Notes On Music Ecology As A New Research Paradigm

Notes On Music Ecology As A New Research Paradigm
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Author: Maria Anna Harley
University of Southern California, Los Angeles
E-mail: maharley@bcf.usc.edu
Copyright: 1996, by Maria Anna Harley.

I.
Today, many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period
when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully
being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying and exhausting
itself, while something else, still indistinct, were arising from the rubble. . .
We are in a phase when one age is succeeding another, when everything is
possible. (Havel: 1994)
These words from a 1994 speech by Vaclav Havel point to the collapse of
existing value systems, the plurality of cultures, and the turmoil of social
changes as signs of the end of modernity and the birth of a new era in human
history. This time is commonly known as the epoch of post modernism, a time for
questioning presumptions, revising axiologies, exploding borders, and transforming
every truth into a "truth." The almost universal acceptance of the postmodern
paradigm in humanistic studies, including musicology, reveals the deeply felt
necessity for re-examining the fundamental issues of value, meaning and
context.
Postmodern world is one in which a grand unified theory of existence cannot
be proposed; often, it is characterized by fragmentation, non-linearity and
heterogeneity Lyotard: 1979, cf. also Docherty : 1993). Similarly, postmodern
music is a world of musics, an incoherent universe of musical styles and cultures
whose only link is their simultaneous existence on the same small planet. In
the field of contemporary concert music, the postmodern is often associated
with the use of quotation, ironic inverted comas, and a self-conscious
juxtaposition of styles. However, postmodern musicology abandons this field of
"modernist" music altogether, for the sake of cultural critique of traditional
"canonic" art musics and contemporary pop, rock, and world musics. References to new
literary theory, psychoanalysis, deconstruction and feminist theory abound.
Kristeva, Lacan, Bakhtin and Adorno all have their devotees: contextualising
music is the battle-cry for the New or Critical Musicology. Scholars rush to
cross the boundaries of interdisciplinary and explore new methodologies. Among the
disciplines invoked in such border-crossings, privileged positions are
occupied by sociology, literary theory, and semiotics. Here, music is a part of the
complex manifold of socially grounded sign systems and texts. These approaches
have an enormous value in seeking to fill in the lacunae in the earlier
paradigm of music as an autonomous art. The traditional belief that music dwells in
a unique world of totally original, fully self standing, and
complete-in-themselves musical artifacts continues to influence ways of dealing with this art.
With its roots in the complex notion of absolute music, embracing the
romantic idealization of music as the most immaterial of all arts, the thesis of
musical autonomy has been both extremely appealing and problematic (Dahlhaus:
1978/1989).
What the postmodern, "critical" approaches often miss is the vital connection
of music to its sound material; what they often ignore is the sonorous
presence of music in the world that makes music a part of the human environment. The
physicality of the musical sound, the spatiality of musical performances are
bypassed on the way to signification. When postmodern scholars, such as Susan
McClary, invoke music's bodily presence in performance, their attention shifts
immediately to the body, its gender, its theatricality (see especially the
study of Laurie Anderson in McClary 1991). The sonorous is left behind.
The new ecological approach to music study that I propose under the rubric of
music ecology or eco-musicology (appropriate even if awkward) attempts to
contextualize music as sound and relate musical sound-material to other sonic
realities, both natural -- of the non-human organic and in-organic worlds --and
technologically created. This approach highlights the sensory aspects of
music-making: tactile textures, spatial dimensions, and timbral riches that, due to
their diversity and abundance, evade unifying tendencies of theory-making. It
also brings in a renewed emphasis on the links between nature and culture,
seen not as opposites, but as permeating one another in a mutual relationship. I
will return to the definitions of the field and methods of eco-musicology
after outlining a conceptual basis for this proposed undertaking.
II
Let me start with the issue of the cultural significance of the placement of
human subjects within their natural/cultural environments. According to the
new cultural movement of deep ecology, the total sphere of human life experience
encompasses the awareness of, and solidarity with, the whole living universe.
In the speech quoted at the beginning of this paper, Vaclav Havel described
our times as the birth of an era of global awareness, of human unity with all
Life. The writer pointed out the importance of the Gaia hypothesis
(Lovelock:1979) which implies treating the whole Earth as one meta organism of symbiotic
life-forms, an organism that may destroy what threatens it (i.e. it may
dispense with humans). To counter this image of human insignificance, Havel invoked a
second principle, the Anthropic Cosmological Principle locating human beings
at the centre of all Universe, as the goal of cosmic evolution, stating that
"from the countless possible courses of its evolution, the universe took the
only one that enabled life to emerge" (Havel:113). Both principles together
remind us, concluded Havel, that "the only real hope of people today is . . . a
renewal of our certainty that we are rooted in the earth and, at the same time,
in the cosmos."
Since the Carthesian revolution, human identity was linked to inwardness and
self reflection, separated from the world outside and rooted in the
transcendent world of pure spirituality, the world of the divine (Taylor: 1989). The
late 20th century has seen various alternatives to this vision. In Pierre
Teilhard de Chardin's philosophy of Christian evolutionism, the isolation of the
Cartesian Self has been subsumed by a grand vision of the noosphere superposed on
the biosphere of our planet and consisting of all thinking beings and the sum
total of their relationships (Teilhard de Chardin 1959). Teilhard's noosphere
is still involved in the process of noogenesis and convergence, evolving
towards the final point at the end of time: the Omega point of evolution. While
treating individual human minds as mere sparks in the cosmic incandescence of the
Divine Mind, Teilhard de Chardin pointed the way towards intuiting the
totality of life, the close connectedness of all human beings - a junction made
possible by their copresence on the same planet. For the French Jesuit, however,
humans are separated from non-humans by their capacity for thought and only the
human evolution has a telos, a final end-point of union with Divinity.
In contrast, ecophilosophers, such as the Norvegian Arne Naess, focus on the
diversity, corporeality and transience of human life, treating humans as yet
another life form, a species of animals, thinking apes, not the stewards of all
creation (Naess:1973, 1989). Naess's ecophilosophy seeks to clarify the place
of our species within nature. If ecolo means "the interdisciplinary
scientific study of the living conditions of organisms in interaction with each other
and with the surroundings, organic as well as inorganic" (Naess, 36),
ecophilosophy is a field of study bringing ecology and philosophy together, while
ecasophy is a personal application of this field and ideas used "to approach
practical situations involving ourselves."
The perspective of ecophilosophy or deep ecology is opposed to the
traditional "man-in-the-environment" image upheld by humanists and Christians alike.
The new paradigm involves "the relational, total-field image" emphasizing the
vitality of connections between people and the surrounding world. Naess sees all
organisms, including, humans, as "knots in the field of intrinsic relations"
(p. 28), relations which change the objects involved and are essential to
them. The principles of deep ecology point out that the flourishing of human and
non-human life on Earth has intrinsic value and that richness and diversity of
life-forms are values in themselves. In political terms. ecophilosophy
provides a conceptual basis for the deep ecology movement, the purpose for which is
not a slight reform of the present society, but a "substantial reorientation of
our whole civilization" (p. 45). The reorientation changes the direction away
from seeking a high standard of living (associated with consumerism and
waste) towards a global enrichment of the quality of human life found in
Self-realization through the close contact with other humans and with the non-human
ecosphere (the quality of life is non definable and non-quantifiable).
In a direct opposition to Rene Descartes's cogito ergo sum, Naess posits that
the identity of the individual, "that I am something" is developed through
interaction with a broad manifold, organic and inorganic. The Norvegian
philosopher maintains that "to distance oneself from nature and the 'natural' is to
distance oneself from a part of that which the 'I' is built up of" (p. 164).
Thus, the polar opposition of nature and culture is entirely false. The
ecophilosophical stance strongly objects to its source, that is the
postivistic-scientific world view. Naess questions one of the basic premises of science, that of
the existence of things in themselves which possess primary, measurable
qualities (e.g. size, shape, movement). The scientific world view empties Nature of
sensory content, delegating the secondary qualities of colour, warmth, etc. to
the perceiving subject. As Naess writes, for the scientist, "real nature is
something infinitely different from what humankind immediately experiences and
appreciates" (p. 51). Through this viewpoint, "human reality is served from
nature proper." All prestige belongs to the core of reality which is real,
measurable and scientific" (p. 53). Yet, simultaneously, nature is interpreted as
"both slave and raw material" (p. 191).
Instead of this reification leading to abuse, Naess proposes an affirmation
of Nature that humans are a part of his ecophilosophy claims that "organisms
and milieux are not two things . . . organisms presuppose milieux" (p. 56).
Similarly, a person is a part of nature to the extent that he or she too is a
relational junction within the total field. All beings, not just humans, have a
right to self-realization (i.e. its potential) and all are valuable in
themselves. In the philosopher's words, "the conceptual bridge from Self-realization to
a positive evaluation of diversity, complexity, and symbiosis, is furnished
by a concept of Self-realization potentials, and the idea that the overall self
- realisation in our world is increased by the realization of such
potentials" (p. 200).
In order to overcome the traditional separation of the objective from the
subjective, Naess draws from Protagorean "both/and" theory of perception,
affirming the value of tertiary qualities, that is complex gestalt features of the
world (p. 52). The world in itself has all the properties which are perceived by
each individual in the relational field--"the totality of our interrelated
experience" (p. 55). The secondary and tertiary qualities of which the
relational field consists of are the only elements of existence. The primary,
measurable qualities of matter are mathematical-physical, ideal, abstract relations
(e.g. Length, curvature, wave, etc.); in Naess's words "the geometry of the world
is not in the world" (p. 57). In the both-and theory there are no completely
separable objects. Moreover, to further strengthen the junction of the inner
with the outer, Naess posits the existence of apperceptive gestalts which "bind
the I and the not-l together in a whole" (p. 60). Gestalt formation "crosses
boundaries between what is conventionally classed as thinking as separated
from emotion" (p. 63). The elevated role of phenomenological insights and
gestalt psychology in ecophilosophy has a bearing for its usefulness in the
ecological study of music, as it will be shown later.
Thus, to sum up the main points, deep ecology implies (1) a holistic approach
to the environment from which human beings cannot be isolated and separated.
The awareness of the profound unity of all Life calls for a change in
lifestyle, with the focus on (2) the quality of experience and Self-realization, not
on increasing wealth and consumption as measures of personal and social
well-being. The oneness of Life requires (3) the diversity, complexity and symbiosis
of various life-forms, including humans. S ymbiosis means "interdependence for
the benefit of all" (p. 168); it "knits a bond between complexity and
diversity" (p. 201). In ecophilosophy, "life is viewed as a kind of vast whole. . .
the variety of forms of life, with their different capacities, realise, that
is, bring into actuality, something which adds to that whole" (p. 200).
III.
How does ecophilosophy relate to music? What consequences for the study and
practice of the sonic art can be derived from such a radical, all-encompassing
world view? Naess's philosophical reflections contain many threads that may
inspire musicological reflection. Since this borrowing should be acknowledged I
propose to use two labels interchangeably--music ecology, and eco-musicology,
the latter mirroring Naess's neologism. Both expressions contain three
conceptual particles: eco from the Greek oiks, i.e. household, community, (as in
ecology and economy ), music and logos, (i.e. word). In accordance with its
tripartite title, the ecological approach to music research takes into account the
musical life of our home planet, in its diversity, complexity and symbiosis. If
defined so broadly, eco-musicology would encompass all music in theory and
practice, and lose its focus in the process. A more precise definition describes
this domain as the study of music in its environments--including cultural
environments, since nature is not opposed to culture-- with a particular emphasis
on the aural experiences acquired in natural-and-cultural sonic habitats,
rural and urban soundscapes.
In its most general sense, the triple ecological principle (diversity,
complexity and symbiosis) may relate music to the totality of other human and
non-human acoustic environments. While uncovering the relationship of music to
various manifestations of Life, eco-musicology may draw from fields relevant to a
particular topic, e.g. phenomenology and hermeneutics, studies of auditory
perception (Bregman:1990), ornithology, anthropology, etc. A particular attention
is given to music created explicitly with some "environmental" or "ecological"
purpose or context, e.g. works by R. Murray Schafer, Pauline Oliveros,
Hildegard Westerkamp, Francois-Bernard Mache and many others. However, discovering
connections between individual compositions and distinct styles and their
nature-cultural environments, might take place without any overt references to the
existence of such relationships made by the composers and performers.
Since much ecomusicological attention is spent on "extramusical" factors; a
question arises: "is it a mimetic theory of art in a new guise?" Yes and no.
Yes, for in ecomusicological approach, the value of music is situated not in its
portrayal of the nature's effect on the emotions of a detached subject (e.g.
the Romantic experience of nature since Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony) but in
the following of nature's mode of action--as defined by St. Thomas Aquinas in
his famous Ars imitatur naturam (e.g. structural applications of the
proportions of the golden section and of formal patterns borrowed from birdsong, or
the use of chaos theory in computer music). Simultaneously, the answer to the
charge of "mimetic character" of eco-musicology is "No," because in this
approach the opposition between nature and culture is highly dubious. The human
environment is taken broadly and includes all human activity, all the musical past,
all human and non-human soundscapes preceding the creation of a given
performance, a given work of art.
Music ecology focuses on the music's connection to our planet's life, by
recognizing mimetic imitations of elements of natural soundscapes in music, and by
tracing inspirations with environmental processes and phenomena. Thus, it
studies ecological or environmental music, but is not limited to the focus on the
music's content or context and may be applied to various musical styles and
works. This approach eschews the fixation on the abstract (primacy of pitch)
and the obsession with structural coherence of musical artifacts (individual
works). The performative and perceptual aspects of music-making are taken into
consideration in an account that seeks to transcend the limitations of music
notation. The focus on the perceptual primacy of what Naess calls tertiary
qualities implies a change of perspective, from an almost exclusive concern with the
primary element of pitch abstractions, to the complex, interrelated aspects
of music in its sonorous manifestation. These three basic areas of music
ecology discussed so far are summarized in Table 1.

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TABLE 1: MAIN PRINCIPLES OF MUSIC ECOLOGY
1. Emphasis on holistic perception and the sonoristic approach to music
study (music as sound; application of principles of Auditory Scene Analysis);
2. Applications of the triple ecological principle of diversity, complexity,
symbiosis;
3. Focus on relationships between music and environment:
* in performance
* in compositional design
* n representation

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Ecomusicological approach highlights differences between musical styles
relating to their modes of performance and primary acoustic environments. For
instance, the difference between an enormous dynamic range of the symphony
orchestra, spanning the entire spectrum from ppppp to fifif, and the flat dynamic
envelope of uniformly loud rock music reflects the contrast between the total
silence of the ideal concert hall which excludes all elements of external
soundscapes, and the noisiness of modern dwellings in bustling cities permeated with a
constant layer of traffic noise which masks all sonic subtlety. Recall the
frustration of listening to a symphony in a car--the moving sound dome of urban
culture--where the music constantly falls below the threshold of audibility.
Or, to use another example of the coupling of music with its acoustic
environment, imagine a performance of a Palestrina's Mass in an outdoor theatre, amidst
cries of icecream vendors and gusts of winds, without reverberation. You
will really have to stretch your sonic imagination to appreciate this music under
such inappropriate conditions. Marching brass bands, on the other hand, work
outdoors very well.
Music ecology, if practiced earnestly, might lead to a discovery of
relationships between outdoor soundscapes, and musical genres and styles. In the words
of R. Murray Schafer, "music moves into concert halls when it can no longer be
effectively heard out of doors. There, behind padded walls, concentrated
listening becomes possible. That is to say, the string quartet and urban
pandemonium are historically contemporaneous." (Schafer 1977). The emphasis on the
total acoustic image of a musical work implies a consideration of performance
settings, types of sound sources, and compositional designs, that is patterns of
spatial placements of musicians and audiences (cf. Harley: 1994a).
IV. In one particular sense, the principles of diversity, complexity and
symbiosis may govern the relationships between various musical-cultures,
and--within one culture--the coexistence of distinct genres and styles. Eco-musicology,
then, may means the study focused on music in the world, not in a
sociological sense, as the music's involvement in societal ideologies, activities,
organizations, but in a general "ecological" sense, centered on the music's
immersion in the acoustic world around us. Instead of pursuing what Harold Bloom
(Bloom 1994) calls "the triple question of the agon--more than, less than, equal
to?" in reference to the individual musical works, ecomusicological approach may
center on the symbiosis and competition between different transnational
styles and cultures (i.e. classical music, jazz, rock, pop) proliferating through
development of technological environments (recording, broadcast, computer
networks). How would this approach differ from ethno-musicology?
Eco-musicology seeks to emphasize the dependence of musical creativity on the
auditory environments existing in the sites of particular cultures. This
relationship is easily noticeable in cultures of low level of technological
development, where people spend much time outdoors, listening and singing under an
open sky. One example of such a culture is that of the Kaluli people of the
rainforest in Papua New Guinea-studied by Steven Feld (Feld: 1982, 1994). What
raised the Kaluli to international stardom amongst the environmentalists,
critical musicologists, and cognitive psychologists, to mention just three groups of
their fans, was their close association with the endangered habitat of the
rainforest and the relationship between the natural soundscapes and forms of
their cultural expression, including song and the creation of such unique notions
as "flow" and "lift-up-over-sounding" in their musical language.
The question arises, though, whether the Kaluli involvement in acoustic
environment is unique; whether this culture is too primitive to have any
significance for the study of music as art? The answer should be negative if there were
other cases of such direct involvement of people with their environment, and
if one could describe with certainty the metamorphosis of music under the
conditions of changing environment. An interesting case is provided by the
inhabitants of northern area of Lapland which spans northern Norway, Sweden and
Finland around the Arctic Circle (Edstrom). The song of the nomadic Sami people,
called the Yoyk or joik originated outdoors, in solitude with nature while
tending herds of reindeer. As Edstrom writes, "the joiks are directed to different
phenomena in nature: to mountains, fairies, animals, insets, and, not the
least, to people themselves." In joiks, the singer expressed his/her understanding
of the world, of different people, animal species, land geography, and so
forth. The melody of "bird" joiks was derived directly from the birdsong. These
songs were sung with tight larynx, in a timbre suitable to be heard against the
wind. Edstrom cites early derogatory descriptions of this music which,
according to one account "sounds like dogs howling' (Edstrom p. 13). Despite the
southerners dislike of Sami's music, their description confirmed persistence of an
unusual vocal technique used to sing the joiks with "restricted pitch,
stretched vocal chords, closed throat and often with the mouth barely open" (p. 13).
However, after profound social changes, and the abandonment of the nomadic
life-style by the prevailing part of the population, the Sami's unique vocal
technique has all but disappeared. In various examples of cross-over musics
(mixing joiks with pop, rock, symphonic styles of accompaniment), only pitch
contours of the folksong remained, rendering the music almost unrecognizable. The
sonorous image of music created outdoors, in the acoustic coupling with the
environment, was not preserved in later, eclectic recordings. The music evolved
because of the transformation of the acoustic environment caused by social
factors: change of work patterns, settling down in permanent communities where
people's homes are filled with objects, including stereos and recordings of the
Western (sometimes country-and-western) musics.
V.
The research of Feld and Edstrom, which might be considered as
exemplification's of eco-musicology, belongs in the domain of cultural anthropology or
ethnomusicology. Indeed, the two e-musicologies have several points in common. For
instance, an ethnomusicological textbook begins with the following claims:
"Like all of expressive culture, music is a peculiarly human adaptation to life
on planet earth.... Each music culture is a particular adaptation to particular
circumstances" (Slobin and Titon 1992). Ethnomusicology studies music in
culture or music as culture. Music ecology is narrower, in that it focuses on the
acoustic phenomena of sound and its existence, production, interaction in
culture; it also highlights the music's symbolic and cognitive connection to the
environment. Eco-musicology maintains that in music, globalization should not
mean conquest leading to the eradication of local traditions. Thus, two
premises of eco-musicology are interconnected: (a) the end of the hegemony of Western
art music in cultural discourse, (b) the tolerance and openness to various
forms of musical life, including those traditionally studied by ethnomusicology,
music theory, and historical musicology.
Here, we find ourselves on the postmodern ground: the relativisation and
contextualisation of values, the fragmentation of the one art of music into
various synchronous and asynchronous musics, the plurality and diversity of
cultures. The difference is in the ecomusicological emphasis on the sonorous, in the
attention to features of music as performed and heard, not written down and
talked about. A similarity between eco- and ethno-approaches stems from the
triple ecological principle of diversity, complexity, symbiosis. If these are main
values informing the co-existence of the world's musical cultures, any attempt
at cultural hegemony, such as the one undertaken by the Western music
industry flooding the globe with sounds and images manufactured in one country
(Michael Jackson, Madonna), should be greeted with profound suspicion. There is no
room for diversity and symbiosis in a situation of such transnational cultural
dominance. Eco-musicology values pluralism of cultural expressions, just as
ecophilosophy upheld the right of all species to a full realization of their
potential. Similarly, ethnomusicologists would want to be very sensitive to such
issues of colonial hegemony and defend the right of indigenous and endangered
small cultures to exist and flourish.
Vl.
Westerners' delight in discovering the musical cultures of the gentle
children of Nature living in a symbiotic relationship with their environment of a
rainforest or a northern tundra, might be seen as a realization of the Romantic
postulates of JeanJacques Rousseau to return to Nature and scorn the damaging
influence of civilization. There is, indeed, more than a trace of such Nature
worship in the mystique of the rainsforest, portrayed as a present-day
paradise which is threatened with destruction. Some environmentalist deplore all
traces of human presence in or interaction with nature, and value only the "pure
unspoiled beauty" of non-human life. The music of the tribes and nations living
in close relationship with their environment is often considered valuable
because of this relationship, not because of any particuarly intrinsic "musical"
features. For instance, R. Murray Schafer thus describes the experience of
performing on a "natural" instrument, made of a reed, wood or animal skin
(Schafer: 1993). If you think of a musical instrument as something which came from
nature and is still part of nature and still fells itself part of nature, every
time you perform on it, you are indulging in a very wistful, very romantic
ideal of bringing nature back to life. I don't think the same thing exists with
plastic instruments or electronic instruments. There's a very big difference
between an lndian who beats a drum, and the drum is made from the skin of an
animal that he has killed, and the animal is his totem. he plays that drum and
its voice is the voice of the animal that speaks to him as he plays.
It is more difficult to establish the connection between the soundscape and
the music of Western art tradition. Here, thousands of years of isolation of
music from the external soundscape resulted in creating a self-referential
domain of music relating only and solely to other musics, a domain with sharp
distinctions between what is musical and non-musical. Primarily, to put it simply,
pitch is musical, while non-pitched, percussive timbres are admitted into the
domain of music only tentatively, as ornaments not as essential elements of
sound material. A clear-cut division between the musical and unmusical appears,
for instance, in various theories of musical space, the space of tones
projected in time, the virtual space distinguished from the auditory space of
everyday noises surrouding the listeners in their physical environment (Harley:
1994a). In the Western tradition, music is thought of as much more than sounds; it
is the abstract structure superimposed on and mediated through sonorous
sequences that makes these sounds worthy of our attention. Music is--as it were--not
heard, but imagined. Challenges to this conceptual tradition came from
various directions: the futurists and the discovery of "the musical" in noise, the
impressionists and the discovery of "the musical" beyond the sense allowed this
word in a narrow European art music tradition.
Varese's use of percussion, Cowell's New Music Resouces, Cage's play with the
radios, musiq'e concrete, electronic instruments and experiments, the
loudspeaker revolution --all these occurrences influenced a change in the
understanding of the limits of "music." It is impossible even to list the main stages of
this evolution in one brief paper. What needs to be pointed out, however, is
the fact that the widening of the area of "musical" sounds happened
simultaneously with the recovery of the mimetic principle by composers, or, rather, with
the shift away from the romantic emotive response to nature towards the use of
"natural" models and laws as structural frameworks for the music's
construction. This idea preoccupies Franc,ois-Bernard Mache's (Mache: 1983/1992).
The composer finds, for instance, many analogies between birdsong and human
music. He describes various instances of the birds' musical creativity and
seeks to prove that it is "somewhat ill-founded to continue to define the cultural
domain in radical opposition to the natural" (p. 157). Animals are not
machines, for they display invention; moreover, neither human nor animalian music
can be defined as a system of communication. According to Mache, the polarity of
mind and body and the polarity of nature and culture are equally useless (p.
166). All living beings are a part of nature, all are affected by climate and
environment: "man and animal reveal the acoustic influence of the world in
which they live" (p. 151). Music should be--here, the composer's voice changes
from descriptive to prescriptive--based on auditory models borrowed from the
environment, it should recover its sensory contact with the world. For Mache,
music is a tool of knowledge "the tool of apprehension, of comprehension, even,
of the world, at the same time as of pleasure"(p. 169).
VII.
Francois-Bernard Mache was neither the first, nor the only composer
preoccupied with exploding the borders between music and the "external world" of
Nature. Mache himself quotes the importance of Czech language for Leos Janacek,
chaotic crowd sounds for Iannis Xenakis, birdsong for Olivier Messiaen, sounds of
the night for Bela Bartok (Harley: 1994b, 1995). The latter composer's
interest in Nature as a creative force is particularly intersting in this context:
Bartok's music seems to have been modelled structurally on natural laws and
phenomena, such as the Golden Section, approximated by the Fibonacci series. For
Bartok, these natural phenomena include folk music of the peasants who live a
life coordinated with and ruled by Nature. Among living composers, whose
musical activities involve a return to the Earth, and to the small communities
living in close proximity and interaction with their environments, Peter Maxwell
Davies, now settled at one of the Orkney Islands, pursues an expressive ideal of
environmental or eco-oriented music, bringing the sound world of the sea into
the concert hall (Matthews: 1992). His undertaking, much like the music of
Frederic Delius, results in a new series of representations of natural sounds
and soundscapes with symphonic means.
Music ecology transcend the domain of "ecological music" for it purports to
study music beyond the notes, the music of the total perceptual experience.
Here, the psychoacoustic bent is strongly felt because of the focus on sonority
(the types of sounds, their similarity to other existing sounds, the types of
procedures for sound transformation, organization, creation of meaning). A
fully-articulated theory of musicin-its-sounding-form is yet to be developed.
Here, the methodology of auditory scene analysis developed by Albert Bregman
seems to offer a particularly fruitful direction for future research. The focus
should remain on the audible, not visible, reality of music which lives in sound.
In the 19th century, the philosophy of nature presupposed a deep,
unbreachable chasm between the thinking subject and the external natural world. According
to Charles Taylor (Taylor: 1989), the romantic orientation to nature is
concerned "with the sentiments which nature awakens in us" (p. 297); for the
romantic "nature is like a great keyboard on which our highest sentiments are played
out." As Taylor writes, "in our civilisation, moulded by expressivist
conceptions, art has come to take a central place in our spiritual life, in some
respect replacing religion" (p. 376). Art, located on "the border of the numinous"
was awarded a crucial place of creating expression in human life, crucial,
because "expressive individuation has become one of the cornerstones of modern
culture" (p. 376). The 20th century saw all dreams shattered, all identities
fragmented. In music, the conceptual reformulations reached the zero-level of
total absence of created sound, total presence of envrionmental sound in works
by John Cage. The postmodern plurality of styles became obligatory at a time
when composers, to quote Francois-Bernard Mache, willingly rushed "towards the
encyclopedias, exhaustive catalogues, retrospectives, exhumations" because they
no longer believed in the music's future (Mache: 178). While avoiding that
ecological or environmental music sought the utopia of a pure unspoiled nature
in (1) the portrayals or quotations of environmental sounds, (2) the use of
acoustic instruments in live performance, (3) the transference of music into
outdoor environments (performance in total unity with the Earth).
This is a new dream, arising at a time of technological overkill, of
overabundance of noise, artificiality of synthetic and amplified sounds. While
ecological music pursues such dreams of primal wholeness, music ecology seeks to
articulate the ties between nature and culture; it attempts to recover the
correspondence between natural phenomena and human affairs. The modern and romantic
separation of nature from culture is a dangerous illusion; if culture is for
humans here and now and nature there and then, there is a need to recover this
lost unity, a possibility of return to a closeness with the trees--through,
say, travel to the rainforest. In contrast, ecophilosophy claims that nature is
always mediated through culture and that envisioning cultures without their
natural components impoverishes the breadth of human experience. Life on Earth is
a series of networks of interrelationships; the existence of pure, unspoilt
beauty of exclusively "natural" worlds and of completely autonomous and
art)ficial human cultures are equally dubious.
With its emphasis on interrelationship between the sonorities of music and of
the environment, eco-musicology eschews the separation between human and
non-human environments. After all, music in performance is an element of
soundscape, a vital sonic bubble surrounding various cultures with an unmistakable
layer of sound. Schafer defines soundscape as "a field of interactions" (Schafer:
1977, 131). At the centre of this field is located a living, hearing human
being who defines his or her auditory space and environment through decisions and
acts of directed attention, of sound production or perception. The
flourishing of this individual human self is mediated through connectedness, in a
growing awareness of the relational field of existence embracing all forms of life.

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NOTE:
An earlier version of this paper was read at the Spring Meeting of the New
York State-St. Lawrence Chapter of the American Musicological Society, Ottawa,
8-9 April, 1995.

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Maria Anna Harley McGill University, Faculty of Music 555 Sherbrooke St.
West, Montreal, Canada, H3A 1E3 Fax: (514)-398-8061. Telephone: (514)-493-3301
e-mail: cxhy@musica.mcgill.ca
Biographical note Maria Anna Harley, born in Poland, studied musicology (M.A.
1986, University of Warsaw, Poland; Ph.D. 1994, McGill University, Montreal,
Canada) and sound engineering (M.A. 1987, F. Chopin Academy of Music Warsaw,
Poland). After earning her doctorate (with the dissertation on "Space and
spatialization in contemporary music: History and analysis, ideas and
implementations"), she received a SSHRC Post- doctoral Fellowship to study contemporary
Polish music at McGill University, in association with the University of Warsaw
(1994-1996). Since August 1996, she is the Director of the Polish Music
Reference Center and an Assistant Professor of musicology at the School of Music
University of Southern California, Los Angeles. As a musicologist specializing in
20th-century music, Dr. Harley is particularly intere- sted in philosophical
and perceptual aspects of music making, in the composers' concepts of nature
and soundscape, the role of spatial sound in musical composition, as well as in
the connection between music and ecology. She has published articles on
Bartok, Xenakis, Andriessen, Bacewicz, Brant, Schafer and others, and dealt with
issues of musical spatialization, birdsong portrayal in music, Catholic
mysticism, site-specific music, women composers, acoustic ecology, etc. She has also
presented papers at many international conferences in England, Hungary, Germany,
the U.S., and Canada.