MUHST 500 Final Paper
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1 Darcy Copeland Dr. Stephen Rumph MUHST 500 June 10, 2020 “RETRIBUTION WILL BE SWIFT”: INDIGENOUS ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE AND ENVIRONMENTALISM IN THE MUSIC OF TANYA TAGAQ Dating back to Ancient Greece, artists felt a desire to prove connections between music and nature, and thought about these relationships has been prevalent across a vast range of cultures and genres throughout the centuries. It wasn’t until the 1970’s, however, that critical thought about music and its relationships with nature began to emerge within the academy, mirroring a growing public concern with environmental issues. As Sabine Feisst states, “ecologically motivated art dovetails public debates about environmental degradation, climate change, and growing desire for sustainable ecosystems.”1 Aaron S. Allen offers a name for this new field of critical thought: ecomusicology.2 The term stems from ecocriticism, a field of literature combining the study of environment within written works, and applies the eco-critical lens to musicology, which stems from the study of music and culture. Thus, ecomusicology may 1 Feisst, Sabine. "Music and Ecology." Contemporary Music Review: Music and Ecology Vol. 35, No. 3 (2016). p. 1. 2 Allen, Aaron S., and Dawe, Kevin. 2016. “Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature.” New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. 2 be more aptly referred to as ecocritical musicology—the critical study of nature, culture, and music.3 Ecological musical works have spanned from soundscapes and installation pieces to popular music and music videos to Western art songs and contemporary classical concert music. No matter the genre, ecologically motivated works share some commonality. Feisst describes ecologically motivated works as “reflecting, on the one hand, the idea of interconnections of organisms and their relationship with inorganic components in a specific environment, and on the other hand, a critical or activist attitude towards human impact on the environment.”4 Many composers have taken inspiration from their environment to inform their music throughout the past century,—from Olivier Messiaen’s fascination with bird songs to Maggi Payne’s electronic soundscapes of the desert—which are a product of reflecting on the connections between the organic and inorganic. Numerous other composers, performers and artists have taken on the debate surrounding climate change through their music, spanning across a vast multitude of genres. John Luther Adams, who won the Pulitzer prize for music in 2014 for Become Ocean, seeks to make listeners aware of their inherent connection to nature and their role in its demise or revival by sonifying place in works such as Inuksuit and The Place Where You Go To Listen. Icelandic singer Björk has expressed concern for environmental issues and connection to nature in albums such as Medúla (2004) and Biophilia (2011), the latter of which translates to “a love of 3 Allen, Aaron S. “Ecomusicology: Ecocriticism and Musicology.” Journal of the American Musicological Society , Vol. 64, No. 2 (2011). p. 1-2. 4 Feisst, Sabine. "Music and Ecology." Contemporary Music Review: Music and Ecology Vol. 35, No. 3 (2016). p. 1. 3 the natural world.”5 Experimental pop musician Grimes released an album earlier this year entitled Miss Anthropocene (2020), a conceptual narrative album in which the artist takes on the persona of a misanthropic demon celebrating climate change as a force of good, finding glee in humans oblivious destruction of the earth.6 Some recent scholarship has suggested a shift within the field of ecomusicology from the study of any musical works which derive from or connect to nature towards a more activist oriented study. Jeff Todd Titon has even gone so far as to expand upon Allen’s ubiquitous definition of ecomusicology, offering instead “the study of music, culture, sound and nature in a period of environmental crisis.”7 This change in verbiage implies a reprioritization of the goals of ecomusicology, suggesting that ecomusicologists look specifically at how music interacts with the anthropocene. Anthropocene, the term decided upon to denote the period in which humans have had the most monstrous impact on the earth, has been considered a “complex and fraught term among Indigenous peoples”8 in particular. Kate Galloway states that “the proposed ‘start’ of the era of the Anthropocene raises important questions concerning power, notions of time and which worldviews dominate the contemporary environmentalism.” Scholars such as David and Todd, Lewis and Maslin, and Harroway and Kennedy argue that the true beginning of the anthropocene 5 Dibben, Nicola. "Music and Environmentalism in Iceland." In The Oxford Handbook of Popular Music in the Nordic Countries. Oxford University Press, 2017. np. 6 Mistry, Anupa. “Grimes’ Miss Anthropocene.” Pitchfork, 2020. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/ albums/grimes-miss-anthropocene/ 7 Allen, Aaron S. “Ecomusicology: Ecocriticism and Musicology.” Journal of the American Musicological Society , Vol. 64, No. 2 (2011). p. 2. 8 Galloway, Kate. “The Aurality of Pipeline Politics and Listening for Nacreous Clouds: Voicing Indigenous Ecological Knowledge in Tanya Tagaq's Animism and Retribution.” Popular Music 39 (2020). p. 124. 4 coincides with setter-colonialism and global trade.9 Debates surrounding the anthropocene and climate change unfairly paint the picture that equal blame is to be shared on all inhabitants of the earth, further pushing a colonialist narrative that continues to disregard Native culture, philosophy, and way of living. The effects of the anthropocene are directly related to settler- colonialism, the removal and genocide of Indigenous people, disruption of Native ancestral land. Further, the influence of Indigenous Ecological Knowledge, culture, and philosophy has been overlooked in the critical study of ecologically motivated musical works, contributing to the ongoing removal of Indigenous voices from the global debate surrounding environmentalism and climate change. Tanya Tagaq, a prominent voice in ecological contemporary music, vehemently puts forth her Inuk heritage and activism in her environmentalist works. Her voicing of Indigenous Ecological Knowledge as well as Indigenous culture and experience promotes a more equitable climate debate. In this paper, I seek to highlight the Indigenous Ecological Knowledge, & culture present in Tanya Tagaq’s Animism (2014), Retribution (2016), and Sivunittinni (2015) as I explore these works with an ecomusicological lens. Tanya Tagaq is an Inuk avant-garde composer, vocalist, and writer who is known for her use of katajjaq (Inuit throat singing) in her works, combining the technique with contemporary sounds and improvisation. She first gained fame on a global scale when touring with Björk in 2001, and appearing as a collaborating artist on Björk’s Medúlla by providing guest vocals on the track “Ancestors”, which also appeared on her own album, Sinna (2001). In 2014, she won the Polaris Prize for Animism, and collaborated with Kronos Quartet in 2006 to create Nunavut, and again in 2016 as part of their Fifty for the Future commissioning initiative to compose Sivinnutti. 9 Ibid., 124. 5 While Tagaq is praised for her “innovative mixture of traditional and modern musical techniques”10, Tagaq’s katajjaq technique is far from traditional. Katajjaq is traditionally a vocal “game” performed between two women. Galloway describes katajjaq as such: “…two women participate in vocal exchange and mimicry, collaborating, improvising, and co-composing the vocal counterpoint until one participant laughs – a physical reaction signaling the end of a throat song. The structure and the semantic and sonic content of throat song mimics and evokes the local environment, incorporating words and syllables from nature and locale (e.g. place names, plant and animal species), onomatopoeic words and mimetic sounds representative of sounds heard in and absorbed from everyday life. Through the practice of throat singing, vocalists are grounded in a sense of belonging to the community, traditions and the environment.”11 Tagaq wasn’t raised practicing or learning katajjaq—it wasn’t until she went to study at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax that she began to experiment with the technique, listening to tapes that her mother sent her and mimicking the sounds.12 Without a partner to sing with, Tagaq instead forged an intimacy with the natural world in her songs, and used electronic sounds to layer her vocals, playing a game with herself. Tagaq explains during an interview with NPR's Talia Schlanger: “This [katajjaq] is part of a root of what I do but it isn’t 10 Pettigrew, A. (2014). UBC School of Music's Aaron Pettigrew on Tanya Tagaq. Retrieved from https://chancentre. com/news/ubc-school-of-musics-aaron-pettigrew-on-tanya-tagaq/ 11 Galloway, Kate. “The Aurality of Pipeline Politics and Listening for Nacreous Clouds: Voicing Indigenous Ecological Knowledge in Tanya Tagaq's Animism and Retribution.” Popular Music 39 (2020). p. 128. 12 Ibid., 127. 6 traditional. Not even close. ... I don't adhere to the rules of traditional throat singing. ... I don't like following rules.”13 Animism With Animism, Tagaq’s music came to the forefront of North American popular music, and her win of Canada’s prestigious Polaris Prize for the album revealed a “widespread awakening in Canada to Tagaq’s art and messages by non-Indigenous setter-descendant audiences”14. Tagaq uses katajjaq, electronic sounds, and western classical instruments