Post 104.

Today I read a Pocket Worthy article on incubation calling and climate change. Many birds sing to their babies while they’re still in the egg. This has a number of known and unknown evolutionary advantages. Incubation calling helps many birds imprint who their mother is. For some birds, like fairy wrens, it helps mothers avoid raising parasitic cuckoos. Research also has found that the music that zebra finches sing to their eggs changes growth and behavior. In particular, these songs help baby birds be prepared to adapt to changing environmental conditions caused by climate change. This is a new area for research, and there’s a lot scientists don’t know about these songs.

Zebra finch mothers, who live in the harsh Australian Outback, do most of the incubation. Like many bird species, the males are more brightly colored than females, and sing more complex songs. However, zebra finch mothers sing a particular incubation call when temperature climbs above 78 F. Growth and development differs between eggs who experience that particular incubation call. This incubation call helps the baby birds grow smaller than average, which then leads to the advantage of more efficient thermoregulation in hotter environments. These effects are felt into adulthood, as this next generation of birds chose hotter areas to make their nests.

Are these incubation calls one, of many, of the songs of global climate change? What might this music mean for music education? Do our songs affect development as obviously as the Zebra finch mothers' songs do? Probably not. But it's interesting to consider anyway.

DS

Link to image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/1e/Zebra_finch_nest_hollow_Burke_River_floodplain_Boulia_Queensland_P1030205.jpg/640px-Zebra_finch_nest_hollow_Burke_River_floodplain_Boulia_Queensland_P1030205.jpg

Post 103.
   
Today I received a copy of The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning, edited by Janice L. Waldron, Stephanie Horsley, and Kari K. Veblen. At a risk of being obsolete by its release, the authors wrote chapters for this handbook exploring the following questions:
1. How do social media and social networking enable and support learning in diverse contexts.
2. How meaningful is the notion of participatory culture for thinking about social media and music education.
3. How are issues such as communication, mass self-communication, power, democracy, and identity negotiated in a networked society, and what are the implications for music learning and making?
4. How does the business of social media support or exploit the ways in which musicians learn and interact? How does it support musical agency?
5. What roles might social media and social networking play in supporting music learning and making from a social justice perspective? And 6. What are the implications for future music learning in diverse contexts? (pp. 6-7).

To avoid obsolescence embedded in music technological scholarship, my co-author, Vincent Bates, and I chose to challenge the, sadly, perennial negatives of development—economic and ecological devastation. These two devastations, that tech-utopians are most likely to elide, implicate them, and us, in the ongoing oppression of the poor, who are unable to access the newest tech and have their physical homes, waters, and soils poisoned by  chmicals and plastics that make the middle-and upper-class’s prized technologies possible, and dominate nature, who cannot long survive such resulting crises as e-waste and server farms.
           
Because our critique was 2/3 negative (The Bad and The Ugly), many tech-utopians will feel personally challenged. Some are, wanting to hide their unconscious crimes, likely will bury our critique, or charge us with luddism (as if the original rural, English Luddites wouldn’t have benefitted from stopping the 18-hour workday at the factories poisoning their communities). But, truly, we outline The Good, explicating many good things that come from social media development, as well as The Bad and The Ugly. Sadly, most education tech-discourse is 100%, so this small critique can seem radical. There is, after all, money to be made selling the products billionaires develop, like Facebook, to schools and students, who become lifelong customers (or do they call it "consumers of music" still?). Luckily, the editors of the handbook permitted our critique to be voiced. Our critique has meaningful implications for the field of music education, if the field opens its mind, as well as educational and other musical fields. It is part of the long-standing critique of development in many fields, going back to the work of such thinkers as Jacques Ellul, Martin Heidegger, Ivan Illich, Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, Jerry Mander, Neil Postman, Jaron Lanier, Patrick Murphy, and, perhaps the most powerful voice in educational technology today, Audrey Watters.
           
In our chapter, we clarify what community is, and why social media is alternatively good or bad for the cultivation and sustaining of communities. While communities developed solely through social media seldom sustain the depth of feeling and experience as communities developed in actual physical places, communities and other relationships can be sustained through social media, and social media even provide ways for people to sustain a sense of communities after being uprooted, often by our economic system (e.g., urbanization and work-related transience). We also clarify what the commons are, and while I can recall when the internet (then called the Web) was considered a new commons, perhaps too idealistically, social media serves as part of industrial capitalism’s multi-century endeavor to steal the commons from common folk. Poverty and ecological destruction follows in development's wake. Finally, we identify the structure of convivial tools (and idea developed by Ivan Illich and expanded by Audrey Watters) to identify what sort of social media interactions may meet requirements for The Good. How can social media and related technologies be used that support community and avoid ecological destruction through e-waste and server farms? How can social media and related technologies support the commons and intergenerational wellbeing?
           
Finally, we discuss our experiences with specific social media—Facebook, YouTube, Online Scholarship, Pinterest, and Other Social Media (including Wikipedia and Google Docs)—to begin identifying the types of social media and interactions that might be convivial in our field.

DS

Reference

Bates, Vincent C., & Daniel J. Shevock. “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Social Media in Music Education.” In The Oxford Handbook of Social Media and Music Learning, edited by Janice L. Waldron, Stephanie Horsley and Kari K. Veblen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 619-644. [Chapter 31]

Post 102.

This morning want to chew over important words from Esteva & Prakash’s discussion of comida/eating. My educational philosophy teacher, Madhu’s class utilized their book Escaping Education rather than Grassroots Postmodernism, but I have a read much of that book as well. Here I’m going to transform their words comida/eating and “culture” into “music/musics/musicking/musickers” to draw our attention to the depth of Esteva & Prakash’s challenge to my field, music education. Other than that, this is a direct quote:

"Our journey starts with the culture of [music]. [Music] belongs to an ethnos, but it can never be reduced to ethnic [musicking]. By crossing over the chasm that separates the first from the second, peoples are transmogrified into modern industrial [musickers]. [Music] disappears where people buy, prepare and cook [music] to nourish the myth of the “individual self.” Regenerating ourselves means, among other things, escaping the prison of industrial [musicking] and ethnic [musics]." (Esteva & Prakash 1998, 55)

This sentence, “By crossing over the chasm that separates the first from the second, peoples are transmogrified into modern industrial [musickers],” has been central to my published work, and is also to be found in Madhu’s mentor (my scholarly grandpa), Ivan Illich’s work. This quote, from Ivan Illich’s (1990) Declaration on Soil: 

"We were torn from the bonds to soil - the connections that limited action, making practical virtue possible - when modernization insulated us from plain dirt, from toil, flesh, soil and grave. The economy into which we have been absorbed - some, willy-nilly, some at great cost - transforms people into interchangeable morsels of population, ruled by the laws of scarcity." (http://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1990_declaraion_soil.PDF) 

And so, here I stand, torn from my bonds of soil by an industrial system that has done just that to countless folk for centuries. When I walk in Patton, I see a shell of its former self. A town that has suffered the loss of its children for many generations, that has water and soil poisoned by long-gone industry, and, for the people who stayed, lack of job opportunity and a plethora of addictive drugs. This is the town where I was raised, where my brothers and sisters, my mom, and her dad were raised; and within six miles of where my mother’s mother, my father, and his parents were raised, and where many of my ancestors are buried—going back to the 19th Century when Eastern European people’s soil was transmogrified into Private Property, and the peoples of the soil, often called peasants, were torn from the soil. From communal property. As Marx wrote as early as 1867 of peoples elsewhere in Europe, “landlords grant[ed] themselves the peoples lands as private property” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm).

I look at my garden, where to cultivate the land means, in common gardening praxis, to take a tiller to the living ecosystem beneath the soil. To tear years-dead roots from the grasp of living roots. To gain temporary productivity through destruction, as this plot of soil is transmogrified into production for the sake of produce. But tilling is unnecessary as permaculture gardeners and farms have known for decades. Every old-growth forest has loose soil. The same is true for music education, which is why we must, to reuse of Prakash & Esteva (2008), escape education. 

I escape the tiller, just as I must escape music education. Music education tears children from the bonds of intergenerational community just as effectively as the tiller tears roots. Children begin to produce, but at what cost? Decimated rural towns and villages around the globe for the sake of urbanization (this story is repeated in the Global South, and in China, just as it is repeated in the U.S.); to draw all of the intellectuals to one place, all of the engineers to another, all of the businesspeople to a third, all of the carpenters to fourth, all of the farmers to a fifth, never to meet again? Hidden behind the walls of industrial suburban “communities”? Behind the walls separating fictitious nations on Turtle Island; walls that also destroy the lives of migrating non-human animals who know nothing of nations? Onto the superhighway of what goes for success in 21st Century capitalism, while most people find only suffering, unable to win that lottery?

Even the ivory-white tower of universities, maybe especially so, this is so. Most faculty are “part-time” adjuncts, teaching most of the coursework and seldom receiving either the middle-class salaries that capitalism falsely promises nor basic healthcare or retirement programs. Just as farmers can’t quite tell you why soil is always compacted when it’s tilled over and over, since tilling is meant to loosen the soil, music teachers can’t seem to tell you why so many people are self-identified non-musicians after they have been cultivated by the music curriculum (see https://deepgreenpermaculture.com/diy-instructions/no-dig-gardening/). Some farmers think more tilling will loosen the soil, and some music teachers think more music education will fix the problem of non-musicians. It may be that the only way to re-member (again, Esteva & Prakash 1998) music, to put our musicking bodies back together, is to escape music education. To return to grassroots, intergenerational, emplaced musicking. But this requires also re-membering quite a bit more than just musics. We must re-member one another, community, intergenerational and living.

DS
 
References
Esteva, Gustavo and Madhu Suri Prakash. 1998. Grassroots post-modernism: Remaking the soil of cultures. New York: Zed Books.
Prakash, Madhu Suri and Gustavo Esteva. 2008. Escaping education: Living as learning within grassroots cultures. New York: Peter Lang.
Link to image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5e/Tree_Roots.JPG/640px-Tree_Roots.JPG
 

Post 101.

The Covid pandemic, a powerful expression of our global ecological crises, provides distinctive challenges for teachers and students seeking uplifting, nature-infused, ecological experience. The move from not-nearly-living-enough classrooms to oft-worse digital screens has led many, myself included, to gloom and despair. So much disconnection. Detachment. Isolation. And yet, the pandemic has also provided opportunities for thinking differently. Opportunities for us to step outside, and learn in parks and front lawns; to cultivate gardens and our-selves as we learn music.

Stephen Nachmanovitch (1990) concluded his groundbreaking book Free Play discussing the power of limits and specific events, of “conflicting states of mind” (196) that happen when we surrender, in order to transcend hopelessness. He draws our attention to Oliver Messiaen, who composed one of the 20th Centuries most acclaimed works, Quartet for the End of Time, during the harsh winter of 1941, in the Nazi prisoner-of-war camp, Stalag VII. (Listen here, link: https://youtu.be/e2hbwINj7dE)

Like Messiaen, we and our students have been obliged to become distant (social distancing) and even to fear each others touch. This separateness has been harder one some teachers than others; on some students than others, but we have all experienced it, just as Messiaen and others in Stalag VII experienced separateness and despair. And like Messiaen, perhaps we can transform our despair into feelingful art.  

It is important we feel. We don’t aim to transcend gloom by ignoring it, pushing it into the deep recesses of our psyche, and pretending all is well. All is not well. Not societally or ecologically. “If life is full of joy, joy feeds the creative process. If life is full of grief, grief feeds the creative process” (Nachmanovitch 1990, 196). When we create music, we are able to create because we feel. And so, I recommend we help our students express their feelings through poetry and music, beat-making, lyric-writing, experimenting, playing, songwriting, and composing. In short, I call music educators to music educate.

DS
 
Reference
Nachmanovitch, Stephen. 1990. Free play: Improvisation in life and art. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam.
 
Link to image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/76/Novel_Coronavirus_SARS-CoV-2.jpg/640px-Novel_Coronavirus_SARS-CoV-2.jpg

Post 100.

Yay! I have written 100 posts on this blog, expanding our understanding of eco-literate music pedagogy. In this post, I situate humans as a sound mimic species, and provide a pedagogical practice that can be used throughout the school year to improve musical thinking, and challenge ecological destruction in a way musicians are, perhaps, best situated to do.

Some of the best mimic species in the animal kingdom are birds, including (here North America) mockingbirds, thrashers, catbirds, starlings, and blue jays. Humans, as a species, are also mimics. We mimic the natural world in order to acquire culture—what Bernie Krause (2015) calls a “continuously evolving fusion … [with] experienced soundscapes” (44). We, and other animals contributing to the soundscape, are co-evolving through a sharing of sounds.

The soundscape also provides humanity with our sense of the divine. The ever-evolving soundscape, including the musics of birds, contributes to personal wellbeing and increases our sense of rootedness. This isn’t meaningless beauty. Finally, becoming conscious of the more-than-human soundscape, we become increasingly aware of technological intrusion on our soundscape. This listening, deeply and purposefully, can be the start of ecological action. Here is a link to the soundscape in my backyard this April morning. And here is a photo I took this morning of the cherry tree the borough planted in front of my house. We experience the seasons through our senses, which are scientific and spiritual tools.

For students, we can also take them outside and have them record the soundscape. We can increase their wellbeing, while also tuning in their critical ears. Monet, famously painted a series of oil paintings of the Palace of Westminster from his window at St. Thomas’ Hospital between 1899 and 1901. The series provides the viewer with different views of the same place, on different times of day, and under different weather conditions. Researchers suggest that climate change is transforming the global soundscape, including its biophony (animal created sounds) and geophony (non-biological sounds). Drawing these together, we can, with our students, record the same soundscape throughout the school year, and note how it changes through the year, in different seasons and under different weather conditions. This will not only tune our students into the sounds of the natural world, increasing their abilities to understand music, but also provide them with the tools to contribute to and challenge ecological destruction wherever we hear it.
 
 DS

Reference
Krause, Bernie. 2015. Voices of the wild: Animal songs, human din, and the call to save natural soundscapes. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Post 99.

A graduate of a Baptist theological seminary as well as a music academy, Ēriks Ešenvalds’s music often draws on spirituality and the natural world. His choral pieces highlight spirit and ecology-oriented poets such as Rabindranath Tagore (Where is Heaven?), Khalil Gibran (Song of the Flower), Paulann Peterson (Translation), and Sara Teasdale (Stars). Analyzing these poems (below I am including all, or for longer ones, part of the poems), deeply, with choir students provides an opportunity to teach for ecological literacy.

Where is Heaven? By Rabindranath Tagore
Where is heaven? you ask me, my child,-the sages tell us it is
beyond the limits of birth and death, unswayed by the rhythm of day
and night; it is not of the earth.

But your poet knows that its eternal hunger is for time and
space, and it strives evermore to be born in the fruitful dust.
Heaven is fulfilled in your sweet body, my child, in your palpitating heart.

The sea is beating its drums in joy, the flowers are a-tiptoe
to kiss you. For heaven is born in you, in the arms of the mother-
dust.
 
Song of the Flower, by Khalil Gibran
I am a kind word uttered and repeated
By the voice of Nature;
I am a star fallen from the
Blue tent upon the green carpet.
I am the daughter of the elements
With whom Winter conceived;
To whom Spring gave birth; I was
Reared in the lap of Summer and I
Slept in the bed of Autumn.
 
Translation, by Paulann Peterson
Empty of words, not empty
of light, the moon’s face
awaits the touch of a pen.
 
Stars, by Sara Teasdale 
Alone in the night
On a dark hill
With pines around me
Spicy and still,
And a heaven full of stars
Over my head,
White and topaz
And misty red;
Myriads with beating
Hearts of fire
The aeons
Cannot vex or tire;
The dome of heaven
Like a great hill,
I know I
Am honored to be
Witness
Of so much majesty

DS
 
Link to image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9e/Milky_Way_IR_Spitzer.jpg/640px-Milky_Way_IR_Spitzer.jpg

Post 98.

Here is a short reflection on what I think is one of Canadian composer Murray Schafer’s most important concepts--noise equals power. In his book “The Soundscape,” he writes that since the earliest human societies, loud noises induced fear, fear which became linked to the concept of sacred noise. The loud, fear-inducing noises of the natural world (e.g., thunder) were replaced, with civilization, by loud noises created by people for religious purposes. But now, under capitalism, we have new religious purposes.

“During the Industrial Revolution, Sacred Noise sprang across to the profane world. Now the industrialists held power and they were granted dispensation to make Noise by means of the steam engine and the blast furnace, just as previously the monks had been free to make Noise on the church bell or J.S. Bach to open out his preludes on the full organ” (p. 76).

The link between noise and power is embedded in our human experience. It is part of our evolutionary being. The lion roars, and we tremble in fear of the predator. The organ roars, and we tremble in fear of God. The construction vehicle roars, we tremble in fear of development. Here I am using the word fear as not only “a feeling of distress, apprehension, or alarm caused by impending danger, pain, etc” and “concern; anxiety” but also as “awe; reverence: fear of God.” The Old English word fǣr is related to the Latin perīculum danger, and biblically, the Latin used is timor, linking the concepts of dread and awe.

I appreciate Schafer's use of the word "dispensation" in connection to the industrialists. The billionaires are still provided sacred dispensation to make noise and profit at great ecological cost. Bill Gates' Foundation makes its billions of dollars off of hundreds of oil plants in the Niger Delta, leading to thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of displaced refugees, while Gates has the hubris to release a book on fixing climate change. His sacred position as a billionaire is, like the kings of feudal Europe, above reproach.

Progress—noise—induces in us dread and awe. Fear. Our fear, in this sense, is a religious act. The feared noise of the volcano stands beside the feared noise of mountaintop removal mining, which involves clearing the land of all topsoil and vegetation, blasting the earth to remove 600 feet or more of elevation using millions of pounds of explosive, digging through the debris using draglines, colossal earth-moving machines, dumping the waste and polluting headwater streams, chemically treating the coal with water; this processing creates slurry or sludge, including toxic heavy metals like arsenic, mercury, lead, and chromium, and reclamation, in which tax payers give the corporations waivers, and they spray the area with non-native grass seed, leaving the land in a degraded state that may take hundreds of years to re-establish.

As Proverbs 14: 27 says, “The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life.” Or in this case, the fear and reverence of progress is the fountain of death. We have not, in this Industrial Era, removed religion from schools. We have merely changed our religion. Some churches with the biggest crosses on their front lawns are the biggest examples of worshiping industry. But they're no the only ones. Schools are temples of progress. Of capitalist ideology. It is through the worship of greed and noise that we roar our own hubris. And music teachers are called on to educate people to the full-scope of the sonic world. This, for better or worse, includes understanding the use of noise for power in the 21st Century.

DS
 
Link to image:  https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b6/Lion_%28Panthera_leo%29_old_male_Chobe.jpg/640px-Lion_%28Panthera_leo%29_old_male_Chobe.jpg

Post 97.

In England, and Poland, and Spain, and France, you turn the peasants in a grisly dance, transmuting land to property "private," by gun and by sword, migration you drive it.
Then turning to soil, loved and engaged, upon the indigenous, war you wage, driving the peasant to the New World, displacement, now is the dance you twirl.
And when the peasants and paupers want paid, to another place, slaves you made, from people who live in and love their homes, you fill the oceans with their bones.
From England, and Poland, and Spain, and France, a triangle forms your frightening dance, for value and guns, and promises riven, to each oppressed people perplexity given.
And ultimately, now, generations taught, to prize the dancers with whom they once fought, who stole the land, the lives, the hopes, and hung their grandparents upon ill ropes.
But if we together, stand and say no!, repairing our past, our future aglow, reject the rich and their lying lies, perhaps we can fairness, bear through clear eyes.
The homeless be housed, the hungry be fed, though the rich, themselves, may flee in dread, the workers will dance a dance they are due, though we end the lie, we savor the true.  
 
I wrote this poem reflecting on the history that got the globe to the brink of collapse. The history begins with the peasant classes across Europe being forcibly removed from common lands, which they had farms for the pre-capitalist era's nobility and aristocracy. It had been centuries since much changed for peasants, and the way of life, living and working the clean land, living by the seasons, eating organic food, etc., until the rich among the merchant class, aristocrats, and nobility (now the early bourgeois) began transmogrifying the land to private property. Marx studied this history in Scotland, explicating it with a specific example. "'Klaen', in Gaelic, means children. Every one of the usages and traditions of the Scottish Gaels reposes upon the supposition that the members of the clan belong to one and the same family. The “great man”, the chieftain of the clan, is on the one hand quite as arbitrary, on the other quite as confined in his power, by consanguinity, &c., as every father of a family. To the clan, to the family, belonged the district where it had established itself, exactly as in Russia, the land occupied by a community of peasants belongs, not to the individual peasants, but to the community." The process involved the "robbery" (to use Marx's term) of church property, of the commons, and "fraudulent transformation, accompanied by murder, of feudal and patriarchal property into private property."

Next in my poem I turn to the ancient lands the new bourgeois labeled as the "New World," which they claimed was uninhabited and open for European migrants, which were mostly uprooted peasants hoping to make a living, some of which hoping to join the increasingly global bourgeois class. Few succeeded, and most found only poverty in the new American cities and towns.

When the American farm-workers wanted fair salaries for their labor, the bourgeois of Europe and America fixed their gaze on Africa, where they robbed people of their soil in the Atlantic slave trade. However bad conditions were in the child-labor dominated factories of the American North, the slave-based economy of the American South and the Caribbean was worse, leading to many rebellions. Howard Zinn draws out an example, the great rebellion of 1676. "Bacon's Rebellion brought together groups from the lower classes. White frontiersmen started the uprising because they were angry about the way the colony was being run. Then white servants and black slaves joined the rebellion. They were angry, too-mostly about the huge gap between rich and poor in Virginia." Most people in Virginia supported this rebellion, and, as a result, it planted in the bourgeois (including the English nobility involved in the profits) the idea that dissecting the underclasses, getting them to focus on identity above solidarity, was the only way to protect their wealth and class from rebellion. We see this active today, particularly propagated by wrong-minded activists who would see bourgeois like Bill Gates (net worth 126.2 billion USD) and Elon Musk (net worth 157.4 billion USD), or even Donald Trump (net worth 2.5 billion USD) as on their side before the uneducated masses.

So the dance needs a be replaced by a new dance. The grisly dance of capitalism must be replaced by another dance. USSR-style communism was blatantly NOT a replacement, but an ecologically destructive government that empowered the powerful, then starved and killed the oppressed. But that doesn't change the fact that capitalism must be replaced. 8.9% of the globe is starving under capitalism, while the three billionaires I named could easily feed them all and still be billionaires. They could still be far wealthier than Scrooge McDuck, diving in his hoard of gold, and end all world hunger. Capitalism has created the 1.6 billion world homeless. All so a small bourgeois class of billionaires (less than 3,000 individuals in the world) can hoard unimaginable capital. And Bill Gates offensively has a new book on sustainability. Bill Gates IS the ecological problem, with his stocks in dirty oil and made his money by poisoning the earth, sickening children in the Niger River Delta. We must look seriously at our history and do better than this. We just cannot afford the nearly 3,000 global billionaires our economy currently supports while causing so much suffering.

DS

Link to Niger Delta Oil Spill on Wikipedia: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Oil-spill.jpg

Post 96.

Starling, starling, nobody’s darling
Getting into everything, but I adore the hymns you sing
            And I love the coat you wear, murmuring upon the air

I wrote this poem this morning which, of course, is America-centric. Poetry, like music, is experiential. You cannot have phenomenological or narrative writing by a Pennsylvanian without it appearing America-centric. It’s unavoidable. The only other option is to write in bland generalizables, rather than from actual lived experience. However, I’ve always felt more Appalachian than American, though I doubt that helps many who think scholarship is already too overly focused on the U.S. Appalachia is a place. The U.S. is a nation—a modern fiction with a military, education and prison systems, and a history of colonization, oppression, and exploitation. Appalachia is, in contrast, one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world that manages to cultivate some of the most amazing musical traditions in spite of its ongoing exploitation by nations, such as the U.S. For instance, Appalachia is the focal point of both mountaintop coal removal and natural gas pipeline construction, making the coasts wealthy, but despite being the source of this wealth, Appalachia is home of persistent poverty.

Anyway, back to my reflection on starlings—little stars of my local park’s sky. In many parts of Europe the starling is a beloved wild animal who is struggling to survive the 21st Century’s ecological challenges. Here in Appalachia though, most people have long learned to loathe the starling, and to see this non-native migrant as ecologically destructive.

In 1939, a mere half-century after starlings’ introduction, the founding mother of the global environmental movement, Rachel Carson penned an article for Nature magazine, How About Citizenship Papers for the Starling? Unlike the more recent and well-known non-native to Florida, the Burmese Python, brought over as exotic pets, the starling was brought over in a determined act by a specific person, Eugene Schieffelin, and at a specific time, in 1890-1. He had, in previous years, attempted to introduce starlings with only a few breeding pairs, which had not survived in New York’s unfamiliar ecosystem. But by 1890, Schieffelin introduced 80 and 40 birds respectively. This introduction was part of an attempt to acclimatize non-native species to America, all of the species Shakespeare wrote of, to make European-born Americans feel more comfortable. Starlings are and were beloved wild animals in Europe. These societies were successful in introducing many species we take for granted here in Appalachia today, including our dominant grasses, dandelions, and house sparrows.

Returning to Carson’s article, starlings are here to stay. Starlings hunt Japanese beetles, weevils, plant-eating scarabaeoids, cutworms, grasshoppers, millipedes, and ground beetles. For farmers, starlings are “economically the superior of the robin, the catbird, the red-winged blackbird, the grackle, the cowbird, or the English sparrow” (p. 317). Nonetheless, many ecologists are starling-averse because starlings despoil the nests of other bird species. However, starlings strive in cities, and their nest despoiling habits are similar to that of other species, and hasn’t been linked to recent species collapse. Rather, our human expanding suburbs, internet server farms, and other "development" projects are stealing species’ habitats, and, unlike many species of concern, starlings thrive where humans live.

In 2015, the U.S. government killed more than a million starlings, though these efforts haven’t changed the starling population, which has been stable for decades. Our government’s impotent efforts to remove starling populations means chemical warfare. For instance, the USDA uses DRC-1339 to kill starlings because it is not “anticipated” to kill or harm species other than blackbirds, grackles, cowbirds, starlings, pigeons, collared-doves, crows, ravens, magpies, and gulls. I don't see the risks as worth the perceived benefit.

Starlings in the U.S. thrive in cities, suburbs and towns. They don’t thrive in wilderness—not in forests or deserts or plains. Rachel Carson recommended we end our war on starlings, and accept them as part of the ecosystem, which they’ve now been a part of for 130 years. It is a very Western mode of thinking to label starlings as good (in 1890) and needed, or to label them bad (today) and move heaven and earth to eradicate them. Neither of these rationalities or actions are better than the other. Both are colonial thinking. Both create ecological destruction. But a humility that is too often absent in Western thought is appropriate when it comes to starlings and other migrant species. I fail to hear Native American groups asking the U.S. government to cover the soil with pesticide in an inept attempt to kill all of the starlings descended from Schieffelin’s sin. (I use the word "sin" here purposefully, because our actions on the starling are the same as how we in the West conceive of sin requiring penance).

How does this relate to music education? Since I’m hired by Penn State Altoona to teach classical music, it is of note that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who kept birds as pets throughout his life, kept a starling during three of his most productive years. As pets, starlings are perhaps more musical than canaries, being one of the best sound imitators in the aves class. They have mischievous personalities, and Star, Mozart’s starling, influenced his compositions, “serving as his companion, distraction, consolation, and muse.” We can take our students outside, even if we don’t choose to keep a musical class pet to model Mozart. Outside we can help students identify all of the musicians in their soundscape. This, I believe, is the start of a music education that humbly respects clean land and water, and ecosystems that support diverse bird species and life on Mother Earth.

DS

Link to Starling image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/Starling_%285503763150%29.jpg

Post 95.
 
“One day this wall is going to fall … This is a scar on our mother” (Israel Aranda, in Fandango Without Borders). Fandango fronterizo (border fandango) involves a communal musicking experience on both sides of the wall dissecting California, US from Mexico. “The border fandango is a symbolic event. We’re trying to show how music can build community, even when communities are separated. Son Jarocho is the perfect music for that, because it’s all about being together with friends. The community of friends who play Son Jarocho is growing in both Mexico and the U.S., and the fandango fronterizo reminds us that we are one community despite the barriers that divide us.”

This wall negatively impacts human and non-human animal communities. In fact, the wall effects 89 endangered species and potentially impacts 108 migratory bird species. These are not separate issues, but one challenge. That challenge is linked to national identities that overpower bioregional and local ways of being. While people, in community, cultivate diverse ways of being, diverse musics, and offer hospitality, nations offer walls and prisons. Nations and global governments work, for the global billionaire class, to transmogrify people into population. These structures kill diversity.

I heard about Son Jarocho and fandango frontierizo in specific in an interview Kevin Shorner-Johnson conducted with the Chicana artivista Martha Gonzalez on his Music and Peacebuilding Podcast. In fandango frontierizo people come together to recognize and live the reality of community, and challenge the artificiality of national borders for people living on soil. In contrast with industrial musical models, in which musics are enclosed, collective songwriting and community musicking are essentially a practice of what Gonzalez calls convivencia—living with one another. At the core of living together, of living on soil is the practice of the co-living of “place, commons [and] community” (p. 3). What Madhu Suri Prakash and Gustavo Esteva labeled staying well rooted. This is the essence of the sustainable and regenerative cultures that are resisting capitalism. This is ecological musicking, honoring and learning from our Mother Earth, our animal and plant brothers and sisters, and diverse human ways of being. This is the anticolonial practice so many music education scholars are searching for. Colonialism is, at its start, a theft of land from people (e.g., for Indigenous peoples in the U.S.) and a theft of people from land (e.g., for African peoples taken by the slave trade) that has poisoned the land, our self-esteem, our labor, and our relationships to one another, our solidarity with other oppressed peoples of earth, for quarterly profits.
 
As a rural child, if memory serves me well, I first learned Mexican music when my Geography teacher at St. Bernard’s Elementary School in Hastings, Mr. Rodriguez, taught the class two traditional songs, La Bamba, which is a Son Jarocho song that was popularized in the U.S. by Ritchie Valens, and the Son Huasteco song, Cielito Lindo, which he accompanied on the accordion. Places thrive on diverse local cultures. What they don’t thrive with are nations, their borders, their jails, their militaries. In the US, children are infamously kept in cages at the border—when in truth, journalists aren’t permitted inside camps that house migrants and refugees today (many who are fleeing the climate crises rich nations in the Global North exacerbate).

Abrahm Lustgarten of the New York Times calls this the “great climate migration.” For instance, crops are failing in Guatemala due to a “confluence of drought, flood, bankruptcy and starvation.” The model shared predicts migration to the US will increase substantially with climate change. “In the most extreme climate scenarios, more than 30 million migrants would head toward the U.S. border over the course of the next 30 years.” This can an opportunity to enrich Pennsylvania’s local culture. However, national politicians and global billionaires work to stoke fear. It is fear many poor people have (the 14.1 million White poor, but also many of the 9.5. Hispanic poor, the 8.1 million African American poor, and the 600,000 Native American poor in the U.S.), in the supposed-richest economy the globe has ever known, but which has left them starving. Solidarity can be found. People living together on soil. Musicking together. Farming together. Going to church together. Eating together. Guarding our shared Mother Earth together. Being together, in their own ways of talking and being in the world. On soil.

Today, in Emsworth, PA, Holy Family Institute houses unaccompanied children who cross the border. As an immigration lawyer who works with the institute says, “A lot of them are frightened. A lot of them are scared. They’re just looking for a little love like any child around the world, a little bit of caring.”  While nations, as they’re currently set up, fail to care for children; more than that, they initiate the refugee crises to enrich global billionaires, ordinary people can lend a hand where they can. Pushing governments to act (even if they are in the pockets of global billionaires) and enacting local, individual and communal change are not at odds. Some possible bad-actors in socialist discourse have suggested that the only hope is top-down. Well, this isn't so. As a student of educational philosopher Madhu Suri Prakash, I look to the grassroots. To soil. To those protecting clean water, air, parks, and resisting eminent domain and other stools of enclosure in localities around the globe, each in their own ways, artistic and activistic and communal.

Music educators, too, can lend a hand, however we can. I resist a music education that encloses music and encloses what it means to be musical or a music teacher. Co-conspirators Vincent Bates, Anita Prest, and I suggest, drawing on indigenous knowledges and ecological thought. In a recently published chapter on cultural and ecological diversity, music teachers can forge egalitarian relationships, communal responsibilities, cultivate reverence for our ancestors and nonhuman living beings, topographies, and nurture musical practices that regenerate our local and bioregional ecosystems. I am happy this work is available to be read. What the industry calls open access. Open access may not be the best model, but it is better than others, and we fight capitalism from within the belly of the beast. We cannot do elsewise, as capitalism is the dominant ideology on the globe today. From within, we try to create new commons. When our internal voice says to make profit by enclosing, we resist.

The border walls are scars on our mother. Mother Earth. Let’s heal that scar. She will teach us how.

DS

Link to image of the Texas border wall ... (isn't it UGLY! Deadly so. But even so, do you see those grass roots working, in their gentle, humble way, to tear it down?): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/United_States-Mexico-border-wall-Progreso-Lakes-Texas.jpeg