marx emphasizes the author’s synthesis of nonhuman and human sounds, a necessary conflict as means toward harmony. This harmony does not disturb the sabbath, but on the contrary, “this harmonious effect is evoked by the delicate interlacing of sounds that seem to unify society, landscape, and mind.”140 When a train whistle further interlaces itself into the idyllic moment, Hawthorne attaches to the whistle a “story of busy men...who have come to spend a day in a country village” to escape “unquietness.”141 As the whistle subsides, and quiet is restored, the pastoral mode in which Hawthorne is writing simultaneously recognizes the disturbing yet necessary presence of the machine in the garden.

Marx’s complex/imaginative pastoral emerges from readings of Hawthorne and

Virgil as they trace the boundaries of the “oasis of rural pleasure,” which is a space to enjoy “the best of both worlds— the sophisticated order of art and the simple spontaneity of nature.”142 The satisfactions of the pastoral setting are, in Virgil’s case, “peace, leisure, and economic sufficiency.”143 The role of the echo in pastoral literature is metaphorically

139 Andrew Wenaus, “Anxiety in Stereo: Les Baxter’s Space Escapade, Armchair Tourism, Polar Inertia, and Being-in-a-World,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 26, 4 (2014): 496.

140 Marx, 13.

141 Ibid.

142 Ibid, 22.

143 Ibid, 23. 94 significant as a kind of reciprocity between humans and nonhuman nature. The echo binds this relationship in a metaphysical braid, locating the pastoral ideal in a liminal zone between the two worlds of civilization and nature, yet with an ultimately transcendent posture of domination. Yet, this complex mode, Marx argues, “do[es] not permit us to come away with anything like the simple, affirmative attitude we adopt toward pleasing rural scenery.”144 In contrast, these works, many by the

Transcendentalists Marx is referring to, “manage to qualify, or call into question, or bring irony to bear against the illusion of peace and harmony in a green pasture.”145

So where does functional music, such as the environmentally-oriented sounds of

New Age, fall within the Marx’s binary of simple and complex modes of the pastoral? I argue that these technologically-imbued sounds of New Age carve out their own pastoral ideal within the simple/complex binary, reflecting both an escapist mentality of respite and recovery while maintaining an investment in staying on the cutting edge of technological advancement within the domestic sphere. By infusing the body itself and the distinctly human, pastoral living room with a new kind of machine, the personalized domain resonates with an audible ambivalence, a synthesis of the future and the past, the urban and the rural.

As tones ring out across a pentatonic scale played on a Fender Rhodes piano, reference to melodic hooks disappear. The steady pulse of pop music gives way to a

144 Ibid, 25.

145 Ibid. 95 floating, cascade of pitches that drape across a consistent harmonic key center. The pastoral atmosphere is conjured up through the sounds of cutting-edge technology. There is ample room to relax to the sounds of Dr. Steven Halpern’s Chakra Suite, healing from the trappings of modern life, embracing and consuming the natural world in the process.

Dr. Steven Halpern’s Sonic Supplements

Dr. Steven Halpern is considered one of the forefathers of the New Age music movement. His independently released Christening for Listening (1975) offered listeners two contrasting views of the composer. Side one is made up of seven color-coded tracks in various keys: “Keynote C: Red,” “Keynote D: Orange,” etc. Side two consists of jazz funk cuts with electric bass, Fender Rhodes piano, and minimal harmonic movement, reminiscent of Miles Davis releases such as Bitches Brew and In a Silent Way.

As a transplant from New York to San Francisco, Halpern began to experiment with intersections of music and healing by engaging with the New Age communities which have long been represented in the bay area. As an integral part of the New Age infrastructure in the area, Halpern got his start in the genre as a performing musician at

Big Sur’s Esalen Institute, recording his pieces after requests from guests began to flow in. These musical experiments were balanced out by Halpern’s master’s thesis in psychology at Lone Mountain College. His thesis, “Towards a contemporary psychology of music,” provided the foundation for the composer-author’s future work.

Throughout Halpern’s broad discography of over 70 releases at the time of this writing, the composer has maintained a key investment in recycling his material. This is exemplified by the fact that his debut release, Christening for Listening, has been 96 repackaged and retitled over 10 times. This theme of recycling material will guide a brief overview of Halpern’s career and figure as a central philosophical component of

Halpern’s approach to New Age music. By tying together spirituality, psychology, and medical terminology, Halpern has made a career out of positioning his Fender Rhodes drones as medicinal music. These tones are composed with the intention of achieving a form of “sound health,” which, incidentally is the name of his second published book.

In Chapter 10 of Sound Health, Halpern takes up the subject of the “sound imagination,” noting the “healing power of imagery.”146 As part of a guided exercise on

“how to relax with inner imagery,” Halpern prescribes a particular series of steps to achieve this state. After finding a location and time to get in a comfortable position and close one’s eyes, Halpern suggests one play music and “allow your imagination to visualize pleasant surroundings— a beautiful meadow filled with flowers, a sparkling bubbly stream, the beach and ocean, or your own favorite scene.”147

As author of the introduction to The International Guide to New Age Music, Dr.

Halpern further articulates his image-centric visions of sonic health by braiding together images of spiritual dissonance:

...people who no longer believed the world could satisfy their personal life visions because they observed how they increasingly lost themselves in a loud chase for a very insecure future. Disharmony ruled, interpersonal contacts became increasingly superficial, and people experienced a notable spiritual lack. In search of a counterbalance, an interpretation of life in which they could find themselves,

146 Steven Halpern and Louis Savary, Sound Health: The Music and Sounds That Make Us Whole (San Francisco: Harper and Row Publishers, 1985): 101.

147 Ibid, 108.

many individuals joined therapy groups or practiced yoga and meditation. Here, too, New Age music was a balm that salved the wound, so to speak.148

As exemplified in this passage, Halpern conflates imagery (life visions) and medicine

(salve) with sound (loud chase, disharmony). This nexus of multitextuality can be heard in the flowing tones of Halpern’s composition “1st Chakra: Keynote C,” the opening piece on his Chakra Suite album. Incidentally, this album contains the same pieces which appear on at least 10 different Halpern albums, including Christening for Listening.

The piece itself opens with a low C played that ascends via the fifth of G to an octave and begins a stair-stepping sequence through a major pentatonic scale. The warm tones emanate from a Fender Rhodes, an electric keyboard emerging en masse in the

1970s and embraced by pop and jazz fusion musicians alike. The sustain pedal remains depressed through the three-minute affair, as a thin, sweeping synthesizer pad spans out through a heavily reverbed second track. The pad simply oscillates between two different octaves of the key of C until incorporating submerged chord tones of the third and fifth intervals at what come across as improvised moments.

This sonic experience is intended to encourage a positive mood. The description above articulates, in theoretical terms, the sounds of contentment. This mood has been hammered into the ears through consistent audiovisual connection between major key tonalities and positive narrative moments in cinema since its inception in the early 20th-

148 Henk Werkhoven, The International Guide to New Age Music (New York: Billboard Books, 1998): vi.

98 century. Add to this the timbral character of the piece, with its shimmering echoes and vibrating pitches, and the listener is firmly placed in an aquatic, womb-like atmosphere.

To the trained and untrained ear alike, this sonic imaginary conjures up omnidirectional relationships to sound. As Western listeners have been trained to anticipate the predictable changes of verse, prechorus, and chorus in popular music,

Halpern’s brand of New Age seeks to obliterate this progress in the name of floating in all places at once. Film scholar Claudia Gorbman’s psychoanalytic engagements with film music connect to this aural state of being, as the listener is soaked in a “bath or gel of affect.”149

Figure 11: Dr. Steven Halpern’s Chakra Suite.

149 Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 5. 99

The 2010 Chakra Suite recycles 35-year-old compositions and presents Halpern’s idiosyncratic brand of cover art. The cover image of the album features the vacant, shadowy profile of a human figure in a meditative, cross-legged lotus position with hands resting on knees, opened to the sky. A vertical strand of seven circles, each color-coated to merge the seven musical keys with the colors of the rainbow, is digitally overlaid on top of the body. A translucent treble clef floats between the body and the circles, re- emphasizing the connection between inner-harmony and the apparently digestible tones which promise healing and recovery.

Paradoxically, Henk Werkhoven, editor of The International Guide to New Age

Music who hired Halpern to write the introduction, figures New Age music as a respite, giving “its listeners the opportunity to, for a moment, leave this hectic, noisy world behind and enter a haven of tranquility and relaxation where they can take time to catch their breath.” Contrary to Halpern’s positioning of music and the environment as something to ingest, Werkhoven positions the music as a “haven” to enter and recover, ultimately contributing to “an increase in the harmony within and between people.”150 In

Werkhoven’s view, New Age music allows the listener to escape the everyday world and enter into a new reality through sonic immersion. Halpern, on the other hand, constructs a reality in which music is applied to the self as a topical salve or ingested like a vitamin.

This idea of ingestion is further clarified through Halpern’s articulation of New Age

150 Werkhoven, vii.

100 music’s branding: “Truth-in-packaging is a concept that has worked well in other fields, including health foods and herbal supplements.”151

This sense of musical sound as a medicinal supplement to daily life is further expounded upon in another New Age music guide published 10 years before

Werkhoven’s edition. The New Age Music Guide: Profiles and Recordings of 500 Top

New Age Musicians by Patty Jean Birosik presents an exhaustive list of various sects of the solidifying New Age genre as well as an introduction by Dr. Steven Halpern. In her preface, Birosik likens New Age to rock music’s cultural influence, pointing out that rock

“didn’t merely influence, it sledgehammered its message.”152 Birosik writes, “New Age music is more subtle but no less effective; it is created by conscientious artists who are knowledgeable about the effects of sound on the mind of the listener. Instead of being taken as pure entertainment, New Age music can be ‘used’ to induce a wide variety of mental and emotional responses. New Age music is the ultimate blend of art and science.”153

Further expounding in the preface to Birosik’s guide, she lays out possible uses for the music, emphasizing its multi-use functionality through cataloging practices. The author notes that New Age “possesses antinoise [sic] pollution qualities,” “aids mental

151 Ibid, ix.

152 Patti Jean Birosik, The New Age Music Guide: Profiles and Recordings of 500 Top New Age Musicians (New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, 1989): ix.

153 Ibid, ix-x.

101 concentration for superior meditation, inner awareness, or ‘out of body’ traveling.” She concludes that “no other music has had this kind of wide-reaching effect on mental and physical health to date.”154 The author suggests building up a “personal library of New

Age music will enhance all your daily activities,”155 further expanding the functions of the music to inspire “confidence and a sense of capability and inner strength.”156 After outlining the potential benefits of the music, Birosik offers her guide as an “artist’s palette,” to “select appropriate music for a variety of moods and uses.”157 The overarching theme of the preface to The New Age Music Guide encourages learning about

“sound options” to develop a kind of personalized radio station to broadcast atmospheres and moods into oneself in order to heal and feel good.

This palette of options is further articulated through Halpern’s conception of the genre. Halpern notes, “‘[C]onsciousness’ and ‘intention’ are vital components of

‘authentic’ New Age music. Yes, that’s harder to assess, but when you learn how to listen...when you listen with your heart rather than with just your intellect or emotions...you can feel the difference.”158 In this passage, Halpern quickly slips into highly subjective territory, assigning practices of audition to a muscular organ. In this

154 Ibid.

155 Ibid.

156 Ibid.

157 Ibid.

158 Ibid, ix.

102 way, the author weaves a paradox of listening with the heart, promising a departure from

“intellect or emotions” only to land back in an audible space of “feeling.”

In Halpern’s brand of New Age, this abstract notion of how to listen is further complicated by a sense of where this deeper space is conceptually located. From the start, the composer claims that “...it is music that employs time, space, and silence as a sonic vehicle to get the listener into closer contact with his/her spiritual nature.”159 Positioning the music as a vehicle applies a mobilized sense of the music, promising a “closer contact” with “spiritual nature.” But where is this “spiritual nature” and how does it relate to nonhuman nature?

Halpern sheds light on a possible answer to this question of the relationship between these particular human and nonhuman phenomena, quoting music critic Lee

Underwood, saying that New Age music functions to provide “emotional, psychological, and spiritual nourishment. It offers peace, joy, bliss, and the opportunity to discover within ourselves our own highest nature.”160 Taking into account this model, along with the attributes of Halpern’s expansive healing tones and multilayered artwork, ‘nature’ seems to be discoverable through ingesting proper musical material, which, in turn, leads to nourishment, peace, and other joys. In Halpern’s world, such other joys include “...this healing power that has brought New Age music into common use in both hospitals and executive boardrooms….”161

159 Ibid, viii.

160 Ibid, xv

161 Ibid, xxi. 103

It is in this final turn-of-phrase in which we find a strength particular to New Age, strength as a form of functional music that sutures contexts of commerce and recovery, healing and upward mobility. As Halpern continues in Birosik’s guide, it is a special form of organized sound that “encourages personal empowerment, earth connectedness, space consciousness, and interpersonal awareness.”162 The consistent conflation of the physical, consumer, and spiritual self guides Halpern’s vision of a form of music that, at every turn, leads to growth, success, progress, and development. These “consciousness- changing abilities can increase the mental and emotional health of those who listen to it,” shaping listeners into ideal New Age consumers, consumers who wish “to make educated, informed choices, and who are looking for a specific effect….”163

In Halpern’s own Sound Health and Birosik’s Guide, the author prescribes the basic tenets of how harmony, melody, rhythm, timbre, and texture are to be used for maximum effect. Addressing the role of harmony, the author notes that “[M]ost true New

Age music is based on harmony and consonance, rather than dissonance.” Melodic content exists “without the sound ‘hooks’ that characterize virtually all popular music.

When we eliminate the straitjacket of predetermined patterns, we open up new ways of organizing and experiencing sound for ourselves.”164 By opening ourselves up, Halpern reflects New Age DJ and record label owner Stephen Hill’s notion that listeners (and

162 Ibid, ix.

163 Ibid.

164 Ibid, x.

104 musicians), “enter the space by allowing it to enter us...such music takes us beyond ourselves and through ourselves.”165 Halpern’s notions of rhythm, timbre, and texture continue the recurrent trend of human-as-sonic-receptacle found in the work of many

New Age artists. Northern California-based Flautist Iasos and synthesist Steve Roach notably reflect these priorities in their music. Although articulated through their own aesthetic brands, both artists sound out spaces for listeners to enter into.

Emerging alongside Halpern in the mid-70s, Iasos continually aims to conjure up musical states of ecstasy as he riffs on flute motifs against cascading synthetic pads. His

Inter-dimensional Music (1975) features an anonymous body rising out of the clouds with a wand in hand which electrifyingly connects to a lightning bolt. The stakes are deeply spiritualized through song titles such as “Creation,” “Angel Play,” and “Cloud Prayer.”

The opening track, “Libra Sunrise,” swoops out of the left channel of the stereo field with a pitch shifting synthetic pad. The pad opens up to a repeating arpeggio in D minor. The figure ascends and descends rapidly. But the rhythmic intensity is subdued by delay and reverb effects along with lead pads touting subtle parallel-fifth lines evocative of

Gregorian chant. The mood is meditative yet ecstatic. Bird and ocean sounds emerge, further subduing the active arpeggiations, burying them in the mix.

In line with Halpern’s tendency to think of nonhuman nature as consumable, we find Iasos presenting his music as coming through his body. The full title of his debut is

Inter-Dimensional Music through Iasos. As a channel of life-changing sound, Iasos

165 Ibid.

105 figures an environmental imaginary in which a connection is made to abstract spiritual worlds which he taps into and disseminates the results of.

Figure 12: Iasos’ Inter-Dimensional Music.

Most notably, Halpern’s sense of texture underscores this phenomenon, conceiving of New Age as “space music,” which refers “both to its texture and to the state that it tends to evoke in the listener.”166 He goes on, stating that by “‘space’ we mean the electro-acoustic enhancement of instrumental tones, through reverb and echo; in

166 Ibid.

106

New Age music such enhancement is not simply a ‘special effect,’ but rather an integral part of the music itself.”167

Another American New Age musician who maintains a commitment to space is

Tucson-based composer Steve Roach. His 1984 release Structures from Silence, effectively intermingles the cold timbres of Brian Eno’s Ambient series with New Age rhetoric. The opening track “Reflections in Suspension” exemplifies the quality of

Gorbman-esque affective gel as it hovers around a key center of G# minor. The omnipresent arpeggio changes shape as the synthesized bassline creates new harmonic platforms. Throughout it all, the mood remains deeply meditative. Copy for the album’s recent 30-year re-release reads: “Emotional, powerful and enriching, it is a living example of the true healing quality that music can hold.”168 As the sound functions to heal the listener, Roach informs the reader that the sounds “were created in moments spent simply being present in the studio, tapping the flow state and guiding this sense into these recorded moments.”169

167 Ibid.

168 www.steveroach.com Discography, “Structures from Silence: 30th Anniversary Remastered Edition” https://steveroach.com/Music/discography.php?albumID=96

169 Ibid. 107

Figure 13: Steve Roach’s Structures from Silence.

While the work of Iasos and Roach differs from Halpern in their aesthetic approach and sonic pallette, the pattern of imagining environments as fluid and consumable remains intact. The controlled timbres and predictable harmonic progressions of this approach to New Age music are shared across the philosophical spectrum of how this form of functional music is meant to function.

In this next section, I will consider an altogether different, but no less functional, form of New Age. This brand of New Age, and it is very much a brand, takes Halpern’s spiritualized sonic remedies and turns them inside out. Such an aesthetic flip reveals a 108 whole host of equally compelling visions of the nonhuman environment, ultimately figuring such an environment as completely devoid of a human figure altogether.

Disappearing on a Windham Hill

Just down the road from Steven Halpern’s Marin County studio, a Stanford

University dropout was recording and peddling his fingerstyle guitar music to local New

Age bookstores and friends throughout the San Mateo area. The guitarist and fledgling label-owner, William Ackerman, was consumed by the innovative eclecticism of guitarists John Fahey and Robbie Basho, both of whom released records on his nascent

Windham Hill label.

Windham Hill’s initial release, The Search for the Turtle’s Navel, finds Ackerman laying out the aesthetic priorities of the label: reverberating acoustic guitar vignettes, digital synthesizer drones, and a general focus on instrumental music. Much of the label’s output can be heard as a distillation of the more aggressively original sounds of American folk music. While Halpern has emphasized the healing properties of music, Ackerman and his Windham Hill artists take a different tack, retaining a more ambiguous posture.

Intimacy, anonymity, and the fantastical are key characteristics that inform the Windham

Hill experience. Song titles on a variety of Windham Hill releases reflect these aesthetics, often taking on surreal qualities: “What the Buzzard Told Suzanne,” “The Age of

Steam,” “Dance for the Death of a Bird,” and “Slow Motion Roast Beef Restaurant

Seduction.” With this mutated sense of ethical naturalism, binding together consumerism, 109 wild nature, and machines, Windham Hill embodies environmental historian William

Cronon’s idea of the “domesticated sublime.”170

The domesticated sublime maintains a sacred relationship with the wilderness sounded out by Thoreau and Wordsworth but reworks notions of “a grand cathedral or a harsh desert retreat” for a “pleasant parish church.”171 The transcendentalists’ traditional, romantic sentiments about the wilderness stand in contrast to John Muir’s musings on the

Yosemite Valley. As Muir is perched “humbly prostrate before the vast display of God’s power,” fearless while drinking this “champagne water,” he reflects a view of the wilderness as accessible and approachable. In this way, Cronon’s idea of the domesticated sublime articulates the process of attempting to contain the unwieldy terror of nature at its wildest in order to package it for mass consumption.

As the 20th-century came into view, a number of national parks such as Yosemite and Yellowstone had been established, drawing boundaries and crowds alike. Along with this increase in tourism, came increased levels of comfort with environments that had formerly been received in states of awe and piety. In short, the American environmental imagination was transforming. Along with this transformation came new views on what to do with these havens of the domesticated sublime. Were these spaces meant to be

170 William Cronon “The Trouble with Wilderness,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1996), 75.

171 Ibid.

110 historically cast in plaster, frozen in time for eternity? Or were they to be continually open for consumption, regularly managed for planned use and renewal?

The former view mirrors historically preservationist views, a perspective advocated by Muir among others. The latter view is summed up in the conservation ethic, a call to produce from the forest whatever it can yield to man. At first glance, preservation and conservation ethics stand at ethical odds with each other. Preservation calls for an ideal of untouched authenticity, harkening back to an imagined purity free from the clutches of humanity. Conservation is explicit in its interest for environmental generativity for the sake of human progress. Yet, what often goes unnoticed are the consequences of preservationist approaches, consequences which historically displace large numbers of people in the name of capturing an ideal for the privileged to consume.

Conservationist approaches, on the other hand, also speak to a perpetuation of anonymity amongst nonhuman environments. There is no postcard-perfect tree to behold. Instead, there are multiple trees to be filed into a cycle of growth and consumption.

Forester and politician Gifford Pinchot pioneered this conservationist perspective and it is this very approach to environments that takes shape in the imaginaries produced by Windham Hill. The label’s smoothed out visual and sonic aesthetic presents an analog of Pinchot’s utilitarian ideals of reconstructing nature. Through the creation of a dependably commodified musical assembly line, Windham Hill conserves these comforting depictions of nature for sustained commercial production and use. Alongside an exploration of the definitive sonic characteristics of Windham Hill, this section considers the branding strategies and record production practices of the label. As we will 111 see, the concept of artist anonymity guides the Windham Hill experience. The music, and its extramusical components, speak to the importance of visually and textually framing sounds in ways that subsume both the body and musical content itself. Inevitably, the product up for sale from the label is a lifestyle, a lifestyle that seemingly contains musical sound within the container of visual/textual components.

These ideas of sound as contained and image as container is based on sound theorist and composer Michel Chion’s reminder that sound is in fact uncontainable.

Unlike the filmic image, which is framed by an actual frame, Chion argues that film sound, when listened to independent of the image, “feels like a formless audio layer.”172

He goes on to note that the “frame’s preexistence with respect to the image is specific to film: it does not adapt its format to what is shown.”173 This preexistence of the frame

“orients and imposes hierarchy on images and results in the image, the image that the frame has totalized and structured….”174 This is not the case for sound. Sound has no equivalent preexistence of a frame, thereby rendering it shapeless. By emphasizing sound’s formless and ultimately uncontainable quality, we can approach the framing devices used by Windham Hill as attempts to contain the uncontainable.

172 Michel Chion, Film, A Sound Art, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 226-227.

173 Ibid.

174 Ibid.

112

Of course, Chion’s emphasis on the “dissymmetry between what we see and what we hear” can be mapped into any multitextual sonic space.175 Yet, what interests me most in interrogating how this dissymmetry and shapelessness is manifest within the Windham

Hill imaginary are the ways in which the label reverses the process, framing whole seasons and other environmental phenomena. Through this process, the role of the image is flipped. While filmic sound is often interpreted as working in the service of the image, the cohesive packaging and abundance of natural imagery which floods the Windham

Hill experience positions the visual world as subservient to sound.

This asymmetry of environmental imagery, new musical technologies, and attention to intimacy places both the works of Halpern and Windham Hill in unique positions as highly personalized forms of functional music. While Halpern’s miniaturizations personalize nonhuman environments into the form of sonic supplement,

Windham Hill’s brand of personalization takes shape through a kind of bodiless musical expression, a musical space opened for the listener to enter and imagine the music as her own. This welcoming space is reflected quite literally in both uncluttered album covers and record production techniques that embrace heavy use of spatializing effects such as reverb and delay.

Steven Miller, producer of multiple Windham Hill releases, expounds upon the label’s penchant for naturalization to the point of hyperreality: “What’s thought of as the

Windham Hill sound in my work relies on a lot of echo, using a lot of delays and tape

175 Ibid, 227.

113 looping within a given type of reverb. What I’m doing doesn’t necessarily happen in the real acoustic world.”176 Miller goes on to articulate the challenge of producing hi-fidelity recording amidst the label’s historically economical approach: “...I was working with really tiny budgets. The challenge was to make them sound as good as a Steely Dan album while working at a disadvantage.”177 Major label bands from the late-70s such as

Steely Dan and Eagles produced records at the apex of analog recording technology. The latter’s Hotel California took nine months to make and was recorded between Los

Angeles and Miami. Budgets bled into the millions, allowing for endless takes and edits through state of the art recording technology. These digestible sounds of excess permeate the Windham Hill aesthetic, with the glaring exception that artists had a few days and

$50,000, including promotional costs. This approach to record production further reflects the label’s conservationist ethic of aiming for maximum fidelity, or utility, through the most cost-effective means available.

What transpires through this approach is a sonic experience that critics situate as a simulacrum of styles. In a 1986 interview in The Wire, a British avant-garde music magazine, journalist Brian Morton attempts to pinpoint how New Age music falls short within his critical musical rubric. In his interview with Windham Hill’s acrobatic guitarist

Michael Hedges, Morton asks him directly. Hedges responds, “I think it has something to do with the solo artist. The music is very intimate, probably sometimes minimal, almost

176 Sam Sutherland, “Producer Steven Miller: Don’t Call Me Audiophile,” Billboard 97, no.42 (October 1985): 34.

177 Ibid.

114 always an acoustic instrument in there somewhere.”178 At the end of his article on Hedges and the Windham Hill aesthetic, Morton resorts to two equally derisive metaphors:

“Either: New Age Music is an infalling collapse of all styles, an acceleration of stylistic change due to lack of fuel, wiping out all normal relativities. Or: it’s just a soup, bits of this and that, nourishing, but hardly filling. Astrophysics or cucina Italiana.”179

Qualitative assessments aside, Morton’s binary exercise offers a way into considering how the music’s equally lofty and accessible tendencies are reflected at the visual level.

As Zrzavy points out, the cohesion of album art amongst such a diversity of thematic content reflects innumerable paradoxes inherent to the genre. The author hones in on five recurring characteristics of New Age record covers across labels: 1) Stark white, black, or brown covers, which leave significant space around a framed image; 2) the image is most likely a landscape photo or depictions of shrouded or out-of-focus urban or natural phenomena; 3) in lieu of a photograph, an abstract image which evokes natural phenomena; 4) fantastical imagery evoking imaginary scapes; 5) a general absence of the artist on the cover.180 These characteristics support New Age music’s amplification of the general over the specific, the stock footage of ‘nature’ in place of

178 Brian Morton, “Michael Hedges, Hello Trees, Sky, Grass…: Striding through the ferocious terrain of New Age hyperbole, here comes the guitarist who sniffs flowers and warms up on Eddie Van Halen,” The Wire, July 1986, Issue 29, 12.

179 Ibid.

180 Helfried C. Zrzavy, “Issues of Incoherence and Cohesion in New Age Music,” Journal of Popular Culture. 24.2 (Fall 1990): 41-46. 115 particular locales, reflecting the genre’s paradoxical homogenization of heterogeneous musical material.

This tendency to offer up ‘imaginary scapes’ as spaces to exercise the sonic imagination encourage the Windham Hill listener to move into the label’s consuming aesthetic. Anne Robinson, CEO of Windham Hill, further clarifies the label’s album cover philosophy:

We look at the jackets as objects that are there to entertain— and to create an atmosphere for the listener. They offer a beginning illustration of what the record and what the music is all about. I think putting an image of the artist on the cover keeps people from being able to think creatively...about the music. I feel our records give the listener little vignettes—hints and suggestions—of the world of the musician, of groups of musicians, sees [sic]. We are really seeking to describe a mood with our records.181

By coupling a mood, or state of temporary feeling, with the ability to think creatively,

Robinson hones in on the need for ambiguity as a central tenet of the Windham Hill experience. Co-label boss Ackerman connects this sweeping approach of ‘hints and suggestions’ to the listener’s inner, or emotional, landscape: “I personally feel that the range of human emotions that are being attempted and communicated now are more subtle and intimate and personal.”182 Such covers feature both natural worlds, and even anonymous portions of human figures.

181 Zrzavy, 49.

182 Karpel, 8.

116

Figure 14: Anonymous environments and artists.

Figure 15: Climbing out of the frame.

117

A particular tune that exemplifies these ephemeral characteristics is Ackerman’s own “Visiting,” originally released on his 1983 album Past Light, also featured on the

1985 sampler An Invitation to Windham Hill. The piece fades in slowly with Ackerman droning on his open sixth string sounding as a C#. The composer takes cues from acoustic folk players such as John Fahey and Robbie Basho by using open tuning on nearly every song he has released.183 Tuned to BF#D#F#C#F# and capoed on the second fret, the guitarist rolls through ascending arpeggios as his instrument is lightly processed with digital reverb and chorus. After signaling the first section with a series of overdubbed harmonics, Chuck Greenberg enters on the lyricon, an electronic wind instrument which makes use of additive synthesis and was co-designed by Greenberg along with others at Computone Inc. Bathed in reverb, Greenberg’s main refrain descends from the fourth to third to root intervals opening the space for fretless bass pioneer

Michael Manring to provide an undulating foundation from the third to second to root.

After two-minutes cycling through the repetitive A-section, players move toward the flat

VII signaling a mixolydian quality. The piece then increases in dynamic range cycling through an unstable IV-V-vii progression, avoiding the I to increase anticipation. The piece concludes unresolved emphasizing a new center, the flat VII as root, cueing the listener into the ephemeral nature of visiting particularly undefined keys, center, and environments.

183 “Tunings,” William Ackerman, accessed September 30, 2015, http://www.williamackerman.com/music/Tunings.html

118

As displayed above, the Windham Hill aesthetic is paradoxical as it aims for intimacy through close-mic techniques bathed in echoing delay all the while shrouding the sounds in the infinite flexibility of stock imagery and song titles. As such, recording technologies play a crucial role in infusing the Windham Hill aesthetic with a technologized presence. These maneuvers obfuscate the role of the human, highlighting a broader focus on anonymity, a concept which challenges traditional postures of authorial domination. The following section highlights the centrality of anonymity to the New Age sonic communities under analysis. Michel Foucault’s work on the shifting role of the author sets up a foundation from which to explore the explicit and implicit use of anonymity in New Age marketing and compositional practice.

Making Space for Nobody

“With no people or specific places on our covers, these packages ask more questions than they answer.”184 Windham Hill executive Anne Robinson’s statement above frames the importance of avoiding specificity in order to free up the listener to immerse themselves in the personalized sonic environments designed by the label. The concept of anonymity is central to Halpern’s work as well as the Windham Hill catalog as a whole. But before exploring the specific ways in which anonymity figures into the works of the artists and labels under investigation, we must briefly address how the phenomenon of anonymity has taken shape and been interrogated in broader contexts of content producers and consumers.

184 Ibid.

119

In his essay “What Is an Author?,” Michel Foucault sets aside socio-historical analysis of the author function in order to consider the “singular relationship that holds between an author and a text….”185 The result of this singular relationship sets up a scenario in which “the text apparently points to this figure who is outside and precedes it.”186 This essay is useful for the purposes of this chapter as it illustrates how the phenomenon of anonymity contributes to a re-thinking of the seemingly one-way process of the communicative processes Stuart Hall refers to as encoding and decoding.

Building on Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing and the insistent questions of why it matters who is speaking, Foucault tackles romantic ideals of individual expression through writing. He argues that this necessity of expression is reversed through the transformation of writing into “an interplay of signs.”187 This interplay is “regulated less by the content it signifies than by the very nature of the signifier.”188 Such flexibility within the signification process forgoes “exalted emotions” in the name of “creating an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears.”189

This “endless disappearance” fans out into the acceptance and rejection of anonymity outlined by Foucault as the essay progresses. As he notes, ‘literary texts’ have

185 Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, (New York: Cornell University Press, 1977): 115.

186 Ibid.

187 Ibid.

188 Ibid.

189 Ibid.

120 maintained oscillating relationships with authenticity based on the age of the manuscript.

In other words, if the story held no trace of an authorial identity but was old enough, it was deemed authentic. This shape-shifting obsession with authorial identity takes on a different shape in topical contexts.

Foucault points out how these changing societal relationships and priorities manifests within the history of scientific texts. In the Middle Ages, discourse was proven through connections to authors such as Hippocrates and Pliny. Yet, during the enlightenment, scientific texts were “accepted on their own merits and positioned within an anonymous and coherent conceptual system….”190 These examinations highlight oscillating relationships with the value of making explicit authorial identity as a marker of authenticity. Within the realm of Western art music, the historical picture is much more rigid, reflecting a culture of continued obsession with marking, coding, cataloging composer output and generic boundaries.

Foucault then tackles the obsession within the literary tradition to locate the author at all costs to maintain the traditionally authoritative structure of author-reader.

This one-way contract enforces a hierarchical relationship to content production and reception. As an alternative, Foucault presents the thought experiment to “imagine a culture where discourses could circulate without any need for an author.”191 And it is here, in this imaginative sonic-cultural space, that the New Age entertainment complex

190 Ibid, 125-126.

191 Ibid, 138. 121 resonates. As we will see, the concept of anonymity is crucial to the production and reception the New Age music under analysis.

A glance through the album covers above shows that anonymity is essential from the very beginning. These processes of articulating fluid musical identities are the result of careful marketing and production practices. By recognizing the unique interplay between stock images, wordless musical compositions, and vague song and album titles, we can more fully gauge the ways in which these musics produce their brands of personalized and anonymous environmental imaginaries. These ambiguous production values fan out into the cohesive looks paired with the emergence of digital audio recordings, setting the stage for Windham Hill to create a full-fledged audiovisual brand.

Working off the tagline “Now Your Customers Can See What They Love To Hear,”

Paramount Home Video teamed with the label to bring “the music beautifully to life in a special collection of stereo hi-fi videocassettes.”192 By “bringing the music to life” through visual interpretations of the sounds listeners love to hear, the label emphasizes their aim to equate ‘life’ with environmental submersion. Tom Clott, senior VP and general manager of Paramount’s home video division, articulates this power of anonymous environmental video to maintain a particularly flexible status: “It’s not environmental video, yet it’s part of the environment. It’s not background video, yet it’s

192 Billboard (Aug. 10, 1985), 33.

122 part of the background. It can also be foreground video since the visuals are so mesmerizing. It’s undefinable.”193

Releasing the series a few years after MTV launched in 1981, the label responded to a growing market of home video enthusiasts. Their customer base was not lost on the label either. Clott continues: “I don’t really look at this series as music video as such. It’s not typical of the music video genre. It so happens that the Windham Hill audience coincides with the videocassette audience: slightly older, upwardly mobile and affluent.”194 Not only does Windham Hill’s brand of anonymity invite listeners into unknown, fluid environments, but the label clearly equates such spaces and sounds with the emergent baby boomer generation.

193 Sam Sutherland, “Paramount Breaking Ground with Windham Hill Titles,” Billboard 97, no.40 (October 1985): 26.

194 Ibid.

123

Figure 16: See what you love to hear.

New Age music marketing practices hold paradoxical relationships to the role of the “self.” As record collector Anthony Pearson writes: “...the idea of New Age is also a very social idea, and there is a strange conflation that goes on between ‘the self,’ which you are supposed to get rid of, and ‘the self,’ which is the constant preoccupation of the

New Age movement.”195 With titles such as Between Two Worlds and Another Time,

Another Place, New Age records remove the body in favor of opening a natural space in

195 Anthony Pearson, “P.I.N.A. — Private Issue New Age, The Last Undiscovered Genre of Rare Records,” in Contra Mundum I-VII, edited by Alex Klein et al (Oslo Editions, 2010), 37.

124 which one can insert oneself. This subsumption of the human body within a nondescript, more-than-human sonic space supports my claim that New Age does the utilitarian work of reclaiming lost impulses, effectively bringing the garden into the machine. The listener, then, is formed as a subject capable of transporting and being transported. This, in turn, speaks to the synthesizing function of New Age music to simultaneously dissolve the human into nature and nature into the human

Intertwining environmental text and imagery with spacious, comforting sounds makes both forms of New Age explored herein aiming to solidify vague notions of concepts. As New Age journalist John Diliberto writes, these are “...concepts that go beyond impressive packaging are as important as musicians.”196 Such concepts share equally anonymous traits with the role played by stock imagery and music, PowerPoint templates, and model homes. In each environment, suggestions are unobtrusively posed for users to consider at will. Such is the case with Windham Hill’s anti-prescriptive New

Age as it paints a multi-textual space for the consumer to disappear into. It is important to to consider just what these ‘inside-out aesthetics’ look like.

In a special issue of Billboard Magazine, these aesthetics of artist anonymity are explored directly through the ways in which they relate to marketing practices (fig. 4).

Throughout the issue, label owners and radio hosts give voice to this prevalent marketing technique. Stephen Hill, president of Hearts of Space Records notes that “[I]t has to do

196 John Diliberto, “What a Concept: Artist Anonymity May Be a New Age Theme, as Compilations and Mood Music Take Precedence,” Billboard (March 22, 1997), 39.

125 with perceived risk…from a listener’s point of view, a compilation based on a concept they are already familiar with is a safer buying choice.”197 This “safer buying choice” provides a safe space to first purchase then sonically immerse oneself. With no threats to specific bodies (of a specific sex and ethnicity), the listener can fully (dis)engage and trust their consumptive relationship with sonic environments.

Figure 17: Foregrounded environments, erased bodies.

197 Ibid.

126

Larry Hayes, President of Marketing at Windham Hill: “We don’t have an extensive catalog...but it has consistency in package and look and musical identity, so we hope that they market it in special Windham Hill sections.”198 A Chicago record store employee expounds upon the label’s unique brand, collapsing its natural landscapes, thin font, and white covers with racialized metaphor: “Windham Hill lends itself to be segregated and displayed and merchandised as such.”199 The employee goes on to mention the heavy rotation of George Winston’s December during the holiday season, which works as a gateway to other Windham Hill releases.

In regards to George Winston and other musicians affiliated with the New Age sound, Bob Doerschuk writes: “Despite their many differences in style and sound, all these artists share a love of soft textures and silent spaces, and a tendency to take a static approach— without a sense of movement toward cadences or of operating within traditional structure, where verse leads to chorus, and free of the tensions that these cadences resolve.”200 This sense of moving but never arriving is reflected in consistent attempts to reflect particular times and spaces free from their broader contexts.

Winston expounds on these impressionistic tendencies found on his release

Autumn:

198 Jim Bessman, “‘New Age’ Product Enters the Mainstream: Genre Gains Foothold in Traditional Record Stores,” Billboard 98, no.9 (March 1986): 23, 25.

199 Ibid, 25.

200 Ibid, 94.

127

…[T]he important thing about Autumn is that it’s about the autumn, not that it’s a piano record. It could have been a painting, or a guitar piece; it’s the autumn idea that I’m really into...what I’m doing now with the seasons albums is sort of impressionistic— it’s music describing some idea or picture— and a lot of the music I listened to as a kid was impressionistic too...they’re mood pieces. I’m trying more to create an impression of something than to produce an absolute piece of music that somebody might want to transcribe or analyze.201

Taking this impression-oriented approach to music spills over into the label’s business practices themselves. CEO Anne Robinson sees New Age not just as a musical classification but a way of life. “‘For me, (New Age) means an attitude towards business,’ Robinson says. ‘Yes, it’s a convenience term for retail and for the press, but I think it demonstrates an underlying current about different ways of doing things. A lot of businesses are starting to be successful because they are paying attention to people— customers and employees alike— and details.’”202 The energetics of economic transactions are further articulated by Robinson in the label’s aim for “‘...everybody— the artist, the accounting department, the sales staff, consumers— to be happy. If people know it’s making money they put more energy into it.’”203

By creating a line of music, similar to a collection introduced by a clothing company, labels such as Windham Hill and Narada make use of environmental imagery and language as the central component of their respective brands. The character of the musical releases is rooted in the buffet-style logic of samplers, compilations, and

201 Ibid, 97.

202 Zan Stewart, “New Age Music Money Machine,” Los Angeles Times, January 31 1988.

203 Ibid. 128 collections— a logic of branding as a means of cohesion through variety. These acts of framing sounds through image and language are used throughout communities of commercial music production. But, key to the New Age ethos, is the delicate balance of emphasizing the personal and individual through anonymity and predictable musical choices. The aesthetic advocates mystery by way of maximum security. Windham Hill’s samplers went on to achieve platinum status, supporting this marketing move to subsume the artist within a cohesive branding strategy.

Music scholar Helfried Zrzavy articulates this subsumption by noting that an

“examination of the New Age phenomenon is hampered by a general unfamiliarity with

New Age artists whose names, unlike those of pop or rock n’ roll stars, largely remain subordinate to the record labels for which they perform.”204 Through a general lack of visibility on record covers, New Age artists on the Windham Hill label essentially dissolve into a bodiless environment. Ironically, it is this erasure of the artist and listener which founder and flagship Windham Hill artist William Ackerman touts as a central component of bringing people together. Ackerman notes: “We’d stumbled onto a sensibility. The wall of sound was shutting people off...Our careful miking [sic]...and uncluttered recording technique restored a sense of intimacy between performer and listener.”205 Here Ackerman attempts to speak to the complicated balance held by the

204 Helfried C. Zrzavy, “Issues of Incoherence and Cohesion in New Age Music,” Journal of Popular Culture. 24.2 (Fall 1990): 35.

205Craig Karpel, “High on a Windham Hill.” Esquire, December 1984.

129 label in constructing a dialogue between performer, listener, and the broader environmental imagination.

The centrality of anonymity to New Age music reflects Foucault’s call for new questions to be asked in the context of “pervasive anonymity.”206 Instead of tired questions about proof of authenticity and profound self-revelation, Foucault asks: “What are the modes of existence of this discourse?” “Where does it come from; how is it circulated; who controls it?” What placements are determined for possible subjects?”

“Who can fulfill these diverse functions of the subject?”207 Such questions can be mapped into the current context in order to more fully understand the character of subject formation within the New Age environmental imaginary. In order to do so, we must consider how the shape of such imaginaries are made manifest within the framework of

Buell’s work on the environmental imagination.

Articulating Anonymous Environmental Imaginaries

Taking up Buell’s first characteristic, we find the branding of environments espoused by Halpern and Windham Hill maintaining unique balances between amplifying and attenuating the human presence in the nonhuman environment. On one end,

Halpern’s “Anti-frantic Music” integrates technological tools to give “us a glimpse of the world beyond our senses.”208 This “world beyond” integrates into Halpern’s broader

206 Foucault, 138.

207 Ibid.

208 Birosik, xix.

130 vision of New Age music, its listeners and composers, “working with the concordance of harmonies that underlie the orderly processes of the universe.”209 In other words, Halpern is attempting to connect his “music of the spheres” with the whole history of the universe as we know it. While the aesthetic of Ackerman and Co. reflects an investment in something more “subtle and intimate and personal,” it is no less relevant to Buell’s claim of human implication within nonhuman histories.210 As Windham Hill’s brand of environmental imaginary will “sweep you along on an awe-inspiring look at some of the most incredible natural wonders…,” the label continually emphasizes artist and listener anonymity in favor of disappearing in a larger network of environmental constellations.211

This relationship with Buell’s first characteristic is amplified by the ways in which these musics interact with Buell’s second characteristic of going beyond human interest. Beginning with the sounds of Windham Hill, we find an extreme posture of going beyond. So much so that the artists and listeners seem to be erased all together. As co-director of the label Anne Robinson put it, “[W]ith no people or specific places on our covers, these packages ask more questions than they answer.”212 This aim to disrupt the specificity of human and nonhuman identities points toward a focus on something beyond

209 Ibid, xxi.

210 Karpel, 8.

211 Western Light, directed by Stephen Verona, (Hollywood, CA: Paramount Home Video, 1985), VHS.

212 Karpel, 8.

131 human interest. Halpern’s sonic vitamins clearly take a different approach to the construction of an environmental imaginary. Indeed, Halpern’s talk of our bodies as

“human instruments, producing an electromagnetic field that resonates with the electromagnetic field the Earth itself,” appears to tout a focus beyond human interest.213

Yet, as his album titles attest, the sounds inevitably end up heading toward self-interested goals of Attracting Prosperity and Enhancing Success. While each strand of New Age maintains a centrality of nonhuman environmental imagery, neither brand makes explicit

Buell’s third characteristic of an environmental ethic of accountability. Buell’s final characteristic required of an environmental text speaks to the root of the word environment as an encircling, or environing, active phenomenon. As I note below, the multitextual environmental imaginaries constructed by these artists present unique relationships with a constantly evolving nonhuman phenomenon.

Windham Hill’s advertising copy that touts the benefits of listeners “thinking creatively” through the “hints and suggestions” provided through stock natural imagery, mood-oriented song titles, and artist anonymity.214 On the surface, these branding tactics suggest a relationship with the environment as an unfolding phenomenon, one which remains open to interpretation and change. Yet, upon closer inspection, the label has created a scenario in which whole seasons are neatly packaged and sold. George

Winston, the label’s most successful artist, exemplifies this construction of the

213 Birosik, xxi.

214 Karpel, 8.

132 environment as a stable idea. With releases such as December, Autumn, and Spring,

Winston sets out to make music “describing some idea or picture.”215 For Winston, “...the important thing about Autumn is that it’s about the autumn, not that it’s a piano record. It could have been a painting, or a guitar piece; it’s the autumn idea that I’m really into.”216

This tendency to generalize changes in weather, ecology, and hours of daylight through distinct packaging is echoed in the sounds themselves as they maintain a compressed, harmonically corralled character. With a “...love of soft textures and silent spaces,”

Winston’s sonic descriptions of “some idea” reflect broader New Age inclinations a to take a “static approach—without a sense of movement toward cadences or of operating within traditional structure, where verse leads to chorus, and free of the tensions that these cadences resolve.”217 This stasis is equally reflected in Halpern’s environmental imaginary, albeit in different ways.

Throughout Halpern’s oeuvre, the artist consistently references nonhuman environmental concepts such as “Dawn” and “Waterfall.” Yet, at each turn, the composer puts these concepts and their sonic and visual analogs to specific use. The aforementioned titles are featured on Music for Accelerated Learning, clearly setting active nonhuman processes in the service of human progress and development. Instead of solidifying environmental processes through summations of seasons and stock imagery,

215 Jim Bessman, “‘New Age’ Product Enters the Mainstream: Genre Gains Foothold in Traditional Record Stores,” Billboard 98, no.9 (March 1986): 97.

216 Ibid.

217 Ibid, 94.

133 as Windham Hill seeks to do, Halpern maintains his own brand of de-activating nonhuman environmental processes. By placing the vibrations of the whole history of the universe at the service of human development, Halpern renders impotent the powers of nonhuman environmental phenomena.

Just as second-wave ecocriticism challenged the celebratory, preservationist inclinations of the traditions’ first-wave, we must interrogate the production and reception of New Age music’s complex relationship with nonhuman environmental phenomena. As I have shown, Both Windham Hill and Halpern’s brands of New Age present diverging and intersecting examples of how the environment is depicted and consumed through practices of functional music. If nonhuman environments function as spaces on which to construct and shape one’s subjectivity, it is only prudent to ask what kind of self is being constructed. Who is the New Age subject Halpern is speaking to when he wishes to accelerate learning? What kind of subject purchases Windham Hill’s multiple samplers for their hi-fi living room systems? And, perhaps most importantly, what kind of imaginative relationship with the environment is constructed as the listener navigates the paradoxical terrain of New Age music? In order to explore these final questions, I turn to the guiding idea of domestication, conjoining Cronon’s figuration of the term in relationship to the wilderness alongside processes of consumption.

As we have seen, the task of this chapter has been to interrogate how New Age musics conceive of the environment as something which consumes and has the power to consume. The musics under investigation present acts of multitextual representation which attempt to make analogies to the natural world. In the process, the listener is 134 shaped into an environmentally-attuned subject. The construction of the subject is contingent on repeated interactions with such analogies, thus solidifying particular relationships to environments.

Through examinations of how the media is crucial to the formation of communities, scholar Roger Silverstone theorized the idea of domestication. In

Silverstone’s conception of the term, domestication involves four stages: appropriation, objectification, incorporation, conversion. Once an object is purchased or acquired and set into action within the domestic space, the physical positioning of the artifact reflects the constructed environment of the home. The author notes that “it is possible to see how physical artifacts, in their arrangement and display, as well as in their construction and in the creation of the environment for their display, provide an objectification of the values, the aesthetic and the cognitive universe, of those who feel comfortable or identify with them.”218

The physical location of particular media artifacts, such as the record player in the

American 1980s living room, plays a central role in the domestication of not only new media technologies, but the development of subjectivities. For Silverstone,

“...domestication is practice. It involves human agency. It requires effort….”219 This

218 Roger Silverstone, et al, “Information and communication technologies and the moral economy of the household,” in Consuming Technologies: Media and Information in Domestic Spaces (London: Routledge, 1992), 22-23.

219 Roger Silverstone, “Domesticating Domestication: Reflections on the Life of a Concept.” In Domestication of Media and Technology, edited by Thomas Berker, et al (Berkshire: Open University Press, 2006), 231.

135 active relationship and exchange between media technologies and subjects, reflects the consumption process as its own form of production. As explored above, the New Age musical context encourages forms of production which find the listener both consuming and consumed by sonified environmental imaginaries. As sounds emanate from the centrally located living room stereo, or immersive earbuds, they wrap the listener in a space which redefines “the boundaries between humans and machine.”220

William Cronon’s sense of domestication within the context of the American environmental imagination figures a transformed relationship with the wilderness. The once harrowing spaces of wilderness sublimity were transformed through governmental regulation into welcoming spaces of postcard-perfect destinations of purity. Indeed, New

Age music reflects its own brand of transformations in relationship to nonhuman environmental phenomena. By compressing or expanding the roles of environments, both

Halpern and Windham Hill promote aesthetics that make such environments approachable, prompting listeners to actively shape and engage a host of environmentally-related media.

This accessibility and freedom to consume or be consumed is articulated by musicologist Timothy Taylor’s exploration of domestication as it relates to the use of electronic sounds within advertising contexts. In his work, Taylor offers a history of “the domestication of sounds that were initially associated with science fiction but fairly

220 Ibid, 232.

136 quickly found their way into television commercial[s]....”221 These sounds, made by pioneering electronic musicians such as Raymond Scott, Eric Siday, and Suzanne Ciani, became known as the sonic signatures of emergent technologies, anthropomorphizing the coffee maker by adding a bit of ‘personality’ to it.

Through the adoption of the sounds of science fiction into everyday life, the advertising industry imbued its products with a hyperreality wrapped in sounds that

“seemed to be more realistic and vivid than the actual recorded sounds….”222 The surreal practices of audiovisual packaging plays on earlier forms of mood-music as it attempted to transport the listener to distant lands through environmental and cultural imperialism and mimesis. But what happens when the product is the listener’s life? As the New Age agenda often asserts a kind of psychological influence on the listener to relax and recover, the question must be raised about what kind of life is being espoused?

By honing in on the historical context in which New Age music emerged, we can better understand the importance of material goods and resources to the genre’s environmental imaginaries. With is connection to early forms of functional music such as exotica, beautiful music, and Muzak itself, New Age essentially spiritualized the process of using music for specific purposes. As Hibbett puts it, New Age “responded and

221 Timothy, Taylor, “The Avant-Garde in the Family Room: American Advertising and the Domestication of Electronic Music in the 1960s and 1970s,” in The Oxford Sound Studies Handbook, edited by Karin Bijsterveld and Trevor Pinch. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 388.

222 Ibid, 404.

137 contributed to the popular imagination of the time as well as to feelings of material prosperity, and managed to bring a sense of hipness back to the domestic realm….”223

What differs within the New Age musical experience from other forms of functional music is the role of the willing subject to simultaneously project and be projected onto. New Age works as personal enhancement background music, as music to be heard and listened to. It is music “used more for personal development or for individual recovery of lost function. It is often self-applied, thereby making the emitter and receiver the same person in many circumstances.”224

As the 70s came to a close, the healing music of Halpern gave way to the less- prescriptive aesthetics of Windham Hill’s hi-fi ambiguity. Along with the ambiguities espoused by record covers of misty groves and non-descript mountaintops, came an emphasis on crystalline production values at the highest fidelity possible. This concurrent striving for outward excellence whilst achieving inner-peace is particularly notable with

Windham Hill’s flavor of anonymity. Hibbett further expands on this phenomenon of dissolving oneself into the broader capitalist environment noting that the “music is subsumed into this larger set of material objects, potentially understood as one component of an atmosphere constructed to create domestic peace and harmony but also as a display of neobourgeois identity.”225

223 Hibbett, 293.

224 Steven Brown and Tores Theorell, “The Social Uses of Background Music for Personal Enhancement,” in Music and Manipulation: On the Social Uses and Social Control of Music, ed. Steven Brown, et al (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 128.

225 Hibbett, 296. 138

This dissolve of environmentally-engaged products into the domestic space reflects the middle-way inhabited by the music. Indeed, it succeeds as intensely specific in its aims, continuing the tradition of “Music for…” albums released in the mid-century easy listening boom. And it is with similar success, as Dennis Hall points out, that the music remains “...very much an unelaborated code; that is, possible meanings and uses of the music are far less circumscribed, remain much more open to the listener’s construction of meaning and use.”226 Whether through specific, prescriptive means or generalized scenarios, New Age music’s processes of domestication naturalizes the co- presence of technologies alongside seemingly ‘natural’ phenomena. In this way, New

Age makes manifest its unique brand of ambivalence.

Fading Out

As I have shown, the two forms of New Age examined in this chapter provide complex, overlapping, and competing environmental imaginaries. Both Halpern and

Ackerman & Co. emphasize nonhuman environments as crucial components to the sonic spaces and cultures they construct. In the view of the former, anonymous universes, cultures, and environments are presented to serve the human, infusing and attuning her to a balanced and healthy spiritual state. In the space of the latter, the listener is presented with anonymous, approachable scenarios which encourage fluid interpretation through static harmonic movement and echoing digital production. Unlike Halpern’s subject, the

226 Dennis Hall, New Age Music: A Voice of Liminality in Postmodern Popular Culture,” Popular Music and Society Vol.18, No.2 (1994): 15.

139

Windham Hill subject, communes with abstracted and generic artifacts, all which encourage the production of moods and impressions.

Matthew Huber notes that attunement to the cultural politics of life in a neoliberal environment focuses on “how wider narratives make normative claims about particular modes of living as a universal model.”227 Such wider narratives in the neoliberal

American environment involve the construction of life as an enterprise, a life that is made up of one’s entrepreneurial choices. The acquisition of cohesively branded music which simultaneously promotes personal well-being through both the attunement of one’s chakras and identification with audiophile status certainly contributes to the production and reproduction of a distinctly neoliberal subjectivity.

The interlocking dynamics of spirituality, nonhuman environments, and consumerism promote an infinitely flexible sonic space. Environments are posed as scenarios to be consumed or to disappear within. Whether it is through consumption or dissolve, the New Age subject is inextricably linked to the realities of life under capitalism. Through echoes, generic packaging, and crystalline digital production techniques, Ackerman and Halpern weave their own brand of popular and sentimental pastoral aesthetics, by appealing to the listener with extremely inoffensive, flexible sonic scenarios. These scenarios permit the listener to enter an articulated space of safety.

Musicologist Elisabeth Le Guin asks how easy it truly is to listen to easy listening. She argues that “blandness, neutrality, unmarked space can be terrifically hard won. It is

227 Matthew Huber, “Refined Politics: Petroleum Products, Neoliberalism, and the Ecology of Entrepreneurial Life,” in Journal of American Studies 46 (2012), 299.

140 precisely such ‘places,’ whether physical, temporal, or metaphorical, that are lacking in most people’s lives….”228 This opening up of sonic space allows the listener, in Le

Guin’s terms, to achieve a “hard-won” ease as opposed to an avoidance of the liberating

“difficult music” espoused by Adorno. Instead of being read as an avoidance of listening responsibility, Le Guin argues that this way of listening, the way encouraged by New

Age music’s openness, admits to an engagement with disengagement. This is not merely an Adornian “refusal to think,” but a complex mode of diffused subjectivity. Le Guin notes “the one who listens in disengagement exercises the option of encountering the musical work in a place of putative, experimental, fictional unity, one which neither denies the damaged I nor accepts it as a condition.”229

When we take Le Guin’s figuration of a disengaged listening practice and map it into the domestic space, we find the listeners positioned “at neither attentional pole, but

[free to] inhabit as much of the countryside of hearing and listening as possible.”230 The freedom simply comes from being in an environment that “will not be disrupted…,” and

“with the sense of safety can come pleasure, of the mild diffuse variety— intense pleasure being just as disruptive as fear— and relaxation of mental focus….”231

228 Elisabeth, Le Guin. “Uneasy Listening” In repercussions 3:1 (1994), 7.

229 Ibid, 8.

230 Ibid, 10.

231 Ibid, 3.

141

Indeed, this immersion in a sonic environment is “a safe ‘place’ to be; a ‘place’ where one is pleasantly relieved of the necessity of having to focus.” This is sustained in the ways in which New Age respite harmonizes with the shape of neoliberal subjectivity, implicating the listener within a complex matrix of viewing one’s life as a product of one’s consumptive choices. The stakes of this contrapuntal engagement hinge on affective connections to nonhuman environments and commercial products. Through a series of emotionally-tinged relationships to products and their attendant consumptive practices, the question must be posed to the enviromentally-attuned New Age subject: Is ultimate safety defined by an individual ability to endlessly consume?

142

CHAPTER 3: METEOROLOGISTS AS DJS: LISTENING TO THE WEATHER

(CHANNEL)

A series of oscillating synth pads hover around the cool tonalities of a G minor 9 chord. The lower notes of the chord, G and D, support a wavering digital whistle-pad which emphasizes the uncertainty resulting from the flat-seventh and ninth intervals.

Dramatizing the moment, a crescendo of cymbal swells appears on the sonic horizon. The listener imagines the sizzling waves of heat that blur distant traffic on freeways or a setting sun against a smoggy horizon. At seven seconds in, a molten alto saxophone line blazes against an ascending chord progression which leads the listener from G minor to the relative major chord of Bb.

As the progression unfolds with a series of quarter note triplets and cymbal crashes on each beat, the piece keeps the listener on edge, albeit a smooth edge. The bassline transitions between chords, alternating as root note and less-stable chord tone.

These smooth transitional moments occupy the liminal spaces of affective imbalance.

The final note of D within the 4-bar phrase, could readily be identified as a dominant chord of G minor, but the balance is shifted just enough to position the note as the third of the tonic. Such a compositional move exposes a circularity to the hook: the song needs to begin again to hopefully find a sense of resolution. Yet such resolution remains obfuscated by the sizzling hiss of cymbal swells, synth pads, breathy sax, and slash chords. These are the sounds of “Seasons on the Edge,” composer Trammell Starks’ dramatic underscore to the credit sequence of The Weather Channel’s 1995 special

Hurricane Season 95: Season on the Edge. 143

This chapter analyzes the functional sounds of The Weather Channel (TWC), considering specific ways of making and listening to such sounds reflective of the ambivalences of control and anxiety within the Anthropocene. Central to the exploration of sounds associated with the weather is the role played by technological mediation. The convergence of technological and natural phenomena within the aural domain can be traced from experiments with the Aeolian harp, through the field recordings of the World

Soundscape Project, to Douglas Kahn’s recent distinction between Thoreau’s Aeolian sounds, which effectively allowed him to hear the trees through the wind, and Watson’s

Aeolectrosonic experience of hearing natural radio through telegraph lines. These processes of listening to technologically-mediated sounds of nature carry with them aesthetic agendas. The listener adds her own meaning to the experience, framing it as representative within a larger schematic of knowledge production.

As Georgina Born reminds us, musical sound is alogogenic, “unrelated to language, non-artifact, having no physical existence, and non-representational.”232 Even in regards to recordings of nature itself (field recordings, etc.), or Adams’ musical ecosystem experiments, these (seemingly) natural recordings are not reproductions.

Reproductions imply an exacting replication of an original. Technological mediation and listening context continually change the sonic experience and, as Rick Altman notes,

232 Georgina Born, Rationalizing culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the institutionalization of the musical avant-garde (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 19.

144 recordings are always technologically-mediated representations of sound.233 Furthermore, live performances, experienced in real-time, are highly mediated events, deeply affected by the presence of acoustic architecture, sound reinforcement, and listener positioning.

These aspects of musical sound’s mediated character support the overarching theme of this study, that functional music’s specific utility is found in its flexibility to produce particular kinds of environments upheld by the contexts and codes in which it is situated.

As Kahn has recently noted, nature “has been absent in histories of communications technologies, historical media theory, and the history of electronic music,” taking electromagnetic signals and their transductive counterparts to be the opposite of old-growth violins resounding in acoustically treated concert halls.234 In this chapter, I take Kahn’s point and map it into the living room, considering how musical sounds and disembodied human voices interact with graphical depictions of the weather.

Emphasizing deeply embedded relationships between nature and technology as they solidify in domestic spaces draws attention to how environmental imaginaries take shape.

The process of applying meanings to interactions and splits between nature and technology takes on pertinent relevance in an era of increasing environmental instability due to human activity.

233 Rick Altman, “Introduction: Four and a Half Film Fallacies,” in Sound Theory Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge Press, 1992), 40.

234 Douglas Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 18.

145

The atmospheric results of burning carbon have led to increased attention toward human-induced changes in the climate. Such changes have ushered in a geologic era in which there exists a distinctly human presence in the environment. By purposefully amplifying a human presence within non-human contexts, this chapter listens to connections between weather, climate and functional music, remaining invested in the relationship between sound, broadcast media, and abiotic nature. Work from the fields of rhetoric, film studies, and music studies will guide this section, in which I emphasize the role of functional music, in this case smooth jazz, as a framing device for the dissemination of weather information. Mareck’s work on the rhetorical nature of the discourses used in TWC Desktop application is useful for its emphasis on the cultural production of myths relating to weather as well as the effects of situated learning in relationship to screen-based depictions of weather cycles. The work of Gorbman, Chion, and Rodman on film and television sound grounds the examination, calling attention to the different diegetic spaces in which visual codes are anchored and smoothed over by musical sounds. I contribute to this work by amplifying the aesthetics and history of smooth jazz music as embedded within TWC’s products. The culture of smooth jazz and its place on the scholarly landscape reflects a music that not only lacks rigorous engagement, but provides a unique position as an ecologically-embedded music. In framing smooth jazz as functional music, I focus particularly on the Local on the 8s segment which depicts local weather conditions along with music every 10 minutes throughout the channel’s 24-hour cycle. 146

TWC’s use of smooth jazz offers the opportunity to investigate how a form of functional music, typically associated with upwardly mobile imbues the weather with particular affective qualities. Following Claudia Gorbman’s work on film sound, I consider how smooth jazz acts as a kind of sonic suturing device, easing the televisual transitions with the channel as a whole. With a focus on the intradiegetic space of the channel, this chapter asks how functional music contributes to depictions of the weather.

As a result, I ask how the generic codes of smooth jazz cloak the televisual space with connotations of a specific kind of neoliberal, white subjectivity, all the while attempting

“to lull the individual into being an untroublesome social subject.”235 Finally, I connect fans of TWC’s brand of functional music to the idea of (counter) nostalgic listening practices. By identifying nostalgia as a means toward a progressive listening practice which engages functional music, this chapter carves out space to listen through the complexities of life in the Anthropocene. To begin, I will give a brief outline of the channel itself, focusing on its “classic period” (1982 through the 1990s) and the role of musical sound in the production of this unique sonification of the effects of solar energy.

A Channel Devoted to the Weather?

The numbers 28, 26, and 24 hover underneath digital icons of a three suns partially covered by clouds. Above each icon are three-hour increments of time (3pm,

6pm, and 9pm). This is a typical display from The Weather Channel’s WeatherSTAR system, a cable news service devoted to broadcasting weather conditions. Wrapping the

235 Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 57. 147 imagery is a reverb-drenched drumbeat featuring slowly alternating kick and rim-shot quarter notes, peppered with emotive hi-hat eighth notes. The other sonic elements are minimal, consisting of a patient 5-string bass groove, a harmonically flexible synth pad, and a melodic figure performed on a crystalline digital piano setting. Like “Seasons on the Edge,” the F-minor I-bVI-bVII progression of Starks’ “Reflections in Time” maintains a flattened mood of endless anticipation. Throughout the progression a single synth pad holds an Eb note, changing function with each alternating chord, but retaining the same tonal and timbral quality throughout. The unchanging pad note resembles the reliable character of constantly updating digital depictions of nature. In this way, the aesthetics of a channel devoted to the weather become audible.

From its inaugural broadcast in 1982, TWC embraced instrumental music as the core of its sonic brand. By positioning the weather as the main actor in a 24-hour narrative of cable news info-tainment, TWC fused graphical representations of weather patterns, natural phenomena, and emerging functional sounds of soft rock, new age, and smooth jazz, constructing an unmistakable audiovisual environmental experience. This experience reflects Born’s sense of music as a multitextual form of cultural production.

These aesthetics reflected an investment in the functional aspect of background music as audio architecture, generating “a sense of place.”236 Canonical works of background music, such as Brian Eno’s crystalline Music for Airports (1978) or the cascading

236 Herve Vanel, Triple Entendre: Furniture Music, Muzak, Muzak-Plus (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 81. Also see Jonathan Sterne, “Sounds Like the Mall of America: Programmed Music and the Architectonics of Commercial Space,” Ethnomusicology Vol. 41, No. 1 (Winter 1997): 22-50.

148 melodrama of The Melachrino Strings’ Music for Reading (1958) have been used on

TWC. Such explicit uses of music for flying or reading prescribe a desired environment for maximum listener benefit. Indeed, these diverging forms of functional music aim to set up artificial sonic scenarios, generating a “desired emotional relationship between man and environment.”237 Congruent with the construction of a desired auditory environment is a promise of stability and safety which infuses the physical space in which the television is viewed and heard. This regulating effect of the music is Janus- faced in character, balanced out by what Vanel and Eno locate as a “certain sense of catastrophe.”238 Whatever the positive relationship between man and his environment might sound like, it is crucial to hear the ubiquitous presence of background music as an answer to encroaching danger, helping to “make us realize that we’ve come to the right place.”239

This assurance of safety in the face of disaster was important for TWC in establishing its brand, not as sensationalized 24-hour cable info-tainment, but as an essential service akin to utilities such as electricity and water. On the first broadcast of

TWC, May 2, 1982, Dr. Richard Hallgren, Director of the National Weather Service, expounded on the importance of the channel as a unique, lifesaving form of cable TV programming: “The United States has the most varied weather of any nation in the world.

237 Vanel, 81.

238 Ibid., 80.

239 Ibid., 81.

149

From beautiful sunny days to life-threatening flash floods….”240 To this day, these themes of impending catastrophe are deeply interwoven into the fabric of TWC’s corporate identity. The consistent instrumental sounds of smooth jazz filled the sonic space of the channel until it became an outdated trope in the early 2000s.241 As I will show, the functional sounds of TWC reflect an investment in the historical roles of functional music as a device of both comfort and control, figuring the weather as a product to be consumed.

While music made for airports and reading produce an audio architecture for physical scenarios, TWC’s use of smooth jazz assigns particular affective qualities to the dissemination of meteorological data. This data, consisting of high and low temperatures and general conditions, was first depicted via the use of The WeatherSTAR (Satellite

Transponder Addressable Receiver), broadcasting crude graphical representations of weather conditions set to the smooth sounds of the day. This information is transferred directly from the National Weather Service and wrapped in a sonic coating, embodying the “specialized” portion of the channel’s mission to provide “...specialized and lifesaving programming.”242 The WeatherSTAR system has been in use since the beginning of TWC and, while still in use in some smaller markets, has largely been

240“Weather Channel’s Debut May 2, 1982,” YouTube video, posted by “Andre Bernier,” April 11, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmAcbjhtkLM

241 The channel introduced music with vocals, much to the dismay of longtime listeners.

242Ibid.

150 replaced by newer software with slicker aesthetics and HD graphics. The WeatherSTAR system has gone through many versions throughout its 30-year history resulting in a series of system nomenclature: I, II, III, IV, Jr., XL, and so forth. Some of these systems have pictorial representations of clouds, sun, and moon cycles, while the earlier versions maintain a simple pixelated font reporting numerical temperature data in white font against a dark purple or blue background.

As John Coleman, creator and president, remarked at the inaugural broadcast, the mission of the channel is to solve “the problem of forecasting the weather for the nation and presenting that forecast in an interesting way.”243 Things have remained interesting for the channel as the effects of anthropogenic climate change have become increasingly detectable through the weather. Throughout the 1990s TWC did not address issues of climate change. But in 2007, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and films like An

Inconvenient Truth and The Day After Tomorrow, the channel made its first official statement via its mini-series 100 Biggest Weather Moments. By rating global warming at the top of the list, the channel was primed to make an official statement which recognized human involvement in an increasingly warming planet.244 In 2003, Heidi Cullen was hired, becoming the channel’s first climate expert.245 Additionally, the channel has

243“Weather Channel’s Debut May 2, 1982,” YouTube video, posted by “Andre Bernier,” April 11, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmAcbjhtkLM

244 “Global Warming: The Weather Channel position statement,” last modified October 30, 2014, http://www.weather.com/science/environment/news/global-warming- weather-channel-position-statement-20141029

245 Robert Henson, Weather on the Air: A History of Broadcast Meteorology (Boston: American Meteorological Society, 2010), 196-197. 151 increased its investment in coverage of other types of environmental disasters, most recently America’s increase in oil-by-rail accidents246

Dramatic depictions of weather events have always been at the heart of the channel’s mission. In order to heighten the affective stakes of the broadcast, musical sound has remained a constant in the channel’s brand identity. An attendee at the press conference for the unveiling of the channel asked Coleman if the channel was “going to entertain us with music during these...weather reports?”247 Coleman’s response is worth quoting at length, as it reflects the prominent role of music on TWC since its inception:

There will be about 14 minutes of music per hour on The Weather Channel. Every one minute out of every five you will hear music and we’re making a strong effort to see that it’s varied, that it’s current, that it’s bright, that it’s happy, that it’s upbeat...and I really think that some people will stay tuned to The Weather Channel just to keep up with the music...they may begin to think of our meteorologists as part disc jockeys.248

While the channel has quite literally changed its tune over the 30 years of its broadcast history, the abiding mission of the channel remains intact: to attempt to make meteorological data entertaining. Indeed, the channel’s brand audiovisual representations of the weather carry with them innumerable codes which make explicit the particular

246 Marcus Stern and Sebastian Jones, “Boom: North America’s Explosive Oil-by- Rail Problem.” weather.com and InsideClimateNews. December 8, 2014, accessed February 27, 2015 http://stories.weather.com/boom

247 “Weather Channel’s Debut May 2, 1982,” YouTube video, posted by “Andre Bernier,” April 11, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmAcbjhtkLM

248 Ibid.

152 kinds of relationships with the weather the channel strives to promote. As we will see, such relationships are dialogically bound to broadcasting practices.

The model for this incorporation of “bright, happy, upbeat” smooth jazz accurately reflects the historical developments in approaches to news broadcasting. The

“happy talk” format emerged in the 70s in contrast to previous structures of news casting in which news, sports, and weather were isolated into separate programs, each with a different sponsor. The “happy talk” approach fused these various parts into a whole which prescribed conversation between newscasters to bridge the gaps.249 The sounds of voices talking happily began to be used as a sonic suturing device, forming the foundation for music to be used in the same way. These changes reflected American broadcasting practices engaging in what Thomas Frank refers to as the “conquest of cool.”250

Frank’s idea of the “conquest” links countercultural practices of the 60s with advertising practices in a mutual feedback loop, with each affecting the other, dissolving romanticized notions of a (sub)cultural movement free from outside influence. By challenging easily drawn binaries between cool countercultural actors and out-of-touch advertisers, Frank argues that both contexts collapse, with the counterculture best understood as “a stage in the development of the values of the American middle class, a

249 Henson, 15-16.

250 Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

153 colorful installment in the twentieth-century drama of consumer subjectivity.”251 This alternative history of the 1960s primes the context for new approaches to broadcasting, approaches which gave the impression of “newscasters as family—or at least close friends—concerned with one another’s lives.”252

A unique example of a convergence between advertising and meteorological reporting came in the form of the “Shell Weather Tower,” a television set adorned with

Shell Oil products featuring a weatherman who reported the forecasts interlaced with describing the benefits of shell products. As Henson describes in his history of weather broadcasting, “each segment opened with film of a real oil derrick, with the camera zooming to the top then dissolving to the indoor weather set.”253 The fusion of advertising, the weather, and the increasingly familial nature of broadcasting aesthetics set the stage for a-signifying sounds to acquire agentic capacity to encapsulate the experience as a whole.

By the 1980s, technological advancements brought about computerized graphics and the use of the green screen, allowing on-camera-meteorologists to effectively embed themselves into digital representations of weather patterns. These advancements allowed the channel to capitalize on a 24-hour model of local and national weather forecasting, a model which began to balance the appearance of human bodies with pre-recorded,

251 Ibid, 29.

252 Henson, 15.

253 Henson, 90.

154 disembodied voices. With access to site-specific information from the National Weather

Service, the channel effectively fused authoritative, computerized graphics with the

“informal, personable approach common to weathercasters….”254 Along with these changes in graphical information, a key cartographic advantage that came about was the use of moving symbols. As Monmonier notes in his history of meteorological cartography, “television and networked computers allow engagingly realistic reconstructions of the weather drama…(making) storms and other atmospheric phenomena comprehensible by shrinking time as well as space.”255 The mobility of graphical data successfully challenged the dependable presence of human bodies and personalities, making way for the prominence of the sound of human bodies.

Thus, the televisual experience of TWC is a primarily sonic experience. The audience engages in the 24/7 broadcast of weather in a state of distraction, relying on recurring sonic and graphical templates to guide the flow of information. TWC broadcast model is aimed at a particular kind of viewer referred to as a “grazer.” The grazer tunes in for three-minute intervals which occur during breaks in programming on other stations.256

And yet, the bodiless, transitional Local on the 8s segments have gone on to become a trademark of the channel’s brand of weather, finding an average viewing rate of 14

254 Ibid, 19.

255 Mark Monmonier, Air Apparent: How Meteorologists Learned to Map, Predict, and Dramatize Weather (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

256 Tal White, “Morning vs. Evening,” RTNDA Communicator 50 (December 1996): 11.

155 minutes, over triple the amount generally attributed to grazer programming.257 Viewer enthusiasm for this repetitive feature hinges on the sonic aspects of the televisual event.

Indeed, sound is the central component of the channel’s brand of weather.

Sound Rhetoric

A weather broadcast accompanied by musical sound is an electronic media artifact which functions as a discursive tool, carrying with it its own set of particular codes and signs. These codes and signs are rarely attended to directly. Rather, it is through gradual, emergent processes of repetition and coagulation that the solidification of relationships with non-human environments begin to take shape. To better understand the channel’s persuasive sonic language and construction of a particular environmental imaginary, I consider how environmentally-attuned rhetoricians engage specifically with socio-cultural constructions of environmental environmental data and their resulting discourses. Such discourses are shaped by language which frames data in ways which encourage particular relationships with the natural world. By attending to this work, I argue that TWC shapes meteorological data through an emphasis on non-verbal sounds.

In their 1974 book Ark II, Ehrlich and Pirages called attention to the dominant social paradigm (DSP), which “consists of the values, metaphysical beliefs, institutions, habits, etc., that collectively provide social lenses through which individuals and groups interpret their social world.”258 In short, the DSP is a particular culture’s worldview

257 Fleming Meeks, “What Brand is Your Weather?,” Forbes 156 (October 23, 1995).

258 Lester W. Milbrath, Environmentalists: Vanguard for a new society (New York: SUNY Press, 1984), 17. 156 which both shapes and reflects the ways that society functions. In light of this, the ways that humans construct, depict, and disseminate information regarding everyday environmental phenomena, such as the weather, hold equal importance to catastrophic events. To better understand the shape and character of the DSP, analysis of mundane, utilitarian informational media sources will amplify the ideological hallways of cable news channels and shopping networks. These very contexts— in this case, weather reports on TWC—hold a great deal of potential for further understanding how environments are construed through the use of functional music.

Writing in the wake of the Santa Barbara oil spill and at the height of the OPEC oil crisis, the Ehrlich and Pirages argue that environmental problems are a result of the value structures and institutional configurations of industrial society. As a remedy, the authors provide an answer of full-scale changes to the system in order to avoid the annihilation of society as we know it.259 The aforementioned disasters, preceded by publications such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, drew attention to the destructive ways in which humans were interacting with non-human environments. In response to this, social researchers Dunlap and Van Liere proposed

“The New Environmental Paradigm,” an instrument to measure and challenge commonly assumed beliefs associated with a society’s DSP.260 The ideals of the instrument and its

259 Dennis Pirages and Paul Ehrlich, Ark II: Social Response to Environmental Imperatives, (New York: Viking, 1974).

260 Riley Dunlap and Kent Van Liere, “The ‘New Environmental Paradigm’: A Proposed Measuring Instrument and Preliminary Results,” Journal of Environmental Education 9 (1978): 10-19. 157 revised version, The New Ecological Paradigm Scale, seek a fundamental measurement of the possibilities of a sustainable future.261 The concept of sustainability maintains a fraught rhetorical function within DSPs of the American environmental imagination. The contribution of the field of rhetoric to discourses on sustainability attend to the role played by literacies and narratives in the development (and dissolution) of paradigmatic understandings of the environment. Goggin writes of rhetoric’s contribution to issues of sustainability: “...[R]hetorical inquiry explores relationships and disconnects between discursive practices on sustainability in science, government, and business/industry.

Further, rhetorical inquiry addresses professional objectivity that insulates enclaves of scientific specialization from the general public and the policies that inform social change and environmental impact.”262 Rhetorician Anne Faith Mareck examines how narratives about the weather solidify through repeated engagements with “TWC Desktop,” a standalone piece of weather dissemination software which updates users to current weather conditions in an unobtrusive way.

By attending to the “unremarkable material discourses in which we are daily immersed,” Mareck takes up a piece of everyday software to highlight how it represents the world “in such a way as to make reliance upon unlimited growth and consumption

261 Mark Anderson, "New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) Scale," The Berskshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability: Measurements, Indicators, and Research Methods for Sustainability (2012): 260-262.

262 Peter Goggin, “Introduction,” in Rhetorics, Literacies and Narratives of Sustainability, ed. Peter N. Goggin, 2-12. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 4.

158 appear as a commonsensical aspect of normal human existence.”263 As a result, society’s distracted and frequent engagement with discursive tools such as weather reports set to musical sound, can be understood as “situated learning environments” which wield the power to normalize particular DSP discourses. The software maintains a consistent presence in the background, reliably present for the consumer to engage with at will. By interrogating the software-aided relationship between the often unnoticed discourse of dominant social paradigms and the rhetoric of use, Mareck amplifies the role of attenuated modes of cultural production.

In the same way, the omnipresence of smooth jazz as an inextricable presence in weather broadcasts contributes to the production and solidification of narratives which encourage the perpetuation of the DSP. These narratives propagate through repeated interactions with screen-based depictions of weather cycles. Revisiting the aforementioned Starks composition “Reflections in Time,” we are reminded of the architecture of the piece as it clings to an unchanging synthetic pad in Eb. The effect of this constant sonic element imbues the experience with an audible reliability. As the consistency stretches across chord modulations and changes in timbre, the effect takes shape as a simulacrum, a foil for a kind of improvisational music devoid of spontaneity, kind of music based on music that never existed.

263 Anne Faith Mareck, “Acquiring Biospheric Literacy: Discursive Tools, Situated Learning and the Rhetoric of Use,” in Rhetorics, Literacies, and Narratives of Sustainability, ed. Peter N. Goggin, 132-149. (New York: Routledge, 2009), 142.

159

Dominant social paradigms tend to be unchecked and oversimplified through regular, everyday engagement. While it is true that the complexities of software programming and technological modes of dissemination inform our myriad, everyday micro-interactions, I maintain that the surface, or skin, of these products does its own unique work. By mapping ambient paradigms alongside an interrogation of the DSP, and the challenges posed by the NEP, I aim to show that the omnipresence of weather-related forms of media do the most effective work of sawing away in the background, rendering the listener an “untroublesome social subject.”264

Sounding the Brand of Weather

As the credits roll on Hurricane Season 95, the controlled, circular melodrama of

“Seasons on the Edge” unfolds. The formal architecture of the piece, touting an

ABACDE form, calls to the listener to stay tuned. As the half-step alternating melodic lines found in the E-section hover aimlessly, they reveal their compositional cards to build tension in the same way the themes from Jaws and The Twilight Zone attempt to put the listener on edge. But all is resolved with the return of the triumphant A-section. The alto saxophone climbs into the upper realms of its register as cymbals and low bass tones bash through digital reverb settings. Composer Trammell Starks is not just sounding out the conclusion of a Weather Channel documentary. Indeed, the composer is deep within the infrastructure of an environmental imaginary hinging on synthetic high-stakes. This is cable news infotainment.

264 Gorbman, 57.

160

TWC uses sonic branding as a way to normalize particular relationships with the weather. The sonic codes and discourses circulating within the broadcast and how the broadcast teaches those discourses to its audience.265 The practice of sonic branding has been tied to the history of the culture industry since its audible inception. Devon Powers suggests that sonic branders are attracted to music’s capacity to function in the consumer space “because it is heard uncritically—some might even say it cannot be heard critically.”266 As music placed in the service of depicting weather conditions, the sounds of TWC reflect the classic characteristics of background music as a device of both comfort and control. Yet in the context of the channel, sonic branding maintains a distinct role in building aurally-centered relationships with the environment.

As Powers notes, “music is deeply ingrained in the phenomenology of consumerism, both as an affective component of the experience of consumption but also as a ‘space’ in which consumption happens.”267 The aural space of consumption is an environment in itself, encircling the listener with sounds suggestive of a brand’s identity.

As managing partner Bill Nygren of Boom Sonic Branding notes, sonic brands “penetrate the emotional and logical mind. A hybrid of voice, sound design and original music, the sonic brand works by harnessing music's power to trigger an emotional response.”

265 Mareck, 136.

266 Devon Powers, “Strange Powers: The Branded Sensorium and the Intrigue of Musical Sound,” in Blowing Up the Brand: Critical Perspectives on Promotional Culture, ed. Melissa Aronczyk and Devon Powers, 285-306. (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2010), 288.

267 Ibid.

161

Powers adds to this definition noting that sonic branding “refers to the use of sound to enhance brand awareness, appeal, and cohesion.”268 Further, the role of sonic branding in depictions of the environment has been figured by TWC sonic branding consultant

Stephen Arnold as distinctly tied to nature, with cavemen hearing thunder as a cue to go back in the cave and farmers hearing crows as an important aural sign to tend to the field.269

Roland Barthes’ well-known emphasis on the importance of considering audience interpretation in the process of making meaning reminds us to consider how the sonic brand of TWC is received. As I will emphasize further, a full attention to media is not the only mode in which consumers interact with sonic presences. In her work on the role of music in advertising, Kurpiers emphasizes the embodied nature of branding which “relies on the audience member’s participation with the brand through her/his real experience….”270 The Local on the 8s is often listened to or watched in states of distraction. However, this does not detract from its effectiveness as a bona fide experience with audiovisual media. The influence of consumption in states of distraction is well documented. Referencing the work of Soviet montage filmmakers such as

Eisenstein and Vertov, Walter Benjamin theorized the powers and potentials of media

268 Ibid, 293.

269 “Weather Channel Branding - Stephen Arnold Music,” YouTube video, posted by Stephen Arnold Music, May 22, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nrcLPcqdr4

270 Joyce Kurpiers, “Reality by Design: Advertising Image, Music and Sound in the Production of Culture” (PhD diss., Duke University, 2009).

162 consumption in states of distraction.271 More recently, Anahid Kassabian has written about distracted, or ubiquitous modes of listening which, she argues, develop a communal distributed subjectivity which exemplifies the majority of the ways in which sound and music are consumed in today’s world.272

The channel’s Local on the 8s forecast is built to be consumed in a state of distraction: repeating every 10 minutes, maintaining strict and dependable sonic codes, and providing repetitive, regular vocal cues to train the consumer to respond. Not only does the segment encourage distraction, it paradoxically acts as a respite from direct advertisements, storm updates, and other forms of information disseminated by the channel. As the most popular segment amongst the channel’s viewers, the Local on the 8s carves out a quiet island;273 it serves as a televisual space to reflect on the past, through musical sound, the present, through attending to current conditions, and the future, by imagining the implications of the 7-day forecast. In her work on new marketing techniques, Moor points out that “the addition of music to the mundane can move us beyond the here-and-now into a space of private fantasy or nostalgia; like the brand itself,

271 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” in The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, and other writings on media. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).

272 Anahid Kassabian, Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).

273 A reference to WDBN, “The Quiet Island,” a radio station in Medina, Ohio with thrived in the 1960s as one of America’s first “Beautiful Music” stations. See Joseph Lanza, “Adventures in Mood Radio,” in Radiotext(e) Vol. VI: 1 (New York: Semiotext(e)), 97-105.

163 it can move us backwards or forwards in time, co-ordinating the activities of the present with those of an imagined past or future.”274 The convergence of smooth jazz, disembodied voices of off-camera-meteorologists, and graphical depictions of abiotic nature reflects the potential of the Local on the 8s as an ambient audiovisual experience which privileges nostalgic and idealized imaginaries in conjunction with the dissemination of meteorological data.

In the early 1980s, along with the development of the channel and the emergence of smooth jazz as a musical genre, advertising studies began to focus on the importance of emotion, or mood, in the advertising experience. The concept of ‘attitude toward the ad’ was formulated to consider how consumers were influenced by the emotional consequences of engaging with an advertisement.275 The ‘attitude toward the ad’ promotes the idea that positive feelings about a product are more likely to lead to a purchase. Musical and nonmusical sounds play an important role in this exchange by

“effectively conditioning preferences between products.”276

Such conditioning between smooth jazz and weather forecasts served to solidify the sound of TWC’s forecasts throughout the 1980s and 90s. Similar to the

274 Elizabeth Moor, “Branded Spaces: The scope of ‘new marketing’,” in Journal of Consumer Culture Vol. 3:39, 39-60. (London: Sage Publications, 2003), 54.

275 Steven P. Brown and Douglas Stayman, “Antecedent and Consequences of Attitude toward the Ad: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Consumer Research 19 (1992): 34-51.

276 Adrian C. North and David J. Hargreaves, “Music in Business Environments,” in Music and Manipulation: On the Social Uses and Social Control of Music, ed. Steven Brown et al. (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 112.

164 environmentally-centered practices of ecotourism and outdoor supply companies, the channel’s “products” actively brand and condition particular relationships with natural phenomena. Yet, the channel forgoes the charges of sustainability and conservation, dressing its product in sounds which relate historically to an urban, mobile, upper middle- class demographic. Before unpacking the aesthetics of smooth jazz and the finer points of the channel’s relationship with it, we must address the basic structures of the televisual experience, the space in which the channel is received.

Televisual Sound

TWC is a unique audiovisual experience which fuses environmental phenomena with functional music, thereby constructing the weather with a distinctly human presence.

Central to the flow of the channel’s broadcasting practice is the Local on the 8s segment.

Occurring every 10 minutes through the 24-hour cycle, a disembodied voice reminds the listener to look for their local conditions. While the voice cues to attend to particular data, the data is never read aloud. Indeed, it is the role of non-verbal functional sound to aestheticize depictions of abiotic nature into a particular environmental imaginary. While a relatively new field, studies on the relationship between cinema and sound have been consistently published since 1980.277 Such studies embrace psychoanalysis, semiotics, and more recently, ecocritical modes of analysis. Yet there remains a large gap in studies on the personalized, often private engagement with sound that television presents. In this section, I build on the work of film sound scholars and studies on television music and

277 See Rick Altman’s edited volume Yale French Studies, No. 60, Cinema/Sound (1980).

165 sound to better understand how functional music shapes imaginative and meaningful engagements with the weather.

Both Claudia Gorbman and Ron Rodman borrow from Genette’s categories of narrative agency in literature, to describe the three spaces in which television communicates particular messages: extradiegetic, intradiegetic, and diegetic.278 The extradiegetic space of television “consists of flow in its entirety, the programs, commercials, station identifications, news updates, broadcasting sign-offs, etc.”279 While the sounds of this space are neither part of the diegetic story world or the intradiegetic home of the typical soundtrack, the role of sound in extradiegetic space completely permeates the televisual experience. In other words, extradiegetic space is the space in which various stakeholders such as investors and producers fashion the sonic brand of the channel in order to establish a recognizable corporate identity. This identity assumes a liminal posture, sliding between recognizability and invisibility. This paradoxical

(non)presence is nowhere more apparent than in a recurring segment of local forecast updates set to the sounds of functional music.

Through the use of such functional sounds, the classic Local on the 8’s segment presses inward from the extradiegetic space of the brand, toward an intradiegetic space in which depictions of weather conditions and musical sound are fully intertwined. This

278 Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. by Jane E. Lewin (New York: Cornell University Press, 1980).

279 Ron Rodman, Tuning In: American Narrative Television Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 53.

166 play between different spaces within the diegesis speaks to the potential for sound to create slippage, a phenomenon coined by Stilwell as the “fantastical gap.”280 The gap between diegetic and nondiegetic spaces is sounded out when edges are blurred through the traversal of spaces. A prime example of functional music’s relationship with the gap in the televisual context is through the use of bumpers: transitional audiovisual cues which remind the listener/viewer of the program or network they’re engaged with.

Bumpers not only function as sonic mottos of networks, but as intermittent brand identifications which narrativize the broadcast flow. The capacity of bumpers to circulate through the fantastical gap, reflects Stilwell’s point that these boundaries—artificially constructed through and through—are regularly traversed, thus troubling the distinction in the first place. These regular traversals of space through the use of sound make the suspension of belief a commonplace activity in the televisual experience. As Claudia

Gorbman notes, “[M]usic removes barriers of belief; it bonds spectator to spectacle, it envelops spectator and spectacle in harmonious space. Like hypnosis, it silences the spectator’s censor. It is suggestive; if it’s working right, it makes us a little less critical and a little more prone to dream.”281

The cartographic and audible spaces set up by TWC are prime targets for media critics, begging questions of why particular fonts are used, why the weather converges

280 Robynn J. Stilwell, “The Fantastical Gap between Diegetic and Nondiegetic,” in Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema, ed. Daniel Goldmark, et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 186-187.

281 Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, 55.

167 with entertainment, why OCMs look a certain way, and why broadcasts are set to particular kinds of music, or set to music at all. Cultural critic Andrew Ross chastises the channel for its creation of a fictional world, a branded cartography with:

fishing maps, business travel maps, picnic maps, indoor [and outdoor] relative humidity maps,...tanning maps, allergy maps,... the ominously named “aches and pains index,” influenza maps, precipitation maps, radar maps, storm history maps, windy travel maps, . . . each charting in detail the geographical distribution of daily weather effects on our bodies, and each sponsored in turn by the manufacturer of an appropriate product.282

Firmly rooted in the postmodern rhetoric of the early 90s, Ross explains further that:

among the many Weather Channel maps, there are no maps of acid rain damage, deforestation, oil spill concentrations, toxic dump locations, or downwind nuclear zones. In the absence of these politically complex health and safety hazards, the responsible weather citizen’s rights are only threatened with natural and not social erosion. So too, the channel’s multiple address to individual, (his) family, and nation is pluralist in principle but speaks primarily to the citizen identity of a white male property-owner. Ideal Weather Channel “citizens” are assumed to be comfortably off, white-collar, with cars, boats, vacation options, families, and gardens and homes that require extensive upkeep.283

Ross’ point is well taken that in its early mode, TWC avoided politically-charged environmental hazards, upholding a particular kind of upwardly mobile consumers. Yet,

Ross’ critique misses an opportunity to address functional sounds and music. If sound is equally, or even more, important to television as visual content, surely it must be addressed to more fully understand how TWC has shaped and naturalized social and cultural practices of consuming weather information. As shown in this section, the role of

282 Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits (London: Verso, 1991), 242.

283 Ibid, 240-241.

168 sound in the televisual experience unfolds in multiple spaces at once. These extra-, intra-, and diegetic spaces collide and blend through psychophysiological recognition of the

“concomitance of a discrete sound event and a discrete visual event as a single phenomenon,” or what Chion refers to as “synchresis.”284

This involuntary activity of melding sound and image into one phenomenological experience is a well-rehearsed point of intervention by the consumer of media. The often illogical pairing of sonic and visual material is taken up by Chion as he notes that synchresis “attributes a common cause to sound and image, even if their nature and source are completely different and even if they have little or no relation to each other in reality.”285 The role of sonic branding in the development of a product’s identity is to encourage unconscious acts of synchresis, melding semiotically unrelated material in the name of cohesion.

Smooth Jazz

Smooth jazz on TWC maintains a unique position as a music bound up in depictions of the natural world. While studies on smooth jazz have considered the effects

284 Michel Chion, Film, A Sound Art, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 492.

285 Ibid.

169 of its presence as a radio format286 and its sexualized aesthetics,287 there are no studies on the relationship between smooth jazz as functional music used to construct depictions of the environment. This section fills that gap, asking how environmental imaginaries take shape through repeated exposure to weather broadcasts consistently buoyed by background music.

In their sweeping history of jazz, Giddins and DeVeaux note that the genre of smooth jazz appeared when the label of fusion had “run out of steam.”288 While fusion melded jazz improvisation with the progressive rock aesthetics of the late 60s and 70s, its mission often elided easily digestible pop hooks and accessible harmonic movements instead embracing abstract melodic fragments and odd time signatures. Described as “an innocuous, listener-friendly blending of jazz with an upbeat, celebratory brand of R&B and funk,”289 the seeds for smooth jazz were planted by producer Creed Taylor in the

1960s and 70s with his string-laden productions for Wes Montgomery and his subsequent projects on his label CTI. Taylor’s move toward smooth aesthetics carries on traditions of easy listening and light music to reformulate and distill popular forms into instrumental

286 Simon Barber, "Smooth jazz: a case study in the relationships between commercial radio formats, audience research and music production," Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media 8, no. 1 (April 2010): 51-70.

287 Kristin McGee, "Promoting Affect and Desire in the International Industrial World of Smooth Jazz: The Case of Candy Dulfer," Jazz Perspectives 7, no. 3 (December 2013): 251-285.

288 Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux, Jazz, (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009), 558.

289 Ibid.

170

‘shadows’ of original compositions. As Giddins and DeVeaux point out, the backgrounds for these early experiments with smooth jazz were often pre-recorded, laying the groundwork for the soloist to overdub their parts. The sounds of these early CTI recordings connect to an overarching characteristic of functional music as utilitarian musical sounds diluted of their complexity in favor of clearly signifying particular codes of genres, moods, and feelings.

Just as important to the development of the genre is the relationship between racial politics and socioeconomic status. Soon the music began to emphasize elements of funk and soul with slightly more aggressive timbres and harmonic progressions. These traits are exemplified in the 1970s work of saxophonist Grover Washington Jr. and guitarist/vocalist George Benson. With evocative album covers of scantily-clad bodies, wine glasses, and exotic locales, these sounds both re-appropriated earlier tropes from exotica and easy listening and appealed to the relaxed, affluent market of black professionals seeking alternatives to the heavier sounds of fusion groups like Return to

Forever and Mahavishnu Orchestra.

As one of the best selling music styles within the black community,290 the centrality of white artists like Kenny G and Dave Koz not only continued familiar patterns of white artists gaining more financial success through co-optation from black artists, but these artists were also able to appropriate black audiences. This phenomenon

290 Christopher Washburne, “Does Kenny G Play Bad Jazz? A Case Study,” in Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate, ed. Christopher J Washburne and Maiken Derno. (New York: Routledge, 2004), 135.

171 further entrenches the “institutionalized disdain” for pop-oriented styles within the jazz purist community; with such critical repulsion remaining constant while the target changes with time.291 Jazz critic Dan Morgenstern challenges this pattern of institutionalized disdain by challenging critics with the question: “...[S]ince when has jazz been a cloistered virgin avoiding contact with the great unwashed?”292

The convergence of racial and socioeconomic issues that arise as we trace the development of smooth jazz reaffirms the continually contested boundaries of what constitutes jazz. Historiographic patterns and practices within the music reflect investments in keeping the form, and its authentic others (free jazz, non-commercial improvised musics), pure. In order to do this, the music must remain purely outside of the popular commercial sphere. IRCAM, the electro-acoustic center for avant-garde music in

France, implements thoroughly modern practices of writing their own history, and stands as a telling inverse of jazz’s own legacy of historiography. In her ethnography and critique of IRCAM, Born uses a multitextual model in order to challenge the naturalizing presence of scientific language and computer visualizations which are used, in her view, as a means to promote the “transcendent and universalizing” nature of the music.293

While both camps reject connections to the popular and/or commercial, they clearly construct a non-existent authenticity through racial, socioeconomic, and technological

291 Ibid, 136.

292 Ibid.

293 Georgina Born, Rationalizing culture, 20.

172 narratives. Levine’s claims about cultural hierarchies reflect these trends: “Exoteric or popular music is transformed into esoteric or high art at precisely that time when it becomes esoteric, that is, when it becomes or is rendered inaccessible to the types of people who appreciated it earlier.”294

Smooth Jazz finally settled into its name through radio formatting practices which thrive on detailed categories, as opposed to record label practices of broad categorization

(pop, jazz, rock, etc.). Broadcast Architecture, a radio consulting firm, conducted a series of consumer research studies to arrive at the genre name and heralding saxophonist

Kenny G as the torchbearer.295 Stations such as Los Angeles-based KTWV “The Wave” launched in the late 80s solidifying the place of the genre and locating its target audience as the “money demographic,” which was made up of middle and upper class 25-40 year- olds.296 Myriad names for the genre floated through the mediascape by the late 80s:

“contemporary jazz,” “lite jazz,” “quiet storm,” and “new adult contemporary.”297

As Washburne notes, “such a radio friendly aesthetic provides few intellectual and emotional challenges to listeners, and smooth jazz musicians produce recordings that overtly cater to their fan base, creating a clear dividing line between making art and

294 Lawrence Levine, The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988): 234.

295 Washburne, “Does Kenny G Play Bad Jazz?,” 132.

296 Giddins, 559.

297 Ibid.

173 selling records.”298 The importance of the market in shaping the production codes of smooth jazz secures the form as a prime example of functional music, or music with a clear utilitarian purposes. Not since the swing era has a form of jazz been so successful in the commercial marketplace. Over 50 years earlier, Adorno was writing about this exact phenomenon. Adorno’s writings on jazz are among his most scathing and misunderstood.

Maintaining that jazz exemplifies music as commodity form, Adorno argued that the formal elements, predictable resolved dissonances and calculable improvisations, “have been completely abstractly pre-formed by the capitalist requirement that they be exchangeable as commodities.”299 However these claims were about specific kinds of jazz popular in the 30s in the Southern Germany as well as the work of Paul Whiteman,

“The King of Jazz,” who wrote big band dance music which was often called jazz.300

While the music sounds nothing like smooth jazz, the critiques and functionality of both forms are equal in measure. Adorno writes: “Jazz is not what it ‘is’: its aesthetic articulation is sparing and can be understood at a glance. Rather, it is what it is used for….”301

298 Washburne, 132.

299 Theodor W. Adorno, “On Jazz,” in Essays on Music by Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Susan Gillespie, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 477.

300 Richard Leppert, “Music and Mass Culture: Commentary,” ibid, 349.

301 Adorno, “On Jazz,” 472.

174

This relationship between the flavor of commoditized jazz Adorno so vehemently argued against and the proliferation of insults302 against smooth jazz is found in each form’s utilitarian value. As music made to be sold and danced to, ‘30s swing jazz provided the aural accompaniment to dance and the latest fashion trends. Similarly, the identity of smooth jazz as functional music is deeply tied to ideals of leisure within a neoliberal capitalist system. Most recently, Nate Chinen of The New York Times has noted the increasingly mobilized and rebranded character of smooth jazz as it gains its sea legs in the digital musical economy.303 With branded smooth jazz cruises presented by famous musicians such as Dave Koz, the smooth jazz experience becomes immersive, containing listeners in the physically mobilized space of the cruiseship, an emblem of tourism and upward mobility. In the present chapter, I am exploring a particularly common media context in which smooth jazz operates alongside depictions of the environment. This context is what jazz critic Gary Giddins claims the music is made for:

“(Smooth jazz) exists primarily as musical wallpaper for the Weather Channel….”304

As we have seen, smooth jazz, along with many other forms of functional music, has been subjected to sustained critique. Exemplary of what not to do, these critics argue

302 One of the most memorable insults towards Kenny G came from Pat Metheny, a respected member of the jazz community whose music often verges on smooth jazz, describing his “lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune noodling.” Giddins, Jazz, 560.

303 Nate Chinen, “Smooth Sailing in a Sea of Evolution: Smooth Jazz Finds New Ways to Reach its Audience,” The New York Times, July 5, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/arts/music/smooth-jazz-finds-new-ways-to-reach- its-audience.html?_r=0

304 Giddins, 560. 175 that smooth jazz liquidates improvised music of its liberatory potential. Yet, judging by such inflammatory responses to the form, the listener must acquiesce to the music’s ability to provoke. Indeed, in the same way that environmental narratives solidify through uncritical repetition, smooth jazz’s ubiquitous presence on TWC successfully functions as the “natural” sound of the station and its brand of weather.

The Weather Channel Presents

As discussed above, a brand’s sonic identity is not just found in its theme song or sonic logo, but can be equally vital through recurrent use of particular musical genres.

The channel’s emphasis on “varied, current, bright, happy, and upbeat” sounds of smooth jazz became so intertwined with the channel’s identity that a two-volume curated set of smooth jazz songs was released by the channel in 2007. The first release, The Weather

Channel Presents Smooth Jazz, which peaked at #1 on Billboard, features a woman surrendering herself to the rapturous winds of the rough seas. The drama subsides upon opening the CD package to view a bodiless, distant view of what appears to be Oregon’s

Cannon Beach. Volume 2 does away with the body altogether in favor of an adirondack chair on a deck in what looks to be a secluded beach at The Hamptons. The complete removal of the body reflects functional music’s investment in identity flexibility— promoting a space for listeners to imagine themselves.

The liner notes quote the channel’s OCM’s (on-camera-meteorologists) as they wax philosophic on connections between the weather and music. Carl Parker reflects on the emotional power of the weather as a composition to be taken in like music: “...the feel of the air sparks an array of feelings, which can reach back through the best moments of 176 our lives. Music is similarly evocative for many of us, having remarkable capacity to shape and enhance our experiences.” Weekend Now anchor Kim Perez connects the fragile conditions of jazz improvisation to the “rare mix of conditions that cause a perfect storm.” While these OCM’s are quick to conflate musical sounds and weather activity into something akin to a Debordian hi-def spectacle, its important to remember the other side of the smooth jazz/weather coin: both phenomena are certainly used to being ignored and reviled. As jazz critic Giddins quips, “there are many things to dislike about smooth jazz— for example, everything.”305

As discussed above, this is a common sentiment amongst purists. But smooth jazz has never claimed to be un-branded, natural, or pure.306 Rather, the music, like all forms of commercially available music in the capitalist environment, subsists on the development of a brand and a culture of listeners. In this way smooth jazz reflects the explicitly commercial aesthetics of TWC. What is being sold by the channel is a brand of weather wrapped in music which amplifies the human tendency to control, calculate, and predict something that is ultimately out of control. In this way, smooth jazz is not only successful in sounding out the weather as a product, but it accurately reflects the values of a society set on commodifying everything in an attempt to master the unmasterable.

Further, the existence and success of smooth jazz speaks to its power as a cultural and

305 Giddins, 560.

306 Note the prevalence of renditions of classic standards and cover songs in explicitly accessible ways by artists ranging from Kenny G (At Last...the Duets Album, 2004) to Mindi Abair (In Hi-Fi Stereo, 2010) to B.W.B. (Human Nature, 2013).

177 ecological force which challenges institutionalized disdain for technologized pop aesthetics within jazz and environmental purist communities.

In the mid-90s, Trammell Starks, an Atlanta-based composer and studio musician, was commissioned by the channel to produce a collection of 44 songs which went on to air 24/7 for two years straight. Eventually, the channel began to rotate properly licensed music while Starks’ local on the 8s compositions still appeared regularly until 2007. They also became the default sound of the station’s technical difficulty mode.307 Starks’ uncanny ability for triplet-based musical earworms and descending chord progressions exemplifies the ephemeral role of the Local on the 8s as a simultaneously transitional and main event. Alongside the contained melodrama of “Seasons on the Edge” and the smooth reliability of “Reflections in Time,” the Starks composition “Life” sheds light on the processes which keep the viewer coming back for more.

Composing in a modular way, Starks’ music holds to a strict policy of not letting any one section go on for too long. With “Life,” the composer opens with a dependable pad allowing the progression to hover seamlessly through a bVII-ii-I progression in Db.

The mode is defiantly mixolydian and the melodic content hinges on triplet-figures which emphasize strong chord tones. The opening verse of Lionel Richie’s olympic anthem

“Dancing on the Ceiling” comes mind as the melody hints at exotic, technologized lands bathed in neon.

307 Justin Makepeace and Kevin Latchford, “Music that Moved the Clouds: My Interview with Trammell Starks,” The Black Flag Cast, podcast audio, March 11, 2015, http://www.blackflagspecialk.com/2015/03/music-that-moved-the-clouds-my-interview- with-trammell-starks/ 178

As the verse of “Life” gives way to the chorus, the key center is dropped a whole- step and begins it controlled chromatic descent. Once again the drama is high, but not too high. By dropping the key center, the syntagmatic motion of Starks’ melodic content undergoes a series of paradigmatic shifts, changing note-relationships in the process. The melody is once again voiced by an alto saxophone, outlining an ascending major-seventh arpeggio in the key of B. The melodic call is responded to with a descending major- seventh arpeggio in F-sharp. The sequence continues another whole-step down in A major, concluding with a rapidly executed figure that lands on the dominant of the original home key of Db. This motion through keys is exceptional in its ability to mask forward motion. Starks’ sonic brand of environmental imaginary cloaks endlessly modulating musical content in a timbral sheen that entices and distracts the listener from critical engagement with the harmonic stakes. And it is here in the timbral zone where smooth jazz is set apart from traditional forms of American improvisational music.

The confluence of synthesized nylon-string guitar patches with breathy digital pads revels in a self-conscious embrace of sonic simulacra. And, given the context, it is only proper. Depictions of weather forecasts with cut-and-paste disembodied vocal cues should feature functional sounds which call attention to the synthetic stakes of the moment. As Starks modulates through keys via a guitar solo played on a keyboard, there is an intrinsic awareness of the fabricated character of it all. And, as humans have become completely intertwined with non-human environments, we must consider how functional sounds have contributed to equally mediated conceptions of the natural world. 179

As Starks sets data to chord changes and production codes which evoke nostalgic sentiments for a hopeful environmental imaginary, we must consider the relationship between nostalgia and environments. Displacing key centers against continually evolving weather conditions bathes the broadcast in a kind of existential state of liminality. Put simply, home base now becomes a stop along the way to a new destination. Yet, the memory of what was is never fully out of earshot. Digital reverb and delay and consistent pad tones which imbue entire pieces encourage constant reflection on the past. What once was a meteorological data set is now a nostalgia vehicle. Starks’ compositions sound phenomenologically sealed, casting a reflective image of the listener as a future anonymous self living life in world of endless forecasts.

Smooth jazz and nostalgia both occupy spaces of intense critical derision, seemingly operating outside of critique due to their recurrent positions as strawmen available to knock down as examples how not to be critically engaged with the world. I take up these seemingly uncritical modes of expression, modes which ‘stand accused,’ as a way to explore the complexities and possibilities of forms of creative engagement often become framed as easy. As I will show, the ready availability of these phenomena provide space to consider the ambivalences inherent to the politics of the Anthropocene; it is an environment which is simultaneously easy, or smooth, in its ubiquitous engagements between human and more-than-human phenomena while posing the difficulty of imagining productive ways of listening and thinking in the era of the

Anthropocene. 180

Nostalgic Listening in the Anthropocene

Since his childhood, graphic designer Charles Abel has maintained a lifelong love affair with the weather. Abel admits that his obsession with the weather began after witnessing a dramatic tornado at the age of 8. In his video compilation, “Special

Presentation: 20 Years of The Weather Chazz,” Abel speaks of his journey to designing emulations of current and past graphics of WeatherSTAR software.308 After meeting another weather and Weather Channel enthusiast, Matt Marron, the two designers launched the website TWC Classics. The website attracted numerous fans and has highly active forums for users to talk about TWC’s aesthetics and depictions of the weather.

Another fan, TWC itself, eventually turned to the TWC Classics community to help beta test emerging local forecast technology.

Through creating special effects, redesigning fonts and animating icons, The

TWC Classics community attracted two other programmers, Nick Smith and Bill

Goodwell, who had created a software program, to emulate the WeatherSTAR exactly.

This work came to fruition in the WeatherSTAR 4000 emulator (now referred to as simulator). The software was presented at the 2013 American Meteorology Society conference to a room of baffled meteorologists. At the end of the presentation, the programming duo responded to a singular question about what compelled them to undertake such a project. The answer lies in an excerpt from their conference abstract:

308 “Special Presentation: 20 Years of The Weather Chazz,” YouTube video, posted by “The Weather Chazz,” October 9, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMXWoNxaatc

181

“The application has been received not only as an impressive piece of weather dissemination software for the home or work environment, but also as a source of strong nostalgia for those who sought weather information before the widespread growth of the internet.”309

Nostalgia is paramount to the mission of TWC Classics community, the online community in which significant weather broadcast software, on-camera meteorologists

(OCMs), and music is cataloged, discussed, and mimicked. The aesthetic shape of this community is productively heard through the lens of Jennifer Ladino’s counter-nostalgia as a method of listening to weather-related functional music.

By taking up nostalgia as a productive social and political practice, I argue that the role of functional music in the meteorological audiovisual contexts can support the reclamation of nostalgia as a progressive practice. Attending to the bodily and material aspects of listening within domestic sonic spaces offers the opportunity to embrace what

Ladino calls “counter-nostalgia.” By examining the role of functional music and sound in the culture of weather fandom, we find that a unique form of musicking is taking place which engages with musical sound in a way that reflects both the felt and manipulated realities of weather and climate.

As we have heard, the sonic brand of TWC relies on a psuedo-spontaneous, harmonically agile functional sound bathed in digital production codes. These

309 Bill Goodwill and N. Smith, “The WeatherSTAR 4000 Emulator for Quasi- Operational Dissemination of Real-time Weather Data,” 93rd American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting, January 8, 2013, https://ams.confex.com/ams/93Annual/webprogram/Paper219704.html

182 reverberations encourage a material engagement with the past as they leave residue on emergent sonic content. Nostalgia is central to this aural engagement. The question at hand is whether or not this nostalgia can break from what Boym calls restorative practice of wishing they used to broadcast like “the old days” and be read through a reflective mode, a mode in which physical, visual, and aural phenomena collide in ambivalent and productive ways? Crucial to this exploration is an emphasis on the material experience of

TWC: it is consumed in physical space with air and light pushed into meaningful forms.

Drawing on Douglas Kahn’s idea of “transperception,” I aim to highlight this material awareness of the spaces traversed, annihilated, and recuperated in the process of weather broadcast consumption. By amplifying the sociocultural spaces of smooth jazz and cable weather programming, transperception reflects the feedback loop inherent in any representation of the natural world. As I have been arguing, the concern of this study is to foreground potential effects of environmental representation through sound while considering the active role of the listener in the process of making meaning.

In order to highlight the agency of the listener engaged in the transperceptive process, I draw on Jennifer Ladino’s notion of counter-nostalgia as a literary tool which revitalizes the often critiqued concept of nostalgia itself. Counter-nostalgia takes up tools grounded in diverse sets of histories, connecting with Kahn’s emphasis on “spaces traversed.” Listening to sounds and stories with an intense awareness of the multiple nodes of connection that shape the signal allows for a deeper sense of the stakes and consequences at play. Ladino’s idea “depends upon a tactical reappropriation of more dominant strands of nostalgia through creative, often literary, means; for that reason, its 183 functions are historically contextual.”310 While the texts Ladino explores depict “home” as “fragmented, complicated and layered,” she finds evidence of counter-nostalgia working simultaneously to be “restorative, insofar as it mimics totalizing or coherent narratives in order to challenge or reinvent them for its own ends.”311

Nostalgia is a prime target for critics of the postmodern era. Fredric Jameson makes a well-known critique of the nostalgia culture by honing in on films such as

American Graffiti and Rumblefish arguing that with such work “it was never a matter of some old-fashioned ‘representation’ of historical content, but instead approached the

‘past’ through stylistic connotation, conveying ‘pastness’ by the glossy qualities of the image, and ‘1930s-ness’ or ‘1950s-ness’ by the attributes of fashion….”312 His argument follows that nostalgia has a paralyzing effect on culture as old styles are uncritically recycled uncritically, origin stories are romanticized, and its co-optation by political forces to justify present action.313

Such critique emphasizes the importance of time in the nostalgic experience. It is the the effect of nostalgia on present and future actions and role it plays in the construction of historical narrative. As a result, the term is often connected to

310 Jennifer Ladino, Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2012), 15.

311 Ibid.

312 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism, (Durham: Duke University Press), 19.

313 Ibid, 1-54.

184 communities and texts which are broadly stamped as conservative and uncritical. Susan

Stewart sums up the phenomenon of nostalgia as a “social disease” in which “the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative.”314 Environmental historian William

Cronon’s case against nostalgia calls attention to the highly constructed and domesticated nature of the wilderness in the American environmental imagination.315

Yet, as Ladino argues, most critiques of nostalgia eschew the term’s physical and material grounding opting instead for an emphasis on temporality. The term found its first usage by Swiss doctors who detected an (untreatable) “sad mood originating from a desire to return to one’s native land” that was most common amongst soldiers.316 That nostalgia is connected to both emotion and mood as well as a physical space (land), expands its ambivalent nature calling attention to its agentive capacity as an emotion and a narrative. Additionally, the prevalence of nostalgia in postmodern society “can and does play a role in helping us monitor broad cultural shifts.”317 The productivity of hearing nostalgia in smooth jazz as embedded in the weather channel bridges anxieties of control,

314 Susan Stewart, On longing: Narratives of the miniature, the gigantic, the souvenir, the collection, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1984), 23.

315 William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness.” In Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. by William Cronon, (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1996), 69-90.

316 Johannes Hofer, “Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia,” trans. Carolyn Kiser Anspach, Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine, vol. 2, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1934), 381.

317 Ladino, 186.

185 through forecasting and planning and chaos, by understanding that nature is ultimately out of our hands.

In her seminal work on nostalgia, Boym points out that the world comes from two

Greek roots: nostos meaning “return home” and algia meaning “longing.” After rehearsing the familiar (negative) consequences of nostalgia, Boym splits the idea open into restorative and reflective modes, offering “a typology that might illustrate some of nostalgia’s mechanisms of seduction and manipulation.”318 The restorative mode echoes

Jameson’s warnings of conservative glosses of history for the sake of progress by emphasizing the “transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home.”319 While restorative nostalgia thinks of itself as “truth and tradition,” reflective nostalgia thrives on the longing itself and dwelling “on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity.”320

The delineation between restorative and reflective modes of nostalgia is especially important when considering human relationships to natural environments. As both emotion and narrative, nostalgia is further impacted by the temporality of musical sound.

In his book Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, Don Ihde outlines the idea of the auditory imagination, a space prone to ambivalence in the same ways as the nostalgic experience. By interlinking external and internal sonic perception, Ihde notes

318 Svetlana Boym, “Nostalgia and Its Discontents,” in The Hedgehog Review 9.2 (2007), 7-18.

319 Ibid, 13.

320 Ibid.

186

“the possibility of a synthesis of imagined and perceived sound….”321 But Ihde is careful to note that “the auditory ‘hallucination’ is not a matter of hearing one thing as something else but a matter of a doubled sound, a synthesized harmonic echo.”322 This doubled sound, or echo, reflects Boym’s claims of nostalgia as “a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images—of home and abroad, of past and present, of dream and everyday life.”323

Continuing to mix aural and literary scholarship, I take up Jo Tacchi’s ethnographic study of the role of golden-age radio as a vehicle for the retention and exploration of memory. In her work, Tacchi delineates American and Greek definitions of nostalgia, with the American version being “trivializing romantic sentimentality,”324 while the Greek stands as “the desire or longing with burning pain to journey.”325 Smooth jazz and its connection to TWC stands at the nexus of these definitions, both affectively wrapping weather forecasts in a bath of sentimental sounds and beckoning the listener to head out into the world and experience the real thing. Contrary to the American definition of nostalgia as a phenomenon that “freezes the past...preventing the present from

321 Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 132.

322 Ibid.

323 Boym, 7.

324Jo Tacchi, “Nostalgia and Radio Sound,” in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. by Michael Bull and Les Back (New York: Berg, 2003), 287.

325Ibid.

187 establishing a dynamic perceptual relationship to its history,”326 Tacchi amplifies the qualitative alterations that resound from an active nostalgic listening practice as both a mode of consumption and production.

Irony works as a successful component to nostalgia. As Hutcheon notes, ironic distance is “necessary for reflective thought about the present as well as the past.”327 In addition, Haraway points to irony’s capabilities as both rhetorical strategy and political method which embraces unresolved contradictions.328 By mobilizing memory within the context of TWC, I am concerned with what a nostalgic listening practice can provide in the way of new perspectives on the weather as it is imbued with a distinctly human presence. I am also interested in how outmoded musical genres and technologies can be taken up and reconfigured, altering the present and suggestive of possible ways forward.

However, this idea of nostalgia as listening practice must be construed with critical irony, as it can be a slippery slope within the environmental imagination.

As a seemingly close cousin to nostalgia, the elegy stands as the preferred mode of the environmental literary imagination. As a “poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead,” the elegy makes looking back the only way forward. This mode favors particular forms of biotic nature, influencing scientific research on endangered

326Ibid.

327 Linda Hutcheon, “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” in Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory, ed. Raymond Vervliet et al. (Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000): 207.

328 Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s, “ in Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics, ed. Elizabeth Weed (London, Routledge, 1989), 173. 188 species that almost altogether ignores the hundreds of thousands of protists and fungi and other forms of nature that seem disconnected from human experience. This selective emphasis on nature reflects the trajectory that have brought the human species to have such an impact on the planet. Premature elegies for a planet still very much alive obfuscate the slowly sawing away destruction wrought by life lived in a resource-heavy capitalist system. Far from the elegiac mode, we find the makings of a nostalgic listening practice embedded within activities of the enthusiastic weather channel fan community.

TWC fans are passionate about weather, recalling favorite storms and weather events with a sense of shock and awe. Yet, these recollections are not frozen in the past.

Rather, they are given new life through emulation and a convergence of past aesthetics with present conditions. The idea of a preference for emulation as reality is reflective of

Jean Baudrillard’s ideas simulation and simulacra. Baudrillard states: “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real.”329 For TWC aficionados, the project is steeped not only in a nostalgia for a purer form of weather construction, but a desire to mobilize past depictions of the weather as means to interrogate developments in the broadcast of weather and climate patterns. In Deleuzian terms, the TWC Classics phenomena enacts step one of the refrain: “Territorializing marks simultaneously develop into motifs and

329 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 2.

189 counterpoints, and reorganize functions and regroup forces.”330 This nostalgic practice marks the territory of the channel’s cultural and aesthetic imprint. The WeatherSTAR emulator software developers seek to solidify framing devices by way of perfected simulations with the goal of a sustained conception of the right kind of weather.

Endless Refrain

What draws me to the classic sounds of TWC is the chance to develop an ear fit for the Anthropocene, connecting nostalgic practice with lived experience in an epoch in which humans have made significant impacts on the Earth’s ecosystems. By attending to the environing effects of smooth jazz as it encircles the Local on the 8s segment, we examine ways of listening that encourage the deprogramming and reprogramming of our relationships with the weather, climate, and more-than-human environments at large.

Listening to smooth jazz in this way, we trade cynical flavors of irony for an affective posture which recognizes the importance of ambivalence in conceptualizing the environment as it currently is: an environment deeply impacted by human activity. This is a way to take seriously the notion of nostalgic listening as a convergence of mimesis and poesis, replicating social conditions of feeling and, in doing so, perhaps leading toward qualitative alterations of such conditions.

In a time when climate change stands as the dominant environmental issue, it is more and more necessary to make paradigmatic alterations to familiar ways of sensing.

330 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 322.

190

Recalling Russolo’s figuration of the “surprising variety of noises” available to the willing listener, special attention to sounds which seem to eschew critical engagement can enrich the scope of listening through the complexities of American cultural relationships with the environment. Thinking through the effects of CO2 emissions alongside a nylon string guitar patch on a Korg Triton synthesizer requires massive shifts in the environmental imagination. Such shifts embrace collisions of the slick and the sick, the consonant and dissonant, the smooth and rough hues of cable services interrupted by permanent glitches in the broadcast system. With these things in mind, it may be useful to tune in to the sounds of your local forecast.

191

CHAPTER 4: SOUNDS LIKE GARBAGE: LISTENING TO ECO-CATASTROPHES

Click, click, click, click, ring, shake. Click, click, click, click, ring, pop. The opening percussive moments of “Earth Minutes” sound out a thin, digital tick-tock figure as synthetic “ahhs” bend in harmony. The rhythmic figures are misaligned, sounding thrown together at random. A triumphant, fake timpani resounds from dominant to tonic key at full force. As the “ahhs” ring out, the percussive motif insists on slight inaccuracy.

It sounds like a musical theater overture played by defiant robots.

With three contrasting sections of calm, less calm, and frantic, “Earth Minutes” makes its way through a series of synthetic sonic spaces. What blends the sounds together is the hiss of blown out digital keyboard presets mixed out of balance. The drums are suddenly too loud. The bass drops out inexplicably. The form rides the edge of falling apart completely. But the timbre is consistent: it is plastic, catchy, and repulsive. The sounds, by their “nature,” interrogate the very idea of natural sounds. By attuning to

Raymond Williams’ three perspectives on nature as an essential quality, inherent force, and material aspects, we open the door to investigate how to make sense of this deeply familiar, hyper-synthetic sonic space.

This chapter examines a 2011 album by experimental electronic musician James

Ferraro entitled Far Side Virtual (FSV). Consisting of 16 instrumental songs made up of preset digital sounds, rhythmic loops, and sonic logos, the composer set about to write a

"rubbery plastic symphony for global warming, dedicated to the Great Pacific Garbage 192

Patch."331 With its emphasis on uneven audio mixes, grating synthetic timbres, and humorous engagements with robotic voices, Ferraro has set up a metaphorical sonic imaginary: an oscillating world of trashy tones not unlike the aquatic clutter that converges in the North Pacific Gyre.

By positioning Ferraro’s work alongside other environmentally-engaged creative activity, I aim to illuminate the gap that exists for art to intersect with environmental issues in unexpected and productive ways. I argue that FSV, and the vaporwave genre from which it emerges, exploits the aesthetics of functional music as a way to sound out environmental imaginaries consistent with the complexities of life lived in the

Anthropocene. By calling attention to the ubiquitous sonic infrastructure that permeates consumptive interactions with technology, FSV challenges the listener to not only examine these seemingly insatiable appetites, but the ways in which such behaviors manifest themselves as we engage with environmental issues. In short, this chapter considers how making sound can make sense of place, as it is rapidly redefined in an era wherein the human species has made irreparable impacts on geologic conditions and processes

Central to this investigation is the unique process of sense-making that occurs through sound. Steven Feld’s analysis of how sound functions for the Kaluli people of

Papua New Guinea poses questions important for this study. In asking how “...the

331 Rory Gibb, “Adventures on the Far Side: An Interview with James Ferraro,” The Quietus, December 15, 2011, accessed November 13, 2014, http://thequietus.com/articles/07586-james-ferraro-far-side-virtual-interview

193 perceptual engagements we call sensing [are] critical to conceptual constructions of place,” Feld foregrounds the potential of sound to mold relationships with physical environments. Building on Feld’s idea of acoustemology, or “acoustic ways of knowing,”

I aim to articulate how “sonic presence and awareness” shapes how “people make sense of experiences.”332 At the same time, I consider how Feld’s concept operates in dialogue with the realities of senses of place which reflect the 21st-century, deterritorialized planet. This perspective is necessarily urban and distinctly virtual in its communicative processes. The idea of ‘being somewhere,’ has drastically changed with telecommunications allowing parties to interact across massive distances. Ecological disasters reflect this dispersal of time and space as well, proliferating across great portions of the planetary environments. To this end, ecocritic Ursula Heise’s idea of

“eco-cosmopolitanism” provides a productive way to engage with dispersed practices of planetary sense-making. This idea of “environmental world citizenship,” in Heise’s view, is sufficient to address the “challenges that deterritorialization poses for the environmental imagination.”333 This chapter places Feld and Heise in conversation in order to sound out the particular environmental imaginaries constructed by Ferraro’s mutated brand of functional music and the equally distorted realities of decentralized ecological disasters.

332 Steven Feld, “Waterfalls of song: An acoustemology of place resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea,” Senses of place, ed. S. Feld and K. H. Basso, (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1996), 91-135.

333 Ursula Heise, Sense of Place, Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 10.

194

After contextualizing Ferraro’s work in relation to other environmentally-engaged works, I will consider how these functional sounds relate to the construction of environmental knowledge in an era of environmental disasters which are “massively distributed in time and space.”334 In doing so, I look to the construction of the Great

Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) as perceived through multiple perspectives of activists, scientists, and media outlets. The aesthetic connection between mutated functional sounds and decentralized eco-catastrophes offer new ways to hear how environmental imaginaries are perceived in the era of the Anthropocene. At stake in this investigation are questions of how functional sounds operate when stripped from their original contexts. What do composers do with elevator music in an age of elevators with no music? How do environmental activists and researchers conjure lasting environmental imaginaries out of pollution too small and remote to be physically engaged with?

Deterritorializing Pop

In an August 2009 edition of The Wire, a magazine devoted to experimental music and sound, writer David Keenan coined the term “hypnagogic pop.”335 In

Baudrillardian fashion, Keenan simply calls this newly christened, post-millennial form of outsider music “pop music refracted through the memory of a memory.”336 Artists

334 Timothy Morton, “Zero Landscapes in the Time of Hyperobjects.” Graz Architectural Magazine 7 (2011): 80.

335 David Keenan, "Childhood's End: Hypnagogic Pop," The Wire, Aug. 2009: 26- 31.

336 Ibid, 26.

195 such as Ariel Pink, Macintosh Plus, Oneohtrix Point Never, and James Ferraro have all approached ‘80s culture, the decade in which most of them were born, with a mixture of awe and irreverence. Like noise music cultures, hypnogogic pop “fetishizes the outmoded media of its infancy, releasing albums on cassette, celebrating the video era and obsessing over the reality-scrambling potential of photo-copied art.”337

These varied attempts to conjure up indistinct impressions of an era of utopic ideals, Reaganomics, and the promises of digital technology speak to the genre’s self- aware capacity to express ambivalence. By projecting and interrogating the ecstatic shortcomings of digital claims of authenticity, hypnagogic pop revels in its “drive to restore the circumstances of early youthful epiphanies while re-framing them as present realities, possible futures.”338 These “youthful epiphanies” are shot through with an updated brand of nostalgia, described by music critic Simon Reynolds as more of an addiction than a progressive political posture. As he notes in Retromania, “nostalgia is now thoroughly entwined with the consumer-entertainment complex: we feel the pangs for the products of yesteryear, the novelties and distractions that filled up our youth [...]

The intersection between mass culture and personal memory is the zone that spawned retro.”339 Perhaps this is nothing new.

337 Ibid.

338 Ibid.

339 Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past (London: Faber and Faber, 2011): xxix-xxx.

196

Sometime around 2009, the term vaporwave emerged as a generic term for a style of electronic music that turned to the early ‘90’s corporate internet aesthetics for guidance. The term is thought to have roots, albeit shallow roots, in the term vaporware which refers to a software project announced and marketed by a technology company that never comes to fruition. Vaporware can also refer to what musicologist Adam Harper calls “the deliberate fabrication of future products, with no intention to eventually release them, so as to hold customers’ attention.”340 By slowing down micro-loops of ‘80s and

‘90s library music, embracing digital preset timbres of consumer synths, and recontextualizing sound logos and ringtones, vaporwave artists accentuate the ubiquitous sounds of the background, effectively turning the spotlight on the spotlight itself.

At the end of 2013, Ferraro had well over 100 releases, upwards of 30 under his own name and nearly 30 aliases with their own string of releases. After releasing multiple recordings in the mid-2000s as one half of the noise duo The Skaters, Ferraro released his first official solo record Multitopia (2007). The record uses clips of reality

TV shows, tabloid shows to weave a post-9/11 tapestry of “extreme, baroque-style consumerism.”341 From the beginning of his solo career, Ferraro has employed hyperreal rhetoric in song titles such as “Wired Tribe/Digital Gods,” “Roaches Watch TV,” “Condo

Pets,” etc.; and in interviews he often cites Foucault and Baudrillard as some of his

340 Adam Harper, “Vaporwave and the Pop Art of the Virtual Plaza,” Dummy Mag, July 12, 2012, accessed November 11, 2013, http://www.dummymag.com/features/adam-harper-vaporwave

341 James Ferraro, liner notes to Far Side Virtual, Hippos in Tanks HIT013, LP, 2012.

197 favorite thinkers. Much like the ephemeral quality of his continually transforming aliases,

Ferraro’s biography remains mysterious. Born in Rochester, New York “sometime in the mid-80s,” Ferraro remains transient, calling both Los Angeles and New York home.342

While Ferraro tours and releases physical albums, there remains a fleeting quality of copies without originals that spills forth from his work. Small-batch DIY releases on primitive formats such as CD-Rs and cassettes amplify the ephemeral halo around

Ferraro’s oeuvre as these limited releases fetch inflated prices on a regular basis. Further, there is even evidence of Ferraro enacting the musical equivalent to vaporware, releasing

James Ferraro and Zac Davis Are Theives, a recording currently fetching upwards of

$100 and bearing no evidence of its actually existence.343

This performative act, wherein concepts take precedence over execution, promising a release of music that doesn’t exist, underscores the virtual quality of the vaporwave experience. Ontological questions abound: Is this music you even need to hear to know the sound of? Is there an original contribution from the artist? Should the music be available for purchase? Indeed, a central paradox of Ferraro’s work lies in a drive toward a critical aesthetic autonomy, while simultaneously generating a glut of commodified content only to be fetishized as rare objects for consumption. This move obliterates easy high/low divides, bringing into question resolute boundaries between

342 Emilie Friedlander, “Artist Profile: James Ferraro,” Altered Zones November 30, 2011, accessed January 17, 2014, http://alteredzones.com/posts/2167/artist-profile- james-ferraro/

343 See James Twig Harper, James Ferraro and Zac Davis are Thieves, http://www.discogs.com/James-Twig-Harper-James-Ferraro-And-Zac-Davis-Are- Theives/release/3022749 198 commercial and underground aesthetics. Ferraro’s nods to the GPGP can then be extended beyond a metaphor for widespread habits of consumption. The very identity of the GPGP (and Ferraro’s FSV) hinges on attempts to amplify the imprecise.

Fredric Jameson’s ideas of the role of mass culture in the postmodern moment speak to this tendency to relinquish the precision in order “to transform the transparent flow of language as much as possible into material images and objects we can consume.”344 Contrapuntal sonic logos and unidentifiable microplastics breaking down in the sea reflect decentralized conceptions of sonic expression and ecological disaster. This imprecision can be interpreted as the resultant anonymity of a networked world, or as

Arjun Appadurai puts it, the consequences of how “locality as a property...of social life comes under siege in modern societies.”345

Sociologist Anthony Giddens further articulates the tensions inherent in the increased pressures of modernization. Through a “disembedding” of social systems,

Giddens points toward a “‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space.”346 While environmentalists can chant the familiar response to “think globally, act locally,” what happens when the very idea of locality becomes indiscernible from globalized activities.

344 Fredric Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Social Text 1 (1979): 133.

345 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalilzation, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 179.

346 Anthony Giddens, Consequences of Modernity, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 21.

199

The seemingly complementary visions eschewed by thinking about the globe in the abstract and religiously composting last night’s dinner come under critique in Heise’s project of redefining place in a globalized world.

Heise’s idea of eco-cosmopolitanism arises from a view that attends to the realities of cultural formation outside of ‘naturally’ arising, physically embedded circumstances. Her argument rests on the problem that “ecologically oriented thinking has yet to come to terms with one of the central insights of current theories of globalization: namely, that the increasing connectedness of societies around the globe entails the emergence of new forms of culture that are no longer anchored in place….”347

The challenge, then, to the realities of deterritorialization “is to envision how ecologically based advocacy on behalf of the nonhuman world as well as on behalf of greater socioenvironmental justice might be formulated in terms that are premised...on ties to territories and systems that are understood to encompass the planet as a whole.”348 Heise demonstrates her investment in eco-cosmopolitanism through exemplary works of literature and art which “deploy allegory in larger formal frameworks of dynamic and interactive collage or montage.”349 I situate Ferraro’s project, and the formal dimensions of vaporwave, in conversation with Heise’s redefinition of place and Feld’s acoustemology, or means of “sounding as a condition of and for knowing,” in order to

347 Heise, 10.

348 Ibid.

349 Ibid.

200 hear how functional sounds can be used to sound out deterritorrialized environmental disasters.350

After experimental music magazine The Wire named FSV the 2011 “Album of the

Year,” Ferraro’s project solidified the validity of the hypnagogic sub-genres everywhere, making room for conceptually ambitious tendencies to be clothed in amateurish production techniques. It should be noted that by naming these ‘ambitious tendencies,’ I am referring to Ferraro’s relentless posture which welcomes the “unexpected and imperceptible introduction of commodity structure into the very form and content of the work of art itself.”351 Just as Jameson expands on Adorno and Horkheimer’s insights into the culture industry, we find an alignment with generic practices intent on sonically articulating a whole-hearted, virtual engagement with the commodity structure. There is no better example of these qualities in Ferraro’s discography than on Far Side Virtual.

Tuning in to the Far Side

A digital piano figure enters as the flutter of a synthetic, watery ringtone lingers in the background. Thin ersatz woodblocks hammer out a repetitive call and response pattern as they drown in gated digital reverb. The mood is light and anxious. A second ringtone-like piano figure enters supplying a crucial major third that cues the listener to stay light and bury the anxiety. But unease is what guides James Ferraro’s “Linden

Dollars” to its circular endpoint. Just after the second piano shows up a 32nd note tambourine shows up, submerging and surfacing with each piano cue. Functioning as an

350 Feld, 97.

351 Jameson, 132. 201 audible representation of the daily engagement with endlessly clickable links, “Linden

Dollars” just won’t let up. More digital voices ‘ooo’ and ‘ahh’ in the background as the piece concludes abruptly at 1:34. After an inexplicable 16 seconds of silence, a lower digital voice shows up with a final trite ringtone figure. With no time to process, the album takes off into “Global Lunch”: a scenario which pairs synthesized speech with loud digital triangle figures, innumerable Skype sign on sounds, and a horrifically catchy sitar riff responded to by a digital voice saying “duh” on repeat. Welcome to Far Side

Virtual, where “Dubai Dream Tone” is on full volume, relentlessly taking the listener on

“Adventures in Green Foot Printing,” exploding with major chords hopefully leading toward a true understanding of “Google Poeisis.”

Figure 18: Far Side Virtual.

As voices from the virtual world of Second Life and text-to-speech voices cue the listener to order sushi and that they have reached their destination, FSV is imbued with a 202 distinctly mobile listening experience. It is not a stretch to imagine moving through virtual and literal spaces, panned and edited like a commercial, filled with goods to purchase, consume, and throw away. The sounds and melodies equally reflect these consumable qualities, mixed and pieced together as if to demonstrate to full and limited capabilities of a freshly purchased synthesizer in the year 1985. General MIDI (musical instrument digital interface) sounds are often considered ground zero in the digital music landscape, functioning as a place to start, and hopefully move away from as quickly as possible. Electronic musicians habitually have worked to shape and tweak preset timbres to create unrecognizable sounds, fresh to the ears. In the early ‘80s, when MIDI first arrived, a standardized set of sounds aimed to mimic the sounds of real instruments. As sampling techniques have grown by leaps and bounds, what were once hailed as

“authentic” sonic replications are often met with ironic cynicism or outright disgust to the distinguishing listener. Yet these dated preset sounds are exactly what Ferraro privileges on FSV; by illuminating falsified representations of “the real thing” the listener begins to question the very idea of real. In context, these sounds beckon the user in and out virtual and digital experiences. On FSV, Ferraro is giving voice to Henri Bergson’s sense of interpenetration with “the notes of a tune melting, so to speak, into one another.”352

Writing about plastic, Barthes expands on its ability to trouble lines between natural and artificial through its sound, stating that “what best reveals it for what it is, is the sound it gives, at once hollow and flat; its noise is its undoing, as are its colors, for it

352 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F.L. Pogson (New York: Dover, 1913), 110.

203 seems capable of only retaining the most chemical-looking ones.”353 The hyperreal relentlessness of FSV does just this. It calls attention to the aural characteristics and relationship of plastic physical objects such as the smartphone, a bottle, a lighter, and a computer keyboard into razor sharp focus. FSV subverts the expected dream-inducing, minor-key, symmetrical melodic fragments of minimalism by pushing them into a realm of digital maximalism. We are being told each day: ‘Let’s go! Create content!

Look...another new thing! Buy it! Throw it away! Click that link! Login!’ If this rapid series of mobile commands sums up time/space of everyday life in a capitalist society, why on earth choose an amped up musical reflection of this virtual/real threshold? Isn’t the noise of everyday life enough? In Ferraro’s world, the difficult choice to surrender to these sounds promotes a conscious engagement with the ambivalences of our current environmental situation and the processes of framing and consuming it. If Ferraro is weaving a metaphorical sonic tapestry of dispersed disasters inherent to the

Anthropocene, we must consider how sound and environment gained attention alongside the increasing concerns for the environment as they emerged in the late-60s.

Beyond Good and Bad

Eliding pristine sonic production and any analog sounds at all on FSV, Ferraro pushes forward the project of interrogating Schaferian notions of moralistic binary divisions within acoustic ecology. The project of acoustic ecology was started in the late-

60s at Simon Frasier University in Vancouver as part of the World Soundscape Project.

353 Barthes, 111.

204

Led by R. Murray Schafer and his colleagues, the core of the project was restore a sense of harmony to the soundscape by “finding solutions for an ecologically balanced soundscape where the relationship between the human community and its sonic environment is balanced.”354 Guiding this original mission is a sense of a proper aural imaginary, that things need to be fixed so we can return to a “natural” state of calm. This

“natural” sound seems to imply a world without the dissonances of synthesized speech, ringtones, and sound logos. Yet such devices are integral to the process of capturing and preserving a pure, hi-def representation of soundscapes. Like the promise of the Lydian devices infecting the ear with nostalgia, this Schaferian call to fix a “world out of tune” refuses to recognize what can be gleaned from dissecting the very idea of garbage, excavating tossed out timbres, and zooming in on the nuances of microscopic changes in the biosphere.

While Timothy Morton’s ideas of dark ecology and Francisco Lopez’s dark nature recordings aim to expose the full spectrum of ecological connection, there remains an issue of removing technological mediation from the constructed ‘scape.’355 Whether one is documenting the sounds of a rainforest free from mechanical noise or a day at the landfill, the process is transduced, translated, and disseminated through technological means. The character of microphones, preamps, and digital audio workstations embody

354 Hildegard Westerkamp, “The World Soundscape Project,” The Soundscape Newsletter 1, August 1991, accessed November 11, 2015, http://wfae.proscenia.net/library/articles/westerkamp_world.pdf

355 Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 16.

205 specific ideas of how sound should sound. As Bennett Hogg notes, “the production practices and public use of music mediated by technology can be revealed as constitutive participants in the constellation of power relations….”356 By attending to the complexities of the always-already mediated nature of sound, Ferraro’s work is liberating in its hyper- artificiality. Schafer’s “aesthetic moralism” has been critiqued at length by scholars who point out the flat-footed divisions between noise as bad and silence as good.357 In

Ferraro’s domain of sonic simulacrum, FSV fires a shot over the bow with the following question: If these aren’t the sounds of a globalized world, what are? Still, the questions persist as to the project of balancing out, or de-polluting the global soundscape. Are seemingly clumsy audio mixes, harsh digital presets, and an overload of sonic logos helpful in articulating the sound of a planet rife with de-territorialized eco-catastrophes?

A consideration of how visual culture conceives of the changing scapes of the planet through maximal, detached, dystopic aesthetics sheds light on the question.

In his preface to David T. Hanson’s Waste Land: Meditations on a Ravaged

Landscape, Wendell Berry comments on the “terrifying...particularity” of Hanson’s photographs.358 The photographs are often aerial shots of sites of deforestation, excavation, and waste ponds. The color is luminescent, the shapes abstract and alluring.

356 Bennett Hogg, “Who’s Listening?,” in Music, Power, and Politics, ed. Annie J. Randall (New York: Routledge, 2005), 212.

357 Marie Suzanne Thompson, “Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect, and Aesthetic Moralism,” (Ph.D Thesis, Newcastle University, 2014).

358 David T. Hanson and Wendell Berry, Waste Land: Meditations on a Ravaged Landscape. (New York: Aperture, 1997), preface.

206

Berry remarks on the temptation to view these pictures privileging their formal features, risking the erasure of the “monstrous ugliness” that contributed to their creation. Berry calls these sites “bad art if by art we mean the ways and products of human work. If some of these results look abstract – unidentifiable, or unlike anything we have seen before – that is because nobody foresaw, because nobody cared, what they would look like.”359

While Hanson’s photos depict topological permutations in landscapes, the GPGP leaves more to the imagination. And there is no shortage of imagination, imagination which promotes misconception.

Two graphic novels have been published about the GPGP as an island. The first,

Great Pacific by Joe Harris and Martin Morazzo, follows Chas Worthington, heir to a wealthy oil family, as he retreats from his familial destiny and settles on garbage island to forge his own independent society. The second, I’m Not a Plastic Bag by Rachel Hope

Allison, anthropomorphizes a garbage island which has inherited the problem of plastic pollution and has to suffer the consequences. While the latter graphic novel contains an educational supplement in the back of the book which dispels myths about the patch as an actual island, the visual power of a floating island arguably sustains the mythology of the patch. These books aim to shock the viewer into consciousness by mapping narrative structures into ecological disasters. Concretized images of dispersed microplastics attempt to make real through unreal representations. A quick search through Google images reveals these tendencies toward narrative solidification as countless pictures merge the text of a dispersed ecological disaster with a palpable sense of containment.

359 Ibid. 207

Figure 19: Plastic Pollution.

The picture above appears through searches on the internet, furthering the expansive myths that surround the GPGP. Yet, ‘bad art’ is still what viewers long for.

Where is the garbage island? When can we visit the set of Waterworld? Dutch designers at WHIM architecture have proposed to collect the plastic, melt it down, and build a plastic, self-sustaining utopia driven by solar panels and underwater turbines. What would this world look like? 208

Figure 20: Plastic Island.

Even more pressing to the aural issues at hand, we must ask what all this would sound like. Perhaps a soundscape filled with ringtones, GPS voice, and digital representations of analog instruments. The narrative of creative works and media reports about ecological disaster often evokes a doubled response, always already shocking us into loops of inaction and action, disgust and discussion, fear and hope. Whether such questions lead to action is another matter altogether. Of particular interest are not only the ways in which such questions are framed and asked, but if there are any alternatives to such binary constrictions. 209

Beyond Nostalgia and Apocalypse

The vitality of FSV as a compelling connector of sonic ecologies is in the defamiliarized space setup by its composer. By emphasizing the (im)mobile sounds of virtual life and mutating the mix, Ferraro guides the listener into a slippery dialogue with the modern world’s utilitarian relationship with the environment. Ubiquitous sounds often appear as passive agents in our everyday interaction with technology and the outside world. Yet, these seemingly unimportant sounds shape and guide the temporal and spatial relationships of our experience of reality. These sounds carry with them purposive implications of connection, mobility, and progress, characteristics embodied by plastic through and through. Barthes sounds out the potentiality of plastic, stating, “So, more than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation; as its everyday name indicates, it is ubiquity made visible.”360 It is in the infinite transformation of plastic that the GPGP finds its true, fluid identity. As plastics break down to the micro level they become nearly invisible. While complexities give way to misinformation in the name of creative simplification for commodifiable creative production, the true transformation of the biosphere eludes easy quantification, often resisting familiar quick-fix anecdotes.

The broad narrative of eco-crisis is historically imbued with a sense of urgency that hinges on a reactionary ‘or else!’ logic. Malthusian tendencies toward knee-jerk simplifications are so common they almost appear as the only choice. Such claims ooze

360 Barthes, 110.

210 out of advertising copy, scholarly papers, and attention-grabbing headlines, i.e., “NPR's

Scott Simon talks with oceanographer Curt Ebbesmeyer about a giant patch of garbage the size of Texas floating in the Pacific Ocean.”361 And still the microplastic floats in and out of the nets, in and out of sea life, sometimes its there, sometimes not. Sea-skaters lay their eggs on it and architects and graphic novelists re-imagine it. A musician even dedicates his “symphony for global warming” to the GPGP.362

In his article “Ecomusicology between Apocalypse and Nostalgia,” Alexander

Rehding calls for an “appeal to the power of memory,” or a reconsideration of nostalgia, as an alternative to recurrent themes of environmental awareness through alarmist rhetoric.363 While Rehding admits the dangers of “regressing into sentimentalizing and romantic nature-worship,” he maintains that the current “attention-grabbing apocalyptic route” of ecocriticism is in need of alternative routes to approach the issues at hand.364

Ferraro’s work falls somewhere between the opposing forces of an end of the world scenario and the remembrance of a better one. In using sounds of the recent technological past, FSV appeals to an already seemingly unnatural picture. It is not typical environmental nostalgic practice to fill one’s ears with antiquated technological

361 “Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch,” narrated by Scott Simon, Weekend Edition Saturday, NPR, June 14, 2003, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1298536

362 Gibb, 2011.

363 Alexander Rehding, “Ecomusicology between Apocalypse and Nostalgia” Journal of the American Musicological Society 64.2 (Summer 2011): 412, accessed November 15, 2015, DOI: 10.1525/jams.2011.64.2.409

364 Ibid, 414. 211 artifacts; imagining shutting down Windows 95 for the first time or being guided by early iterations of consumer-level synthesized voices does not necessarily evoke fetishized memories of a purer, analog time. Ferraro’s use of synthesized speech to conjure up nostalgia for the fresh marks of recent permutations of global capitalism calls into question Feld’s assertion about the power of the voice to conjure a sense of place. In many ways Ferraro’s work intersects with Feld’s emphasis on the sensorial modality- shifting so essential to the Bosavi experience.

As Feld outlines his framework for the acoustemological experience, he marks the importance of the performed, embodied voice in the social creation of emotional connectedness to place.365 Yet, how do the stakes of a resounding voice shift when that voice is synthesized, intimations and inflections artificially constructed out of a pre- programmed set of affective cues? My conception of this process aligns and diverges from Feld’s notion of place sense-making through sound. Ferraro’s globalized sonic ecology grounds the subject in a sense of place. But the place is decentralized. When heard through the eco-cosmopolitan experience, the process of eco-catastrophic cultural construction necessarily hinges on an embrace of the synthetic, the ersatz. The fake voice, the decentralized GPGP, and the aesthetics of globalized micro-communicative sonic logos and telecommunications sounds out the politics of an acoustemology that resides in the virtual realm.

By filling the aural space with sound logos and melodic fragments through the filter of recently outdated sounds, Ferraro exposes the affective consequences of planned

365 Ibid, 97. 212 obsolescence. While the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky exposes such consequences through grand scale shots of ecological disaster, Ferraro hones in the transitional tones that chirp away in the background. This maneuver deflects heroic representations of ecological disgust by crafting a catchy tune, charming in its hooks, uncanny in its harsh resonances. Through this excavation of decomposing technological artifacts, a bizarre affection bubbles toward the surface, giving way to crisp perspectives on issues of sonic ecology.

Dissecting the Earworm

FSV lends a refreshing flavor to the familiar sounds and narratives of environmental crises. It reflects and reacts to the fluid definitions of “nature” by creating an auditory time/space filled with swarming sounds. These sounds are inherently mobile as they are born, live, and die in the digital space. There is nothing natural about the situation, except that it seems to be the real and virtual sound of our natural everyday life. Just as paradoxically natural is the act of discarding waste. We do it everyday, but where does it go?

It is a stretch to imagine pieces of household plastics floating in remote parts of the Pacific Ocean. The garbage dump down the street or wastebaskets in the kitchen are familiar sites for waste disposal. Just as the trash begins to smell it is buried or taken out, taken out to the next, bigger wastebasket. Pondering the transfiguration of garbage with its inherent mobility and anonymous character connects us to what commercial composers call the ‘sound logo.’ A sound logo identifies a product, aurally cuing the listener to attach meaning to the sound, hopefully developing a Pavlovian response. 213

Commercial composers Eric Siday and Raymond Scott pioneered the idea of the sound logo, often using early analog synthesizers to create aural components to instantly recognize the sound of a brand. As Daniel Jackson, CEO of Sonicbrand Ltd., puts it, “The aim of sonic branding, in relation to music is not to pollute the art form but to more accurately express the emotions of individual brands through fabulous music.”366 Sound logos have arguably weathered the transformational storms of the media far better than their lyrical counterparts of the jingle. Familiar sound logos such as signing into Skype, shutting down Windows, or a GPS voice are imbued with space-producing qualities. The rising ‘pop’ of the Skype sign-on is moving the user out of the thick, sludge of other applications into a clear, fluid world of communicative possibilities. The back and forth

‘question and answer’ sounds mimicked by iPhone’s iMessage maintain this fluid state, underscoring the already liquefied bubbles of text. By surfing our way through the technoscape we are encouraged to stay mobile, to be distracted and continue exploring.

FSV turns this mobile ideology up to 11. The sounds are in hi-def, but too loud; the timbres are in focus, but instead of transporting the listener to the next place, they cut into the ear resulting in a near catatonic immobility. The jarring, unbalanced mix of FSV pushes the listener towards a meditative state of anxiety: you want to turn it off, but you can’t; you want to hate it, but you don’t.

Garbage, clutter, and trash are concepts that have been constructed to carry with them undesirable sensorial qualities, but they remain highly transformational. A thing

366 Daniel Jackson, Sonic Branding: An Essential Guide to the Art and Science of Sonic Branding (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 44. 214 becomes trash once it is relocated; and as degenerative processes take hold the trash changes shape at both internal and external levels. As microplastic in the GPGP has become small enough to seamlessly take root in the ecosystem, the biosphere begins to change. Throw-away, utilitarian sounds and music reflect similar transformational potential as they converge, reorganizing our relational habits. By allowing these micro- melodies to reproduce at magnified levels, the sounds effectively exhibit the potentialities of the ohrvurm, or earworm, as “an infectious musical agent.”367 As Steve Goodman notes in Sonic Warfare, “a catchy tune is no longer sufficient; it merely provides the

DNA for a whole viral assemblage.”368 Fully immersed in the generative stench of capitalist compost, the earworms of FSV mate with each other, cobbling together a fertile leitmotif out of a variety of seemingly forgettable motifs. If the assemblage of recycled auditory viruses mirrors the ideological posture of Muzak and sonic branding practices, we must open the scope of what passes for garbage and what passes for art.

The final track on FSV, “Solar Panel Smile,” opens with the sound of Windows

XP shutting down. Ferraro then mutates the four-note motif, deconstructing it, highlighting the nuances of the descending melody. A hazy, bubbly ringtone shimmers on loop in the background as the XP shut down continues to unravel. As digital chordal pad aimlessly descends and ascends, a thin abrasive string motif appears. Just as the repetition of the figure begins to annoy (or become catchy), an incredibly loud digital bell slams the

367 Steve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2010), 147.

368 Ibid, 148.

215 right side of the mix. The pain of the bell opens up to an endless drum fill ripped from

Apple’s consumer digital audio workstation GarageBand. The fill continues to support a series of micro(plastic) melodic fragments. But the fragments never open into a full melody. These melodies are a bridge to somewhere else, just like the endless drum fill should unfold into the persistent predictability of a spacious pop beat, just like the

Windows XP motif was designed for a singular purpose.

Ferraro puts the listener smack in the middle of these transitory functional sounds and beckons us to linger, paying attention to the complexities of often ignored processes.

As the journey of “Solar Panel Smile” unfolds, the ephemeral role of the sharp fourth of the Lydian mode is embraced with ambivalence. This is the same musical interval that often functions in sound logos for movie production companies; these motifs exude the promise of fulfillment that imbues the spectacle of popular cinematic productions. In

Ferraro’s hands, constant repetition of the mode reveals its overuse as a device to achieve the “natural” sound of hope. Such ambitions are self-consciously thwarted by the arrival of a short digital crash cymbal that brings “Solar Panel Smile” to a grinding halt. In this way, Ferraro is adept at conjuring up musical situations that reflect, through rarefaction, our own relationships with the 21-century challenges of attaching comprehensible narratives to deterritorialized ecological crises. This paradoxical narrative is one of crisis and decision, but it moves slowly, without a center, through the sea of sound logos, background music, and virtual scenarios, meditating on how such discourses originated.

This dispersal of audio logos metaphorical reflects a consummate disaster of our times. 216

Trying to Locate a Disaster

Contrary to popular belief, The GPGP is not as visible and cohesive as headlines would have us believe. In reality, microscopic debris is spread across and below the surface of the ocean, making it impossible to view as a concentrated mass.

Misconceptions have floated in and out of the mediascape since 1997 and myths continue to propagate like the increased amount of insect eggs laid on microplastics found in affected marine environments.369

In order to represent and conceive of ecological disasters it has become standard practice to generalize and simplify for maximum impact. As the number of creative works addressing environmental disasters increases, a familiar set generic codes affix themselves to representations of each phenomenon. The GPGP and its representations are part of a blossoming and profitable eco-disaster entertainment complex. In order to more fully understand this dispersed disaster, I setup an interview with its founder.

I show up to Captain Charles Moore’s home in the bucolic Belmont Shore neighborhood of Long Beach, California just as the sun is beginning to set. The home is cloaked in organic vegetables and fruits, with the Captain meeting me at the side gate happily letting me know his garden functions as a certified organic food co-op. We walk the maze to the back of his house, to a shaded porch to meet with Katie Allen, education director for Algalita, a non-profit research and education organization founded by Moore.

369 Cian Luanaigh, “Recycled Island: plastic fantastic?,” The Observer, August 7, 2010, accessed November 11, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/aug/08/recycled-island-plastic-waste- pacific

217

The organization was formed in 1994 with an initial mission to “restore the disappearing kelp forests and improve water quality along the California coast by nurturing wetlands in the region.”370 After sailing his catamaran several times throughout the Pacific, Moore decided to take a shortcut to Hawaii from California, cutting through the North Pacific Gyre. In this large system of rotating ocean currents, Moore began to notice the recurrent presence of plastics, appearing in clumps, held together by combinations of nets, kelp, and other discarded objects. This phenomenon literally widened when Moore began to comb the ocean surface with a Manta Trawl, a fine mesh net capable of capturing particles as small as ⅓ of a millimeter. This tool allows the research team to collect microplastics, the true culprits of the marine plastic pollution problem.

Central to my conversation with Allen and Moore were the question they face as researchers and activists on how best to show harm. Moore’s work with Algalita hinges on this central question. By properly showing, and telling about, the harm caused by plastics in the ocean, awareness can be raised and large scale changes can be made.

Moore’s 20 years of communicating with the media about the GPGP has spawned a host of misconceptions, most notably the consistent framing of the patch as a massive island twice the size of Texas.

In my sprawling, often tangential, interaction with Moore, I hear him convey the patch as “King Neptune’s desert nursery,” a swarm, and as plastic soup.371 The ‘soup’

370 Algalita web site, “History,” http://www.algalita.org/about-algalita/history/

371 Captain Charles Moore in discussion with the author, June, 2015. 218 metaphor is preferential for Moore and his colleagues at Algalita as they fend off media tendencies to solidify the decentralized microplastics into a cohesive narrative.

Throughout our conversation, Moore maintained a clear sense of ownership as the

‘founder’ of the patch. I was struck by this particular issue of ownership which takes unique shape in the work of researcher-activists. Moore has written a book, Plastic

Ocean, regularly conducts interviews with major media outlets, and delivers keynote addresses at pertinent venues.

These attempts to raise awareness outside of recognized research domains present challenges to the construction of environmental knowledge. As Moore and other concerned stakeholders work to frame the issue, they continue to run outside of positions of power maintained by bonafied research institutions. Yet, whether environmental knowledge is constructed through fallacious repetitions of ‘garbage islands’ or through the technical language of a peer-reviewed article, the problem of capturing public investment persists. Furthermore, as Matthew D. Turner notes, “...the categories that are created, named, and manipulated in the application of environmental knowledge do not determine ecological functioning. That is, ‘nature,’ or various aspects of it, acts in certain ways that often defy the categories, boxes, boundaries, and names we come up with.”372

A contrasting approach to the GPGP is taken by Moore’s former colleague,

Marcus Eriksen, who now heads up 5 Gyres, a non-profit similarly dedicated to the

372 Goldman, Mara J.; Nadasdy, Paul; Turner, Matthew D., Knowing Nature: Conversations at the intersection of political ecology and science studies, (University of Chicago Press, 2011), 27.

219 problem of marine debris.373 In our discussion, Eriksen’s name signaled a significant amount of tension for Moore. His frustration seemed to hinge on Eriksen’s continual re- framing of the topic. Most recently, Eriksen began promoting the GPGP as “PLASTIC

SMOG.”374 This consistent shift in framing, vexes the Captain as he longs for a solidified view of the patch, something he continually referred to with a sense of ownership.

Eriksen, who holds his Ph.D in Science Education, has taken a different tack than

Moore in his efforts to “show harm.” Identifying as an “eco-mariner,” Eriksen has combined his background in science education with his interest in the arts. This confluence of skills has merged to take the researcher from Long Beach to Honolulu on a raft supported by 15,000 discarded plastic bottles, aptly named “JUNK.”375 By taking the pollution back into the ocean, the eco-mariner poses questions about alternative uses for plastics alongside media-friendly displays of heroism.

More recently, Eriksen has taken to creating casts of people’s faces made from a variety of plastic sources. The selection of which kind of plastic use depends on the particular face to be cast. Sylvia Earle, a marine biologist and former chief scientist at the

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), was cast in a recycled PET

373 Eriksen, Marcus, Laurent CM Lebreton, Henry S. Carson, Martin Thiel, Charles J. Moore, Jose C. Borerro, Francois Galgani, Peter G. Ryan, and Julia Reisser. "Plastic pollution in the world's oceans: more than 5 trillion plastic pieces weighing over 250,000 tons afloat at sea." PloS one 9, no. 12 (2014): e111913.

374 Marcus Eriksen, “Plastic Smog: 5.25 trillion pieces of trash” Marcus Eriksen blog. http://www.marcuseriksen.com/plastic-smog-5-25-trillion-pieces-of-trash/

375 “Synopsis,” Junk Raft Blog, May 23, 2007, http://junkraft.blogspot.com/2007/05/who.html 220 plastic mold. Polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, is the most common form of thermoplastic polymer resin, found in the ubiquitous and recyclable plastic bottle.

Eriksen’s choice for this brand of plastic reflects Earle’s long-standing connection to ocean floor exploration, a domain now littered with PET plastics, as the caps sink directly to the bottom.

By briefly exploring the different approaches to the plastic pollution problem, I consider different approaches taken by researcher-activists in framing how the problem and possible solutions are communicated. The ethos of vaporwave resonates with the issues facing these researcher-activists in the continual struggle to find value in discarded cultural artifacts. Since neither party maintains an official institutional affiliation, they experience an amount of freedom to creatively explore and publicize the issue. On the other hand, Eriksen and Moore must grapple with the demands of environmental knowledge production standards set by institutionally-affiliated researchers through peer- reviewed processes. At the intersection of this delicate balance lie a host of aesthetic questions, asking how best to represent a problem to capture public consciousness and exist within the rigors of research contexts.

The ways that Moore and Eriksen have chosen to represent the GPGP reflect the shape-shifting character of the deterritorialized ecological disaster. This character imbues the patch with an agentic capacity which resists compartmentalization. As Turner notes,

“[D]espite the changing forms of agency asserted by various aspects of ‘nature,’ scientists are continually influenced by and working to package and categorize nature in 221 such a way that knowledge about particular objects and processes travels (circulates).”376

To contextualize the GPGP within the American environmental imagination it is necessary to more specifically examine the aesthetic practices of those responsible for spreading environmental knowledge and misinformation. By considering the work of researchers associated with the GPGP we can connect the problems of representing a new kind of environmental disaster with the problems taken up by vaporwave artists as they reflect the anxieties of producing art in a neoliberal environment.

The North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (NPSG) is an “area of convergence that accumulates particularly high concentrations of plastic marine debris.”377 The majority of this debris are known as microplastics. These tiny pieces of plastic, sized at 5mm or less, are weathered resulting in “surface embrittlement and microcracking, yielding microparticles that are carried into water by wind or wave action.”378 With a 100-fold increase in microplastic over the past 40 years in the NPSG, a particular kind of marine insect, the Halobates sericeus, or, the sea skater, has found a new surface to lay eggs on increasing the density of eggs in the area.379

376 Goldman, Mara J.; Nadasdy, Paul; Turner, Matthew D., Knowing Nature: Conversations at the intersection of political ecology and science studies, (University of Chicago Press, 2011), 28.

377 Miriam Goldstein, Marci Rosenberg, and Lanna Cheng, “Increased oceanic microplastic debris enhances oviposition in an endemic pelagic insect,” Biology Letters Vol.8, Iss.5 (2012), accessed 11 November 2013, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2012.0298

378 Anthony L. Andrady, “Microplastics in the Marine Environment,” Marine Pollution Bulletin Vol.62, Iss.8 (2011), accessed 1 December 2015, DOI: 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2011.05.030

379 Goldstein, et al. 222

While the issue of microplastics in marine environments has been studied since

1972, the topic has gained traction as a high-priority issue in marine biology since the early-2000s.380 Prior to that time, concern were related to more tangible phenomena such as plastic ingestion by sea birds and ghost fishing, a term applied to animal entanglement by lost or discarded fishing equipment.381 When plastics, micro and otherwise, collect in the compacted space of a rotting bird carcass, the affective impact is palpable. The confluence of direct effect of pollution and mortality maintains a far greater hold on the public imagination than microplastics undetectable with the naked eye.

380 E.J. Carpenter, K.L. Smith Jr. “Plastics on the Sargasso Sea Surface,” Science, 175 (1972): 1240–1241.

381 L.M. Rios, C. Moore, “Persistent organic pollutants carried by synthetic polymers in the ocean environment,” Marine Pollution Bulletin, 54 (8) (2007): 1230- 1237.

223

Figure 21: Message from the Gyre.

As part of a larger series of photographs by Chris Jordan, this series of photos draws the viewer into direct physical engagement with the phenomenon of plastic ingestion. Crude as they are, these dramatic pictures obfuscate the realities of eco- disasters which thrive in their utter lack of visibility. By attending to microplastics, and other contributions to ecological fragility such as carbon dioxide emissions, a different kind of environmental imaginary begins to emerge. It is a brand of environmental imaginary which resists coagulation in favor of complete penetration of ecosystems and their inhabitants.

Following Roland Barthes’ idea of plastic as “ubiquity made visible,” the literal and figurative distance of microplastics decorating the high seas has lured interested 224 parties to the NPSG to hopefully locate the patch in all of its imaginary glory.382 Andrew

Blackwell’s account of his voyage to the GPGP underscores the infectious desire to see trash that builds as one tunes to the “featurelessness of the ocean surface.”383 This desire is played out in real time in the Vice Magazine documentary on the subject, wherein a cluster of ‘explorers’ comment of the disgusting amount of trash they have seen. When asked about the the Vice documentary, Captain Charles Moore, ‘founder’ of the GPGP, was quite uncomfortable with the results.384 Yet, flashy editing techniques, extensive expletives, and a dramatic soundtrack color a journey that pales in comparison to the shocking melodrama of a film like Chasing Ice.

In this film we find director Jeff Orlowski profiling environmental photographer

James Balog’s quest to film evidence of melting glaciers. As the film unfolds, the typical content of eco-disaster documentaries (shocking statistics, talking heads, and speculative theories) gives way to a focus on Balog himself. Orlowski and composer J. Ralph take the spectacle of melting glaciers into ‘hero saves the world’ Tom (Cruise and Hanks) territory. As arpeggiating violins fill out the predictable psuedo-Philip Glass soundtrack, we follow our hero as he busts his knee, takes off his shirt, gives a lecture, cries, takes off his shirt again, and still manages to capture that final photo. After all it is a film about

“one man’s mission to change the tide of history by gathering undeniable evidence of

382 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, Trans. by R. Howard and A. Lavers, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2012), 110.

383 Andrew Blackwell, Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World’s Most Polluted Places (New York: Rodale, 2012), 133.

384 Captain Charles Moore in discussion with the author, June, 2015. 225 climate change.” The US Geological Survey website features pictures of the Muir Inlet in

Glacier Bay National Park showing retreat/advance footage covering the period of close to 100 years. This scientifically contextualized footage and information provides a clearer picture of glacial relationship to changes in climate but, alas, a government website is just not as compelling as a good hero story.

My point here is not to argue against art that addresses environmental issues. The industry of art dedicated to environmental issues must have a place for large scale projects that include the lingua franca of popular culture. By critiquing Chasing Ice, I simply aim to unpack the shockingly predictable formal techniques of the eco-disaster blockbuster that are quickly becoming as ubiquitous as the shards of microplastic that litter the NPSG. The same goes for environmentally-themed viral music videos found on

YouTube. “Plastic State of Mind” is a song by the artist Ben Zolno and New Message

Media parodying Jay-Z and Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind.”385 The video follows a plastic bag user through into a supermarket dream state as he realizes the damage the plastic bag does to the environment. The witty re-purposing of lyrical space cites statistic after statistic of the harmful effects of the product. The chorus opens up to a soulful “ban bags made of plastic” as a plastic bag monster gyrates in the background. Parodic viral videos carry a particularly ironic aesthetic that uses the language of pop culture to drive home the point. There is no problem with this except to say that there must be room for

385 Ben Zolno and New Message Media, “Plastic State of Mind,” YouTube video, November 13, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koETnR0NgLY

226 more in the realm of music than the hippie with the acoustic guitar or parodic viral videos that lead to spectatorial hip-gyrations.

Moving from the time/space of film and music videos into the domain of obscure instrumental electronic music opens the question of how to fairly compare the two. It is not my intention to pit one against the other as much as to offer a model that explores alternative approaches to creative work that engage environmental issues at the hyperobject scale, or, “real objects that are massively distributed in time and space.”386

Before moving on, I will examine a less commercial piece that takes the forms and effects of carbon as its subject.

Composer Pamela Z and visual artist Christian McPhee, joined by strings, bassoon, and percussion premiered Carbon Song Cycle in April 2013: A 10-movement meditation on the way carbon travels through the ecosystem. Spoken word about saving the redwoods and rattling off chemical combinations from the periodic table of elements are accompanied by abstract video of charts, nature, and other blurred intersections of technology and nature. And what of the music? More arpeggiated minor chords a la minimalists such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich. How did minimalist aesthetics become so intertwined with depictions of natural and unnatural processes? Godfrey Reggio’s

1982 film Koyaanisqatsi, or ‘life out of balance’, surely played a part. Minimalism holds many seductive elements to draw the listener into the real and imagined head spaces of environmental destruction and change. There is relentless repetition—much like posture

386 Timothy Morton, “Zero Landscapes in the Time of Hyperobjects.” Graz Architectural Magazine 7 (2011): 80. 227 machines that extract energy from the earth or those we ride in on our daily commute; there is minor harmony—much like the cinematic and cued feeling produced as we gasp at another alarming statistic; there is the ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ quality of a stringed instrument or the sacramental character of the organ—deeply connecting to the personified view of Mother Earth as she disappears. 30 years on, these aesthetic choice still make the most sense in the mind of avant-garde artists.

It begs repeating: the issue at hand is not for the extermination of a specific formal approach to making art out of and in response to environmental disaster. It is to revive the medium through a disconnection with its now predictable tropes. Whether it is the academic avant-garde or the populist approach to riffing on environmental disaster, each form carries with it particular codes meant to shock the viewer/listener into action.

Instead of resulting in shock and awe, many of these works devolve into predictable humorous tropes or apocalyptic doomsday tales.

An alternative approach to predictable engagements with problems of global plastic pollution lies in a decentered logic which mimics the material dispersal of garbage and the artifacts of global capitalism. The artist’s work sounds out paradoxes of the

Anthropocene as an age of environmental instability brought to fruition through human activity. Ferraro’s recent multi-sited auditory installations do just this as they leave room for fluid interactions with looped collages of functional music’s discarded timbres and tones. Further, the composer’s work situates functional music in home territory: as ringtones, hold Muzak, and elevator music. 228

100%

In March of 2014, Ferraro presented a multi-sited work for the Museum of

Modern Art’s PS1 location in Long Island City, New York. The installation and its attendant components find the artist grappling with the possibilities of environmentally- engaged functional sound. By resurrecting recently discarded contexts for functional music, i.e., elevator, ringtones, and hold music, Ferraro reclaims sonic spaces infusing them with environmentally attuned possibility.

I enter MoMA PS1, an exhibition space housed in Long Island City’s first public school, built in 1892. The building is nestled between Long Island’s bustling furniture and industrial warehouses, a creaking New York city train system, and home to the dome, a spherical white venue sponsored by Volkswagen. The mission statement of PS1 states that the project “actively pursues emerging artists, new genres, and adventurous new work by recognized artists in an effort to support innovation in contemporary art.”387

Upon entering the 125-year-old building I am anxious to see, or rather hear, the results of

James Ferraro’s 100%, an multi-sited audiovisual exhibition consisting of three components. The first, Eco-Savage Suite (2014), is a series of 18 ringtones with names such as “Ethno-Ambiguous,” “The Warming Planet,” “Diaspora Gecko,” and “Botox.”

The ringtones are made for free download and are interspersed between scrolling weather patterns for global cities (Manila, Mumbai City, Los Angeles, etc.), exchange rates, pictures of greasy ‘Asian food,’ and digitally rendered human faces.

387 http://momaps1.org/about/ 229

The website connected to the 100% exhibition contains the following statement:

“For Ferraro, hotel lounge playlists, elevator music, and ringtones have become psychological and architectural components to the space of commerce and daily life.

Such audio helps smooth the interactions between people, and between individuals and computer systems. 100% examines automated systems in order to highlight moments when such systems fail or malfunction, interrupting the flow of communication and capital.”388

As I move my arrow icon around the bright green and soft grey website containing Ferraro’s ringtones, I am struck by the blurring edges between utilitarian and aesthetically charged imagery. Hovering over each ringtone instantly darkens the pad from light to dark grey. Google Android and Apple iPhone icons appear on the outer edges of the world ‘PLAY.’ The icons quickly merge with the playfully arranged pads of weather information from cosmopolitan centers and screenshots of digital stock exchange tickers. “Diaspora Gecko” begins with a minor-seventh chord played on a synthesized choir pad which is quickly interrupted by a stuttering computer-generated female voice.

Just as the voice manages to say “s-s-s-sustainability,” it is rapidly washed out by a pitched-down chord modulation which sets up a counterpoint for the voice to return with the word “water.” Supported by the synthetic choir and a micro-sample of an electric guitar line, the ominous texts continue: “...steadily diminishing aboriginal population...corporate yoga god...oil….” As the voices subside, the irregular loop of

388 http://momaps1.org/interactive/james_ferraro/

230 musical material finds a shaky foundation in a clave-led beat played by the familiar tones of a Roland 808 drum machine.

Ferraro’s ringtone fulfills the vacant promises of vaporwave by situating slick production values and comforting diatonic harmonies in suffocating rhythmic shrink wrap. The textual content of the Eco-Savage Suite pairs the ambiguous diversity of what can be called the aesthetics of globalization with frightening statistics of impending ecological collapse. It is here that 100% bears its colors as an omnipresent sounding out of the uncanny hills and valleys of transitional spaces and sounds. By choosing a series of liminal sonic spaces, Ferraro’s work presents the listener with an endlessly temporary scenario.

Heise’s eco-cosmopolitanism comes into earshot in this aural atmosphere as

Ferraro “deploys allegory” resting on a set of “larger formal frameworks.”389 Alongside

Heise’s emphasis on the globalized environmental imagination, Appadurai’s sense of the proliferation of multiple scapes (techno, ethno, media, etc.), comes into the stereo field.

As Appadurai notes, the globalized subject understands the "new global cultural economy

[as] a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models."390 Thus, in the case of Ferraro’s work, these scapes stretch out around the subject, working to erase previously held notions of a localized sense of place.

389 Heise, 10.

390 Appadurai, 32. 231

The next portion of 100% moves the consumer from the private space of a website with ringtone downloads, placing her into a telecommunicative relationship with an institutional framework. Saint Prius (2014) is hold music for the PS1 phone system.

The hold music was available for a particular amount of time and the only way to hear it was to call PS1 and ask to be put on hold. This act further amplified an attention to the telecommunications environment itself, requiring the caller to maximize audible spaces which are typically avoided at all costs. By willingly placing oneself on hold, the caller embraces an aesthetic engagement with the act of waiting.

The final component of 100%, Dubai Dream Tone (2014), demands the listener to enter into the liminal/physical space par excellence: the elevator. As I step into the PS1 freight elevator, I notice my near-reverential form of aural attention. Thus, I enact familiar silent postures typical of elevator rides wherein strangers are packed together in a steel chamber quickly rising and descending hundreds of feet through a tube in a larger enclosure of the building. This day-to-day form of public transportation finds participants surrendering all control to a mechanized system capable of failure. Beyond the recurrent aesthetics of background music, and more specifically the Muzak product, to strive for listener comfort through controlled ‘stimulus progression,’ Dubai Dream Tone amplifies the very possibilities of what can go wrong. The audible glitches and stuttering computer voices are already failing to produce a coherent, comforting sound.

I first enter the elevator on the ground floor of PS1. The entrance is located behind what appear to be private swinging doors for employees only. I go through the door and turn left toward a large set of silver freight elevator doors. My heightened 232 attention to the aesthetics of elevators reveals an obvious but revelatory fact that elevator doors have two ‘skins’: the internal doors which move with the unit itself and the external facades located on each floor. These multiple entrances create a feeling of anxiety as I further internalize the mobilized and multiple identities of the steel and plastic box I am about to enter. ‘Bing’ goes the sonic indicator that the elevator has arrived. The doors slowly squeak open and to reveal a wash of sound accompanied by brushed aluminum walls and a small red LED screen. I enter the elevator and look up to see two medium- sized speakers pointing at an angle toward the floor from parallel corners of the ceiling.

The mood in the mobile box is anything but light. I struck by the destabilizing power of

“Dubai Dream Tone” as it oscillates between pop-oriented chord changes, washes of digital cymbal swells, and irregular rhythmic groupings. After pressing the number ‘3,’ I begin my ascent, paying keen attention to whether or not I will reach my destination uninterrupted. ‘Bing’ goes number 2 button for the second floor. Two mothers with kids in strollers appear through the sliding metal doors. A feeling of embarrassment washes over me as I embrace a static posture; an attempt to remain casually permanent in a space defined by a social contract to keep moving.

Dubai Dream Tone begins to reveal its true colors as recycled content from FSV and the accompanying EP Condo Pets. The sounds are familiar yet scrambled, further embodying the composer’s brand of recyclable, even compostable, Muzak. ‘Bing,’ floor

3. The doors open and once again, the social contract is voided as I keep my position in the elevator. Without pressing any buttons, the doors close and the elevator goes nowhere. For these split seconds, the hyper-mobilized space is without demand. The 233 sounds grow increasingly ominous in this space, as the computer voice echoes a stuttering “P-P-P-Prius.” Is the lift stuck?

Compost Listening

Much like hip-hop and many other forms of electronic music, FSV maintains an affinity for recycling and recontextualizing sonic material. Yet, it does so in a self- consciously naive way, steering clear of reusing forgotten content in the name of sharpening the cutting edge. Instead of dependable practices of musical recycling, Ferraro opts for the compost bin, listening to the re- and degeneration of discarded objects. Upon the release of FSV, Ferraro noted that the true form of the record would be to exist in the mode of ringtones, sounding off anywhere at any time. Additionally, Ferraro expressed ambitions to have the pieces be performed by an orchestra using “ringtones instead of tubular bells, Starbucks cups instead of cymbals.”391 With such grand goals, Ferraro remains acutely aware of the ephemeral quality of the project, noting that “consumer transience was in fact always a part of the concept of the record. The process of disregard or transience elevated to assisted readymades. The last note of my record will be the sound of the uninterested listener disposing the album into the trash bin and emptying out their desktop's trash bin.”392

In this chapter I have considered how making sound can make sense of place, as it is rapidly redefined in an era of wherein the human species has made irreparable impacts on geologic conditions and processes. By examining the formal properties of a series of

391 Gibb 2011.

392 Ibid. 234 works dedicated to a particular environmental issue (Chasing Ice, “Plastic State of

Mind,” and Carbon Song Cycle), I have illuminated recurring generic codes familiar to the thriving eco-disaster entertainment complex. Furthermore, I have aimed to complicate the possibilities of a sonic ecology that allows for rapidly changing discourses that reflect the complexities of constructing environmental knowledge in the current moment. An analysis of FSV reveals and revels in the large chasm between blockbuster and academic approaches to creative work that takes environmental issues as its subject matter.

By asserting a direct connection to the natural reactions of the biosphere to constructed ‘natural’ processes and effects of plasticizing the ocean, Ferraro shines a light on the natural sounds of the modern environment. Propagating earworms are framed for aural exhibition and synthetic voices assume the role of the lead singer. Here in this deterritorialized space, on the far side, the spaces of sonic ecology unexpectedly widen to confront the synthetic as natural, unflinching at the dispersed fragments of plastic sound that simultaneously mobilize and paralyze.

235

CONCLUSION

As part of his writings on music and mass culture, Theodor Adorno produced a brief essay entitled “Music in the Background.” Surprisingly, Adorno sketches the positive role played by background music in social situations, referring mostly to instrumental music “included in the price of the coffee” in a cafe experience.393 As “an acoustic light source,” background music pushes Music (with a capital M) “to the edge of existence” challenging the listener to draw lines in the sand about the function of valuable music and the value of functional music.394 This exploration of music explicit in its usefulness as background for environmentally-engaged media has hopefully shown that such sounds are the potent additive in the process of solidifying imaginings of the natural world.

By not clamoring for our attention, functional music slips through the cracks and embeds itself like a weed in a garden. Framed as an intruder on the pristine landscape of worthy cultural artifacts, functional music must be exterminated. But these sounds are undeserving of such a forceful fate as they were never asking much in the first place. As

Adorno notes, “[T]he first characteristic of background music is that you don’t have to listen to it.”395 By not demanding much more than a distracted engagement, the

393 Theodor Adorno, “Music in the Background” in Essays on Music ed. Richard Leppert and trans. Susan Gillespie (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 506.

394 Ibid, 508.

395 Ibid, 507.

236 functional music under analysis sets the stage for a series of diverse interactions, rather than a narrowly constricted listening posture.

As Richard Leppert points out, Adorno’s unexpected framing of background music as serving a purpose points toward a lack. “And lack,” claims Leppert, “is not an ontological condition but a social one. Lack, in other words, invites critique; critique in turn is the precondition for social change.”396 This dissertation has investigated how functional musics, operating in the shadows of aurality, engage with environmentally- engaged media. As these sounds press toward a solidified construal of environmental knowledge, it has been my goal to problematize such attempts, in order to hear the complexities and ambivalences of our current era. As the authors of After Oil (2016) state, “artistic performance invites counterprocess by calling on spectators to engage in active interpretation.”397

It is my hope that this idea of counterprocess has acted as a signal processor throughout this study. Processors, such as compression and subtle reverb often go unnoticed until they are blatantly removed. By counter-intuitively engaging with works of art that don’t beg for our attention, we can better attune to the nuances of slow changes in the environment that work away in the background. Converging these attenuated

“acoustic light sources” with ubiquitous environmental phenomena, providing space to

396 Richard Leppert, “Music ‘Pushed to the Edge of Existence’ (Adorno, Listening, and the Question of Hope,” in Cultural Critique 60 (Spring 2005), 95-96.

397 Imre Szeman, et. al., After Oil (Edmonton: Petrocultures Research Group, 2016), 53.

237 actively engage with and think through the consequences sounds which are often heard but not listened to.

Bringing together strands of thought into dialogue about sounds that are otherwise ignorable speaks to the delicacy of the situation. Adorno goes on to point out the inherent fragility of functional music, which resonates with the equally fragile shifts in perspective which emerge out of thinking through life in the Anthropocene: “the cafe arranges bouquets of dead flowers. The joints between the brittle sounds into which they are layered are not firmly bonded. Through them shimmers the mysterious allegorical appearance that arises whenever fragments of the past come together in an uncertain surface.”398 Such an uncertain surface reflects the ambivalence and ambiguities of living

50 ppm beyond a safe level of existence.

In one of the earliest analyses of functional music, Carl Dahlhaus argued that these sounds and their accompanying extramusical artifacts often impede “reflection about the nature and the mysterious popularity of such creations.”399 He maintains that the term “trivial music” in and of itself is most appropriate to use to amplify the built-in hierarchies which cloak discursive projects. Metaphorical connections abound between

‘natural’ environments and functional music when considered from Dalhaus’ point of audition. Active impediment of critical reflection is encouraged through submersed

398 Carl Dahlhaus, “Preface from Trivial Music (Trivialmusik)” trans. Uli Sailer, in Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate, ed. Christopher Washburne et al. (New York: Routledge, 2004), 335.

399 Ibid.

238 authorial identities, anonymous environmental imagery, and other hallmarks of the functional music industry. The effects of human-produced carbon emissions on the environment are equally dispersed. Distant changes in environments such as polar ice caps stand as go-to images for damaging behavior, yet provide very little in the way of public motivation for large-scale infrastructural, universal change.

This dissertation has explored how American functional music works to shape environmental imaginaries. Listening to sonic scaffolds of mid- to late-20th century petroculture, attunes to how Chevron’s campaigns sound out the changing politics of a petroleum-based society grappling with increased public concern for the environment and the effects of a volatile market The explored forms of New Age music reflect competing by harmonizing views of human relationships to the nonhuman world, sounding out anxieties of controlling and being out of control. The resonant dimensions of this form of functional music harmonize with nonhuman environments as a means of shaping neoliberal consumer subjectivity, thereby further sounding out an ambivalent inherent to the current geologic era. Listening to TWC with a heightened sense for the ambivalences and anxieties of the Anthropocene which recognizes the environment as it currently is: an environment deeply impacted by human activity. This is a way to take seriously the notion of nostalgic listening as a convergence of mimesis and poesis, replicating social conditions of feeling and, in doing so, perhaps leading toward qualitative alterations of such conditions. Finally, James Ferraro’s work metaphorically sounds out the anxiety- ridden shadows of functional music as it aims to comfort and control. Vaporwave artists engage with the complexities of life in the Anthropocene as it sonically grapples with 239 dispersed eco-disasters, plastic-lined stomachs of birds, and the powers of music technology to reflect the uncanny valleys between human and nonhuman phenomena.

Dalhaus makes a prescient remark which speaks to the particularity of functional music as it remains as “well-known to us” as it is “unknown….”400 This harmonic convergence reflects the current shift in how we conceive of our planet as a place both in and out of our control. This harmony must be fully aware of conventional structures, working within systems and infrastructure with a deliberate, recurring momentum fueled by revolutionary ideals. Dalhaus hones in on these paradoxical tensions, explaining that functional music offers such a model as it “...remains fully within the narrowest limits of convention while attempting to appear as a spontaneous outburst; it presents itself as intentional and instinctive, artificial and natural at the same time.”401 By attuning to this new harmonic structure, we can recalibrate how to listen and interact with heightened sensitivity to the tones and timbres of these anthropogenic moods.

400 Ibid.

401 Ibid. 240

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. "“The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." In Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming. pp. 94- 136. New York: Herder and Herder, 1969.

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Discography

Asher, James. Commerce. 1981 by Bruton Music. BRL9. LP.

Bastow, Geoff. Tomorrow’s World. 1978 by Bruton Music. BRI21. LP.

Eno, Brian. Ambient One: Music for Airports. 1978 by Polydor AMB001. LP.

Ferraro, James. Far Side Virtual. 2011 by Hippos in Tanks. HIT 013. CD.

______. KFC City 3099: Pt. 1 Toxic Spill. 2009 by New Age Tapes. CD.

Hawkshaw, Alan, Brian Bennett, and Dave Lawson. Music Machine. 1981 by Bruton Music. BRI7. LP.

Scott, Tony. Music for Zen Meditation (and other joys). 1964 by Verve Records. V6- 8634. LP.

Starks, Trammell. 3 CD Set. Independently released. CD.

Don Voegeli. Instant Production Music - Volume 12. 1979 by University of Wisconsin Extension. LP.

Various Artists. Tomorrow’s Achievements: Parry Music Library 1976-1986. 2012 by Public Information. PUBINF006. LP.

Various Artists. I Am The Center: Private Issue New Age Music in America, 1950-1990. 2013 by Light in the Attic Records. LITA 107. LP.

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Various Artists. The Weather Channel Presents Smooth Jazz. 2007 by Midas Records. MID 90230. CD.

Various Artists. The Weather Channel Presents Smooth Jazz II. 2008 by Midas Records. MID 90231. CD.

Filmography

“Chistopher Toussaint interviews Iasos.” YouTube video. Posted by “Iasos Videos,” January 2, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAPQO5S9E0A

“Harry Forbes - Tomorrow’s Achievements.” Vimeo video. Posted by “Public Information,” October 3, 2012. https://vimeo.com/50718059

“Inter-Dimensional Music thru Iasos.” YouTube video. Posted by “Iasos Videos,” January 2, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OSn_RJcwl0&feature=youtu.be

Jones, Geoffrey. The Rhythm of Film. BFI, 2005. DVD.

Levy, Shawn. The Pink Panther. Culver City: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2006. DVD.

“Local Forecast ‘F’ Flavor.” YouTube video. Posted by “ILovestorms,” January 2, 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZLkq2Mua4Q

“Special Presentation: 20 Years of The Weather Chazz.” YouTube video. Posted by “The Weather Chazz,” October 9, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMXWoNxaatc

“Weather Channel’s Debut May 2, 1982.” YouTube video. Posted by “Andre Bernier,” April 11, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmAcbjhtkLM

“Weather Channel Branding - Stephen Arnold Music,” YouTube video, posted by Stephen Arnold Music, May 22, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nrcLPcqdr4

Western Light. Directed by Stephen Verona. Hollywood, CA: Paramount Home Video, 1985. VHS.

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Podcasts and other media

Goodwill, Bill and N. Smith. “The WeatherSTAR 4000 Emulator for Quasi-Operational Dissemination of Real-time Weather Data.” 93rd American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting, January 8, 2013, https://ams.confex.com/ams/93Annual/webprogram/Paper219704.html

Makepeace, Justing and Kevin Latchford. “Music that Moved the Clouds: My Interview with Trammell Starks.” The Black Flag Cast. Podcast audio. March 11, 2015. http://www.blackflagspecialk.com/2015/03/music-that-moved-the-clouds-my- interview-with-trammell-starks/

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