Earth Sounds: Exploring the History of Music and Environmentalism
Humans have embraced the environment as a canvas and source of inspiration for thousands of years. The Earth as creative fodder is dynamic, accessible, and emotionally evocative, making it a beloved subject for artists and audiences alike.
An acoustic ecology recording set-up, Mountaindale - Upstate New York, USA, 2015
Our aural sense is a strong avenue for connecting with the Earth, which has led to the creation of subgenres of music that redefine what is considered music. Listening closely to our natural environment can ground us in a sense of place, which prompts us to pay closer attention to our environments and form connections with a given ecosystem.
The relationship between sound, music, and the environment has many branches, and reducing their alchemy to a single narrative is not possible. This blog post will focus on the historical period in the 1960s and 70s when sounds were embraced as music, acoustic ecology spawned soundscape composition, and the land art movement reflected the values of the widespread environmental movement. Focusing on this music journey, which encourages audiences to connect with the Earth in a raw form, can show why today’s music industry can be a powerful conduit for caring about the Earth.
Sound as music
In the mid-1960s, a handful of musicians from different musical disciplines attempted to expand the institutional definition of music to include any and all sounds that one chooses to hear as music. John Cage was one of the pioneers of this expansion and referred to music as “sound hear,” where the listener and the act of listening take on a central role as a parameter of what is considered music.
He supported his beliefs with unique compositions for the classical music stage with pieces such as 4’33’ (four minutes and thirty-three seconds, 1952), where performers remained silent onstage for that time. In an interview with Cage in 1986, he said, “If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical, it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that aren't musical, and that way, cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.”.
Other musicians at the time also centered their work around embracing sound as music: Pauline Oliveros developed a musical philosophy called Deep Listening, which explores the difference between involuntary hearing and conscious listening. Her series of scores and activities, Sonic Meditations (1971), started building a community invested in exploring their relationship with sound.
Annea Lockwood, Bruce Nauman, Bill Fontana, and La Monte Young are other musicians and composers associated with the sound movement at this time.
Acoustic ecology to soundscape composition
In the late 1960s, R Murray Schafer, a musician, composer, and professor, formalized the concept of Acoustic Ecology, a multidisciplinary area of study that advocates for hearing the acoustic environment as a musical composition and owning responsibility for said composition. In 1969, Schafer established a research group called the World Soundscape Project (WSP) that aimed to document functional and dysfunctional acoustic environments and increase public awareness of the importance of the soundscape. As defined by the WSP, soundscapes include the natural sounds of ecosystems, habitats, and sounds we encounter daily. Disciplines linked with Acoustic Ecology include acoustics, psychoacoustics, music, biology, ethnomusicology, geography, and sociology.
Sound environment recordings collected by the WSP for archival and educational purposes soon found their home in more creative works. Composers started creating soundscape compositions where recorded material was mixed with abstract and transformed sounds to create musical pieces that often aimed to build narratives around environmental topics and issues. Some of the most important soundscape composers are Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp, both of whom were early members of WSP.
In 1993, Westerkamp founded the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE), which aims to design more “healthy and attractive sonic environments” with the ultimate mission of “turning the negative specter of a polluted sound world into a vision where the sonic environments become a place for renewal and creativity.” The WFAE exists to this day and is active in the soundscape community.
Land art movement
Around the same time that sounds were embraced as music and Acoustic Ecology got its land legs, the Land Art movement emerged in America in the 1960s and 1970s. Land Art, also known as environmental art, Earth art, and Earthworks, intended to increase public awareness of our relationship with the natural environment through artwork. Artwork under this movement explored a return to nature, which dovetailed with the key principles of the environmental movement at this time.
Oliver Ranch is an example of a space that embodies the site-specific focus of the Land Art movement. Purchased by Steve and Nancy Oliver in 1981, they decided to use their 100-acre property to approach art collecting in a novel, non-commercial way. Installations involving sound were incorporated into the landscape, such as Bill Fontana’s Earth Tones (1992), which used six subterranean Bose Acoustic Wave Cannons that emitted low-frequency sounds recorded at underwater sites worldwide. Oliver Ranch and its mission continue today, and it offers ranch tours that perpetuate the initial values inspired by the Land Art movement.
Conclusion
This post presents a slice of music history that shows music's enduring relationship to the environment. In today's music industry, conversations about the health of our planet are becoming more common. From single-use plastic in venues to the carbon footprint of fan travel, the environmental impacts caused by the industry as a whole have been frequently acknowledged in recent years. Big industry names have championed data-driven assessments of some of the more known impacts - Massive Attack, for example, has commissioned the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research to track their carbon emissions throughout their tour to identify “hot spots” from the band’s data. In January 2024 MIT, Warner Music Group, Live Nation, and Coldplay announced the launching of a comprehensive study of the live music industry’s carbon footprint in the US and UK to be completed by June 2024.
Music has long been a vehicle for honoring and protecting the Earth. The industry’s recent focus on mitigating its harmful outputs aligns with its history as a space for environmental attention and activism. We all call Earth home, and interdisciplinary action is necessary to create substantial change for our planet’s well-being.