Sonic Seascapes, Science, and the Chthulucene
This is the introduction to a paper I presented at two 2018 conferences: the American Musicological Society Annual Conference (San Antonio, TX) and the Irish Sound, Science, and Technology Conference (Derry, Ireland).
The Anthropocene, for all its terminological newness, has the formal logic of an old story, a romance even—a utopian/dystopian hero’s journey where “man” explores, excavates, claims, defines, and kills the Earth and its inhabitants. No less real for its fictive power, it frames our current epoch, a fragment of time itself circumscribed and defined by Western man. This story places humans at the center of a universalizing fantasy of drama and adventure, man against nature, what Ursula K. Le Guin described as the hunter’s “linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic.”[i] In her words:
“Technology,” or “modern science” (using the words as they are usually used … standing for the “hard” sciences and high technology founded upon continuous economic growth), is a heroic undertaking, Herculean, Promethean, conceived as triumph, hence ultimately as tragedy. The fiction embodying this myth will be, and has been, triumphant (Man conquers earth, space, aliens, death, the future, etc.) and tragic (apocalypse, Holocaust, then or now). [emphasis added]
What role does music play in this story? A double one: by appealing to its technological function Western music has been theorized as a site that both stabilizes and destabilizes the Anthropocentric linear narrative. At the most basic level music is seen as fundamental to human biocultural coevolution (a skill that developed in tandem with language, as Gary Tomlinson describes) and hence a defining feature of humanity. The Anthropocene feeds on this idea by framing industrial capitalism as an inevitable continuation of the evolutionary (and artistic) progress of man. Similarly, the notion of a universal “human nature” folds back onto the idea of “art eternal,” which in turn tends to appeal to a musical work’s organicism to justify its place in the canon.[ii] At the same time, as a context-specific, coded medium, music can potentially participate in alternative epistemologies that destabilize the Anthropocene’s single-player techno-heroic form.
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Contact me for a copy of the whole paper.
[i] Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in Dancing at the Edge of the World (New York: Grove Press, 1989).
[ii] For an alternative reading of organicism in music analysis, see Holly Watkins’s “Toward a Post-Humanist Organicism” in Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 14 (2017), pp 93-114.
