Etnomüzikoloji Dergisi
Yazarlar: Jeff Todd TITON
Konular:Müzik
Anahtar Kelimeler:Ecomusicology,Ethnomusicology,Sound,Environment,Ecocritism
Özet: Does ethnomusicology have a role to play in the conversations swirling around the current environmental crisis? By virtue of our training and experience as ethnomusicologists, do we have skills, knowledge, and expertise that gives us credibility in the embattled public sphere? Do we have standing, as ethnomusicologists, to contribute any wisdom to policy-making about the environment? Ethnomusicologists who have engaged with ecomusicology do bring to these conversations an understanding of sound, music, nature, culture and the environment. Ecomusicology as a field coalesced about ten years ago as the ecocritical study of music. Borrowing from literary ecocriticism, musicologists examined relationships among composers, compositions, nature, and the cultural production of music. Directly after the publication of a manifesto in the Journal of the American Musicological Society in 2011, ecomusicology attracted scholars worldwide not only from musicology but also from ethnomusicology, organology, acoustics, anthropology, and ecological science. Ecomusicology also attracted composers, performers, journalists, and environmental activists with interests in music. At the first ecomusicology conference, in 2012, the wide variety of approaches to this new field were on display. Within a few years, the definition of ecomusicology had expanded to become the study of sound, music, culture, nature, and the environment in a time of environmental crisis. More recently, ecomusicologists have begun to explore the “eco-” prefix, not as ecocriticism but as ecology. Ever since William K. Archer’s pioneering observations about music and ecology in 1964, ethnomusicologists and musicologists have propsed an ecological ming of the cultural production of music, drawing on such fields as cultural ecology, ecological psychology, and human ecology. This scholarship is pre-dates the field of ecomusicology. Ecomusicology, however, adds ecological scientists to the conversation about music and ecology, it emphasizes the physical as well as the cultural environment, and it also brings a new sense of environmental crisis combining scholarship with activism. Acoustic dimensions of the environment have thus far received little consideration in discussions of such issues as climate change, industrial pollution, environmental justice, and habitat loss. An ecomusicological approach to the place of music and sound in the environment enables ethnomusicologists to contribute their knowledge to these ongoing discussions, while it also grounds environmental activism in scholarship.