WHAT IS MUSIC FOR?: UTOPIAN ECOMUSICOLOGIES AND MUSICKING HORNBY ISLAND ANDREW MARK A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES YORK UNIVERSITY TORONTO, CANADA August, 2015 © Andrew Mark 2015 Abstract This dissertation concerns making music as a utopian ecological practice, skill, or method of associative communication where participants temporarily move towards idealized relationships between themselves and their environment. Live music making can bring people together in the collective present, creating limited states of unification. We are “taken” by music when utopia is performed and brought to the present. From rehearsal to rehearsal, band to band, year to year, musicking binds entire communities more closely together. I locate strategies for community solidarity like turn-taking, trust-building, gift-exchange, communication, fundraising, partying, education, and conflict resolution as plentiful within musical ensembles in any socially environmentally conscious community. Based upon 10 months of fieldwork and 40 extended interviews, my theoretical assertions are grounded in immersive ethnographic research on Hornby Island, a 12-square-mile Gulf Island between mainland British Columbia and Vancouver Island, Canada. I describe how roughly 1000 Islanders struggle to achieve environmental resilience in a uniquely biodiverse region where fisheries collapsed, logging declined, and second-generation settler farms were replaced with vacation homes in the 20th century. Today, extreme gentrification complicates housing for the island’s vulnerable populations as more than half of island residents live below the poverty line. With demographics that reflect a median age of 62, young individuals, families, and children are squeezed out of the community, unable to reproduce Hornby’s alternative society. This dissertation begins with theorization that connects music making to community and environmental thought. I then represent the challenges Islanders set for themselves and the ii struggles they face, like their desire for food sovereignty, off-grid energy, secure housing, protection of their aquifers, affordability of ferry transportation, ecological waste-cycles, and care for each other’s mental health. I bring attention to unique institutions that Islanders have created to better manage their needs and desires. In response to the island’s social and environmental dynamics of justice, I argue and demonstrate through ethnography that music making is an essential communal process that brings people together to dialogue about their needs and advance their goals to establish a more equitable and environmentally responsible community. iii Dedication For Tempest Grace Gale: You are on the lips of everyone who speaks of music herein. And for Hilary Newitt Brown: Hornby could have never become the case study of this dissertation without your influence. The politics of these two individuals were astonishing, unflinching, and embodied. They are also well remembered, cherished, and contain so many of those things I would like to see grow in my selves in place. iv Acknowledgements This dissertation is a product of process and people. I want to acknowledge the dissertation defence taking place on the traditional territories of the Mississauga of the New Credit First Nation, the Huron-Wendat Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the Metis Nation of Ontario, and locate of the dissertation’s subject community of Hornby Island on the traditional territories of the Pentlach, the K’ómox, We Wai Kai, and Klahoose First Nations. My thanks to Meredith and Olin McEvoy, and all my family for your sacrifice and encouragement. My thanks to Ken McEvoy and Judi McCallum in particular for your welcome, your home, your childcare, and your support whenever we needed it. My thanks to all my friends and peers at York, Amanda Di Battista, Sally Morgan, Sonja Killoran-McKibben, Ellen Sweeney, and David Font in particular for your respect and console. My thanks to everyone on Hornby and in particular all the musicians and artists who directly contributed to this research and the people who made our stay on the island so worthwhile. Without the sponsorship of the Martens family, this research would not have ever come about. My special thanks to my supervisor Peter Timmerman, and to my committee members, Catriona Sandilands and Gage Averill, and also to Rob Simms for your genuine tireless support and belief in the value of my work. Thank you Angie and Charlie Keil, and Albert Chimedza for your wisdom, friendship, and love. My thanks to ecomusicologists everywhere for helping to create a home for this work and to Tyler Kinnear, Mark Pedelty, and Aaron Allen in particular, and to Mark Pedelty again for being my external examiner. My thanks to Sherry Johnson for being my internal-external examiner, and to Leesa Fawcett for representing our faculty at the defence. My thanks to my faculty for taking a chance on what I trust I have convinced you is a worthwhile and proliferating pursuit within the world of v environmental thought and our community at York. Most importantly, my thanks to the ancestors for lending us your charge. Michael Marcuzzi, Christopher Small, are you listening? We are lost, and we are playing for you to help us. vi Table of Contents Abstract .............................................................................................................................. ii Dedication ......................................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................... v Table of Contents ............................................................................................................ vii List of Images ................................................................................................................... xi Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 1 PART I ............................................................................................................................. 12 Chapter 1: Preface .......................................................................................................... 13 Chapter 1: Theory ........................................................................................................... 17 Ecomusicology and Sociomusicology ...........................................................................18 A Musical Theory of Community ..................................................................................37 Utopia .............................................................................................................................44 North American Utopias ............................................................................................45 Mechanical Solidarity ................................................................................................49 Musicking Utopia .......................................................................................................55 Participation ...................................................................................................................59 Dialogue .........................................................................................................................75 Thick Place, Semiotic Density, or Deep Signification ..................................................79 Conclusion .....................................................................................................................93 Chapter 2: Ecoethnography ........................................................................................... 95 Hornby Island: History, Setting, and Context ................................................................96 Methodologies ..............................................................................................................111 Barriers .........................................................................................................................117 PART II ......................................................................................................................... 121 Chapter 3: Island Time Keeping ................................................................................. 122 Counting Time .............................................................................................................123 Chant Down Babylon ...................................................................................................134 vii Arrival and Escape .......................................................................................................138 Non-Participatory Discrepancies .................................................................................141 Chapter 4: Tourism and Other Costs of Living ......................................................... 142 Housing the Revolution ...............................................................................................143 Work and Sacrifice ......................................................................................................152 Ferries and Denman .....................................................................................................157 Police ............................................................................................................................161