Music and the Environment

3 credits · Undergraduate

An exploration of how music, sound, nature, and culture interact both with and within the environment, engage in current issues of conservation and sustainability, and influence musical creation and expression. We will employ methodologies drawn from musicology, ethnomusicology, sound studies, ecology, environmental history, and ecocriticism to consider musical portraiture of the natural world, historical soundscapes, sonic representations of the environmental past, animal and interspecies musical performance, digital nonhuman musical environments, soundscape ecology, the music/sound of environmental change, and social-activist roles of music in periods of environmental crisis. To emphasize the importance of musical thinking about the interconnections of people and planet, this course culminates in ecomusicological explorations of the Anthropocene. [3]