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

Post 94.
 
“We are the people who knew how to say thank you.” Botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer, in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, uses this phrase to describe her Potawatomi family. Gratitude is an idea I want to cultivate in music education. Western society is ingrateful. In the West, our industry steals from Mother Earth, poisoning her children. A friend on Facebook shared a Truthout article outlining the evidence for fracking chemicals in the bodies of Pennsylvania Children in Westmoreland and Washington counties. Rural PA has been the focal point for the shale gas “boom,” though economically it’s been a boom for international business and Texan workers shipped up on the cheap—not local economies. The “body burden” for living near natural gas wells and other fracking infrastructure includes “benzene, ethylbenzene, styrene and toluene” and at least seven other dangerous industrial chemicals.

What does all of this mean for social justice interested music teachers and institutions (such as Penn State where I work)? It means social justice must begin at home. Here in PA we’re facing the ongoing poisoning of our school-aged children by global industry. No social justice minded teacher can ignore this fact. If you pretend to care for distant others, but ignore the suffering of the poor on the land you exploit, your university isn’t socially just—just the opposite.

As Paulo Freire wrote in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well” (p. 44). As bell hooks wrote in Teaching Community, “Where there is domination there is no place for love” (p. 128). And as Madhu Suri Prakash and Gustavo Esteva wrote in Escaping Education, “In every corner of the world, cultural destruction and decimation follow as communities learn to take-off on the education runway” (p. 8). It’s not that one of these quotes is true, and the others false. They are each true. And they're not opposed to indigenous and rural conceptions of gratitude. In fact, they cannot be accomplished except alongside genuine gratitude. Do our institutions show gratitude to the land and poor local communities? Is this the center of any social justice campaigns, as it should be? As educators, rather than continuing to exploit the poor living in communities around our institutions, we must lend a hand, when we can, in their liberation process, continually dismantling our educational systems of domination, to upkeep non-educated musical culture.

Music education may provide distinctive opportunities for gratitude toward Mother Earth, who sustains us in our dismantling of destructive forces in education and other global industries. Let's make it happen by cultivating gratitude.

DS

Post 93.

A haiku on Mother Earth
            Even in anguish
            Infected by industry
            She embraces us

I am not the only music education scholar recognizing the need for a music education that addresses our globe’s greatest ecological crises. Though my philosophy is praxial, and it builds from and extends that tradition, some researchers are doing the same with the older aesthetic music education philosophy. I think this line of research may help praxial-minded music educators stay focused on ecological versions of ideas like beauty and cognition. While I fear most aesthetic approaches to musical ecology are not in fact ecological in any meaningful sense of the term—that is, they are ecologically destructive and narrow the term ecology to mean human environments, hence, not ecology—some work is being done that is genuinely ecological, and can be sustainable. These theorists place the making of music as an eco-aesthetic educational aim above the utilitarian manufacture of music in a capitalist society.

In a study published in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Minjian Guo, Hua Su and Lei Yue aim to transform the paradigm of aesthetic music education to overcome spiritual and ecological crises. Music teachers ought to notice consumer society in music education and reach toward “sustainable development” goals (the UN’s 4th Pillar). These researchers draw on Confucian values to construct their scholarship, (which is notable considering my previous posts looking at Victor Fung’s scholarship, Korean music, and Japanese musical ideas—including my ongoing use of haiku, which I consider the greatest artistic form created by humankind.)

According to this Confucian viewpoint, music is a part of heaven and earth. The researchers surveyed 468 U.S. music teachers and later built a framework around five components: society, ecological rationality, teachers, sustainable development, and ecology (this in response to the lack of ecology in American music education). The focus of aesthetic education has been on “listening, feeling, and appreciating,” (p. 565), and can be expanded to include “forming a new ecological environment for sustainable human development in harmony with nature” (p. 565). It is through art-forms that people experience and express beauty.

These researchers beginning with Confucian thought reinforces my ongoing claim that music educators MUST begin taking non-Western philosophies seriously. It’s not ONLY about appropriating non-Western musics for the Western classroom setting, but about seriously respecting, studying, and trying to understand the place-embedded, ecologically sustainable philosophies found in many specific cultures around the globe. It is no secret that aesthetic music education has been ecologically unsustainable, helping to foster a ecologically naïve citizenry.

As a praxial-minded educator, I observe that, traditionally, aesthetic approaches have drawn our field’s attention to classical music (which I teach at the university level) and Western-oriented ways of observing non-Western musics. The university system I teach in is the result of decades of aesthetic ideology, filtered up from the public school systems. If students truly wanted non-Western music classes rather than Western music, those classes would be full, rather than the ones I am hired to teach. By the time they reach university level, students have already been educated to value Western music in educational systems. Additionally, the focus of aesthetic music education, listening, feeling, and appreciating are, after all, observational modes of musicking. They are part of experiencing music, but not the whole of it.

Returning to my haiku from the start of this post. Mother Earth is an experienced, holistically musical being who embraces each of us. Music, including soundscapes, embrace us and hold us similarly. We spend so much time ignoring soundscapes that many of us don’t realize just how much the bird and the cicada, the wind and the thunderstorm educate us. Every day and night! The way forward for our field is a full realization of our ecological interconnectedness and responsibilities. These interconnected duties expand then to include our duties to other humans. In place, on soil, understanding our full embeddedness as peoples of Earth, we can lend each other a helping hand. Not as hollow. But as beings of Earth, sons and daughters of our Mother. I am grateful there are more and more music educators recognizing that fact.

DS

Link to image, Confucius and his Students: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=confucius&title=Special%3ASearch&go=Go&ns0=1&ns6=1&ns12=1&ns14=1&ns100=1&ns106=1#/media/File:Confucius_and_his_students1.jpg

Post 92.
 
Today I saw that the book, "The Politics of Diversity in Music Education" is published. This is open-access, meaning you can read my chapter (written with Vincent Bates and Anita Press) for free. In our chapter, Cultural Diversity, Ecodiversity, and Music Education, we take a hard look at how we consider diversity in scholarship and politics. There is a paradox to diversity, easily seen by opening our view to ecodiversity, where a shallow approach to diversity (such as is found in suburbia and many universities) appropriates diversity but transmogrifies all it appropriates into a single type. Consider, for instance, the loss of species as bacteria and viruses are carried by businesspeople and vacationers from place to place, destroying ecodiversity. For humans, it's the suburbanite. The globalist. We critique a sort of diversity that eats diversity and spits out uniformity. The 309 indigenous languages of Turtle Island, each with the potential to shed light on diverse ways of understanding music and challenge environmental destruction we all face in the 21st Century, are gobbled up and one language, English, or two, English & Spanish, are expectorated by a globalist-capitalist system of expropriation, waste, and destruction. In other words, diversity ≠ diversity. Diversity objectives made in suburbs, global boardrooms, and university departments looking to be global too often destroy diversity, teaching students to disrespect place and their ancestors, their diverse languages, foods, musics, farming practices, dances, spiritualities, and cultures, and to join the global white-collar suburbanite class.

In contrast, many people are saying "no" and refusing to participate in the type of "diversity" that destroys their diversity. In this chapter, I was blessed to write with Anita Prest, who has made an extensive study of particular indigenous groups on Turtle Island. Her contribution to the paper made the chapter possible. It became possible to connect my ecological philosophy to Vince Bate's new materialism in a way that might sustain both cultural diversity and ecodiversity, both of which are under attack by global industries, including universities where I and many of my friends work.
 
DS

Post 91.

This morning I’m thinking about birdsong. It seems that much of the research on birdsong takes-as-granted that birdsong is consonant. Or perhaps it is better said that the research searches for Western music theoretical definitions of consonance within birdsong. Much early scholarship suggested birds prefer pentatonic scales. In interdisciplinary research, composer Emily Doolittle found that hermit thrushes music better aligned with overtones, rather than pentatonic scales, following harmonic distribution. But the researchers in that study were looking to fit birdsong into music theoretical conceptions of, what I am calling, consonance. Some way to understand thrush music as beautiful. Look at the image they use in their research (link here) and it’s easy to see that though the thrush’s song centers approximately near notes on a Western scale, which are notated using Western notation, there is a wide spectrum of sounds in the birdsong. In other words, a lot of consonance-modification is necessary to fit the birdsong into our theory.

The word consonance comes from the Latin consonantia, meaning agreement or concord. Two different sounds in agreement with one another. Paralleling this, the word dissonance means disagreement or incongruity. These words, consonance and dissonance, have music theoretical applications. In Western music, for instance, the Major 7th harmony is understood as dissonant, and “needs” resolving. In contrast, in Jazz theory, the Major 7th is considered consonant and seldom needs resolved. Western theory and Jazz theory both utilize harmony for the sake of tension and resolution—but their harmonic languages, and therefore their understanding of specific harmonies as consonant or dissonant, are different. The ideas of consonant and dissonant, without going beyond my own wheelhouse of Western music and Jazz music (both of which I teach at Penn State Altoona) are relative to genre and musical culture. [How much better an example might I have at my fingertips if I taught Javanese gamelan or Korean minyo music the past 6 years!]

Ivan Illich, in a philosophical statement that challenges us—that I wrestle with, and which I succeed at times and fail at others—to look at soil. He (and friends) write:
“We note that such virtue is traditionally found in labor, craft, dwelling and suffering supported, not by an abstract earth, environment or energy system, but by the particular soil these very actions have enriched with their traces. Yet, in spite of this ultimate bond between soil and being, soil and the good, philosophy has not brought forth the concepts that would allow us to relate virtue to common soil, something vastly different from managing behavior on a shared planet.”

Even so, I began this reflection on birdsong in the abstract—with research fitting birdsong into Western theoretical models. It is time to pivot—to recognize the bond of soil and being. I'll do this as best I can in a WebLog: I listen to birdsongs, and hear chickadees, sparrows, mourning doves, cardinals and blue jays.
            Listen to these chickadee songs. I hear the “dee dee dee” call.
            Listen to the cacophonous house sparrow chirps, so similar to what I hear.
            Listen to the mourning dove’s sad, hollow song.
            Listen to the cardinal’s “rrrrrr” and whoops.
            And listen to the blue jay’s “jay” shouts.
All of these dominate the soundscape in my place. These sounds all resonate together and, to my understanding of music, in dissonance. I think we do these complex minds disservice when we think of their music as simple, pretty songs easily reducible to our conception of consonance. I don’t think most of these songs in my soundscape could be reduced to pentatonic scales or even overtone series without loosing something essential. Rather, they are full, polyphonic, complex sounds. So, why do I not feel indigestion when listening to these dissonances, the same way I feel indigestion when listening to Pierrot Lunaire? Pierrot Lunaire is uncomfortable, while I could meditate to my backyard soundscape for hours.

Perhaps there’s a type of consonance on the other side of dissonance.

In a video, posted this week by the popular YouTuber and composer David Bruce, Bruce discusses the repetition of dissonance in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. Here he borrows a phrase from a Jazz musician, repetition legitimizes. While his analysis lacks some of the critique of problematic elements in the early-20th Century that are part of the Rite (such as Stravinsky’s depiction of “savages” and linking them with nature—which might parallel my own research into music educator Satis Coleman and Recapitulation Theory), this analysis helps explain to me why the Rite is far more popular than anything Schoenberg composed. Stravinsky seemed to have a sense for the fact that repetition legitimizes. By repeating his most dissonant ideas, Stravinsky permits the audience to legitimize the sounds.

I’ll go even further than repetition legitimizes. Repetition transforms.

Repetition transforms dissonance into consonance through familiarity. Can we be in disagreement with family (the familiar)? It is phenomenological. Sensed. Felt. Lived experience.

Daily I hear my birds in these Appalachian mountains. Some, like the chickadee are natives, and others, like the sparrow, are immigrants (like my family) and have long made their homes here. Harmonies in the soundscape that would (by Western or Jazz theory) be defined as dissonant are experienced as consonant when I listen to my soundscape each day. Not only have I listened to my soundscape each day of my life, but humanity has for hundreds of thousands of years. Our musical evolution begins with birdsongs. These brilliant minds, so different than our hominid minds, help make us different than other great apes. We are in consonance (consonantia) with birds, because we are in agreement. We have over our centuries of being together reduced their complex, polyphonic singing to fit our own, simpler, monophonic voices. If we can recognize our limitations in comparison to our avian brothers and sisters who have been musicking for far more centuries, perhaps we can also humbly protect them from our progress when it results in the destruction of lived  environments. Our economy is too often at dissonance with bird life. All of life, including our own, benefits from our finding consonance with life.
 
DS

Post 90.
 
The fault-line warps all above it
Oppression ubiquitous unspoken
Envoice against power leads to fear
            Unconscious boiling won’t dispose of it
            Until truth be bespoken  
            Unknown, we cower,
choosing the hazy, instead of the clear

I wrote this poem this morning reflecting on the oppressive global natural gas industry and how it has impoverished the place where I live. 

Sara Thomsen, in “Water is Life” (Mni Wičoni) sings “We are the river … we are one.”

“This song is inspired by and in tribute to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and all tribes, nations, native and non-native people coming together to protect the land and water threatened by the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The song came to me on my return from Standing Rock. That morning before leaving, a meadowlark was singing right outside my tent. ‘Be a lark from the meadow. Be a lark from this meadow,’ I heard it sing. We, too, can be larks from the meadow. We, too can sing in the new day.”

I share this song in solidarity with the water protectors at Standing Rock and around the globe. Resistance against oil and natural gas pipelines typifies ecological living in the 21st Century. Between 2017 and 2020 the Mariner East 2 pipeline, here in Pennsylvania, has had 320 spills, releasing 260,000 gallons of drilling fluid into PA waterways much of which into Marsh Creek State Park. That is one small pipeline in one small state in the US. Global industries are destroying your soil and water too. You need that soil to eat and that water to drink.

What does it mean to have preserved land, in the case of Marsh Creek State Park, land that is shared by people of this commonwealth, that is ruined by global industries interested in pipeline construction? Eminent domain is used by natural gas projects to steal private land. What does this mean for property ownership in Pennsylvania and throughout the US? Global natural gas interests stand legally, in many cases, above local law. If communities cannot democratically resist these destructive capitalist forces, what are we to do?

            We resist!

And we resist however we are able. In small ways and large. Persistent as gadflies. We do so for our, and our Mother Earth's, survival. Too often we look elsewhere, and ignore the problems here, where we stand. No longer. As a music teacher I cannot ignore the 18 cities in Pennsylvania with higher lead levels than Flint, Michigan. I refuse to ignore the oppression of our 100 PA schools with lead in the drinking water. As music teachers, musicians, community members, and people living on the soil—indigenous and non-indigenous—we resist the global industries that pollute our Mother Earth. We do this at all levels, but primarily locally, since global industry has taken over global structures. There is currently no viable globalism. To hope for global powers to fix this problem, which they put the peoples of earth into, is to place one’s hope in a fairytale. Real people in real places are resisting in real ways. Join us. 

DS

Link to image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/Natural_Gas_Pipeline_Station.jpg

Post 89.

In the news this week, researchers connected to the University of Vienna have developed a metric to measure long-term human wellbeing within the context of sustainability. According to the researchers, existing indicators of wellbeing often fail to consider being alive at all, which led them to develop the Years of Good Life indicator (YoGL). YoGL counts years as good life years if an individual is not living in poverty, is free from cognitive and physical limitations, and is satisfied with life. In particular, the ecological crises we face affect poverty, as well as cognitive and physical limitations and life satisfaction. They suggest YoGL ought to replace other measurements such as GDP and life expectancy, because YoGL accounts for material loss, lost life years, losses in physical and cognitive wellbeing, “as well as for the losses incurred by the younger generations in terms of their human capital resulting from school closings.”

Paralleling the broadening of how people consider living the good life, are there ways music education fails to account for the impacts of environmental sustainability to musicking the good life? The musicologist Christopher Small put forth what is now considered a praxial (in line with those put forth by David Elliott, Tom Regelski and other philosophers in music education) stand on music—that music is a verb in which meaning lies in “social action.” The praxial turn was truly a revolution for music education thought and scholarship in the 1990s. This approach directs music teachers’ attention to relationships uniting a “living world” and musicking as “ritual.” According to June Boyce-Tillman, musicking is a “complex series of encounters” (p. 197) in which musickers create liminal spaces, and she points our field toward opportunities for “education, therapy, [and] peace-making.” Liminality, “on the threshold,” often refers to ambiguity, disorientation, doorways, and uncertainty.

Musicking, as a process, a verb rather than a noun, is naturally liminal. This is the strength and perhaps the weakness of the praxial argument. What might musicking for uncertainty mean? Discomfort and uncertainty are logically entwined for many people. Since people dislike discomfort, they also dislike liminality. In perhaps their best-known article critiquing band, Randall Everett Allsup and Cathy Benedict draw our attention to this problem (among others). We teach students to value “pleasing, non-transformative ways” (p. 170). Transformation is a process, just like musicking for uncertainty. Liminal musicking empowers students, not as pleasers of those in power, but as transformers.

As I said, praxialism was a revolution in the 1990s that continues to today. But, 30 years into the praxial movement, what has been missing? Are these limitations essential to praxialism, or can modifications be made to make our model better? As I argued in my book, we ought to music educate to cultivate citizens who can transform and sustain—liberate and conserve.

What, then, is the music education equivalent to YoGL, allowing us to see the transformational needs of the natural and human worlds and even to realize they are not really two separate worlds—natural vs. human—but one world? A new liminality? This is the challenge my work has sought to solve. We define musicking as social, but then too often limit the social to the human, and we don’t do much better in creating a pedagogy that is both transformative and sustainable. A transformative pedagogy that is ignorant of the natural world is often destructive. it's hit or miss if you can even notice the destructive nature of a particular transformation. Humans are materially able to transform every wilderness preserve into a strip mall or server farm. That is transformation, and perhaps why so many on the left can look to Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos as heroes-of-the-left while the global poor gets poorer and ecosystems are destroyed for their individual profit. Transformation isn’t good unto itself. It is good within a structure that recognizes the balancing act between transformation and conservation—a genuine transformation that is a sustainable transformation. I hope the model I share in my book, a modified praxial model that adds considering the conservative impulse to the liberating impulse, might better help music educators to recognize life sustaining transformation, and avoid the pitfalls of destructive transformation.

To end this post, in my recent review of Juliet Hess’s wonderfully praxial book, Music Education for Social Change, I draw readers’ attention to one of Hess’s references, Siddhartha, and his use of earth spirituality as a counterweight to possible destructive transformations in Freirean pedagogies. Here educators are called to conscientization of our deep interbeing with “pollution of air, water, and earth,” truly challenging the centering of Western philosophy above non-Western thinkers and ideas. Perhaps my modified praxial music education philosophy will take hold in the 2020s in the same way praxialism did in the 1990s and aestheticism did in the 1970s.

DS

Link to photo of The Temple of Hathor at Dendera, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/Gateway%2C_Dendera.jpg

Post 88.

Lovers chirp, gently,
Their sad song to the darkness
Hear this! Just crickets

Writing my haiku reflecting on crickets, I follow in the tradition of the great Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828) who wrote:
            On a branch
floating downriver
a cricket, singing.

And Josquin Des Prez (1450-1521) set the anonymous poem El Grillo (the Cricket) to chanson in the Renaissance era. This became his most popular song. 

Here’s an English translation on Choral Wiki (translator unidentified):
The cricket is a good singer
He can sing very long
He sings all the time.
But he isn't like the other birds.
If they've sung a little bit
They go somewhere else
The cricket remains where he is
When the heat is very fierce
Then he sings only for love.

In my poem (opening this post) I try to draw together the loving nature of the cricket song found in Des Prez’s song, and fleeting aspect found in Issa’s. Is there another aspect of crickets that artists can focus on in creating their own work?

Today there’s a growing trend of farming crickets for high-protein flour. Crickets need far less feed than cattle to produce the same amount of protein, making this an ecologically sound dietary choice. What a waste our food system is! In a time when world hunger is growing, with nearly 9% of the world’s human population hungry, and national economic development is NOT always linked to better nourishment for all, ecologically and economically sustainable food production and distribution is essential.

In Koji Matsunobu’s recent exploratory Music Education Research article, he studied the pedagogical impacts of cooperative learning and democratic decision-making at a progressive school in Tokyo by having students reflect on their experiences 10 years later. Students remembered their “strong sense of self-efficacy, motivation and ownership” (p. 23). These are three qualities I want my students to remember about coursework they take with me. They’re essential components to resisting metaphorical waste, which I believe leads to less material waste and respect for diverse ecosystems in which all humans must live sustainably and regeneratively.

As music educators, treating music as fully, originally, and naturally interdisciplinary, we guide choral students as they sing El Grillo, read literature, lead students to write their own poems, which can also be turned into songs, experience crickets in Japanese artistic traditions, and consider the global ecological and hunger challenges in a holistic way. I do not believe these are separate concerns. Everything is connected. Ecological.

DS
 
Link to image of Charles Dickens's 1883 "Cricket on the Hearth": https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/Illustration_for_Charles_Dickens%27s_Cricket_on_the_Hearth_by_Fred_Barnard.png