1.1 Sounding the Anthropocene
Much dystopian film and fiction of the past 20 years has grown from a sense of climate dread, as words like âglobal warmingâ and the more neutral âclimate changeâ (or âclimate disruptionâ is less politically conciliatory circles) have permeated news and popular media in the developed world. As of this writing, two âmonsterâ hurricanes have ravaged the Southeast US within a month, summer fire warnings have shocked the residents of Oslo, and temperatures in Siberia have spiked 40 degrees Fahrenheit above normal in July.1 No wonder post-apocalyptic wastelands, devastating pandemics, and mass extinctions are common narrative currency, though humansâ role (and particularly that of comfortable white humans) in wreaking all this havoc is often treated quite vaguely in contemporary dystopian storytelling.2 Still, many who take in these images and the sounds that bring them to life are painfully aware of humansâ hyper-industrialized presence on the planet and the damage it has done. Whether as an attempt at expiation or an act of collective ego, we now have a word for our epoch on Earth. As a buzzword gaining more attention outside academia since atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen drew attention to the term in 2000,3 âAnthropoceneâ contains a paradox of arrogance and humility. The word assumes an epic quality as it names the human epoch, though much disagreement persists on when the age really began: did it start with steam engines or with uranium deposits in the geologic record, or did the first time humans struck fire signal a new era of creation and destruction? Making human presence central to this period also writes us larger than we may deserve to be, neglecting our place in the animal world. Our âsuperiorâ intelligence is coming into question as animal studies, in the sciences and humanities, show how little we know about how whales communicate or what it takes for bees to pollinate the flora of our world. As one branch of the emerging field of ecomusicology would have it, even Western music itself is âtoxicâ in its historical use as a voicing of human dominion over other species. The field is expanding beyond ecocritical analysis of scored music to include studies of nature sounds and their human imitations, material aspects of musical instruments, and planetary activism in popular song.
Anthropocene discourse has likewise expanded to include terms like âCapitaloceneâ and âChthuluceneâ4 (in Donna Harawayâs sense of multispecies connectivity) as scholars, writers, and artists work to understand the many forces forming an epoch reaching a disastrous climax in the larger narration of Earthâs history. Not only climate change but also species extinction, reduction of biodiversity, and increasing air and ocean pollution have led to a growing sense of urgency and âpre-traumatic stress.â5 Within Anthropocene discourse, a political approach favors the language of âthreat and opportunity, fear and activism,â while the philosophical approach asks questions about narrativity and truth claims (who is telling the story, and is it accurate?) as it reframes long-standing assumptions about modernity (most notably in the work of Bruno Latour).6 As first-world notions of human progress disintegrate, amid climate crisis and the decline of democratic societies, artistic responses must change, too. As Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin have noted, describing the sense of disorientation that Anthropocene thinking can cause, âBeyond the modernist valorization of the principle of shock in art, our current climate demands a different kind of aesthetic and sensorial attention.â With a nod to Bill McKibben, they define the Anthropocene as âthe global condition of being born into a world that no longer exists.â7 How to respond to such profound unease is still a developing question, both for artists and for the scholars who analyze their efforts.
Even the fact that scholars disagree on how to pronounce âAnthropoceneâ (is the accent on the first or second syllable?) highlights the ânew precariousnessâ or âontological instabilityâ8 it introduces to traditional binary thinking about humans and nature, by objectifying and thereby exposing it as a construct. At the same time, this very instability has yielded a rich trove of new research beyond climate science itself, in eco-criticism, environmental humanities, and the emerging field of cultural planetary studies. Christian Moraruâs 2015 book Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology (University of Michigan Press) offers a bold combination of post-Cold War and Anthropocene thinking to investigate texts by Zadie Smith, Orhan Pamuk, and others; Moraru has also co-edited The Planetary Turn (with Amy Elias, Northwestern University Press, 2015), a collection of essays that seeks to transcend established concepts of environmentalism and globalism in a new treatment of âgeo-culture.â As projects like these work to âsoundâ the depths of the Anthropocene, and, as of this writing, as a conference on the topic of âplanetary cultural and literary studiesâ is occurring in MontrĂ©al, I am curious about literal soundings of climate dread in narrative form. How does music function in dystopian stories, beyond thematic mention or soundtrack-like accompaniment? How does music claim attention amid the privileging of visuality in dystopian film and fiction? This book seeks to answer these questions as it addresses several gaps in current scholarship in the environmental and planetary humanities, fields that do address sound in terms of animal communication, instrument-making, immersive art installations, or concert music written to evoke ocean, sky, or melting ice,9 but do not treat music as a critical force in the act and experience of storytelling.
How a story is told makes a difference in how its readers/listeners/viewers respond in the outside world. As Kate Rigby has pointed out, âmaterial-discursiveâ elements of narrative are crucial not only to human understanding of eco-catastrophe but also to our actionâor lack thereofâin response to what we perceive.10 This materiality includes images, digital or otherwise; text on the page, its surrounding white space, and its prose or poetic rhythms; sculptural presences in indoor or outdoor space; and sound or pressure waves that move through space as well. Despite the foregrounding of visual and textual elements in much of the environmental humanities, sound is harder to avoid. It is far easier to close the eyes than stop the ears, as many airport travelers attest when trying to tune out the latest gossip on TV. Derrida observes this as well, in his Of Grammatology, when he describes sound as violent, physical penetration (240). Sound, and particularly music, with its expected/unexpected patterns, its associative resonances, and its rhythms that evoke sex, walking, heavy lifting, or the human heartbeat, yields not just an intellectual or affective response but a kinetic one as well. The performative materiality of music can incite a trance state in a crowd or wake one up from such a state. It can also enliven or disturb the stories told about the worldâs end, making them harder to forget or treat as pleasantly discomfiting entertainment.
1.2 A Critical-Performative Approach
This book is part of an ongoing tradition of exploring music in narrative, within the field of word and music studies, itself part of the larger field of intermediality, or the study of intersecting media. Intermediality includes, to name just a few of the possibilities, novel-to-film adaptation, musical responses to visual art, textual âtransmediationsâ11 in dance, eco-poetics in outdoor space, and hidden âheteromedialâ12 aspects of texts that appear to exist in only one medium. Musical settings of text, and musical aspects of poetry and fiction, are also frequent subjects of intermedial study. Much of the research in word and music studies has been taxonomic, as in Werner Wolfâs The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality, (1999) which catalogues formal imitations of music in fiction, or concerned primarily with image and sound, as in Siglind Bruhnâs Musical Ekphrasis: Composers Responding to Poetry and Painting (2000). The related field of adaptation studies has yielded compelling work on music in film, opera, and art song. More recently, efforts to relate word and music studies to sound art, spatial-acoustic studies, embodied performativity, gender, and ideology have enriched this area of study and raised its stakes beyond page and score. While the fields of intermediality and it...