Music and Environment

Undergraduate / Graduate

Over the last four centuries, how have the creators and practitioners of Western art music imagined nature as a recurring other-a foil to the art and artifice of our human world? This course is a trans-historical survey of the multifaceted relationships between musical creators, audiences, and the natural world. Over the 10-week course we will explore humankind's evolving relationship with the environment, calling upon a diverse array of composers, performers, and artists. While music offers a space in which to contemplate our relationship with nature, the natural world has long offered an opportunity for artists to expand their horizons, suggesting new sonic resources, new ways of performing, and new understandings of temporality. The course is organized in three large modules: listening to the environment, representing the environment, and speaking for the environment. The first introduces a set of listening practices-deep listening and soundwalks-to explore how these listening practices open up a range of possibilities for the interpenetration of natural sounds within musical performances, and musical performances in outdoor spaces. The second module turns our focus toward transliterations of natural phenomena and animal sounds, mediated through instrumental or electronic renderings. The final module examines the ways in which music can engage with, critique, and perform (or fail to perform) environmental activism.