Post 87.

The advantage of skunk cabbage
            I won’t claim it’s a saint
            But in March’s scene, this striking paint
            Unpleasant title, excellent plant
            Generating warmth that others can’t

Yesterday, I went for a hike around Lake Perez with my family. I took this photo, and wrote this poem. Walking the boardwalk over the swampy section, we saw the skunk cabbages growing. A perennial wildflower, skunk cabbage creates its own heat in March to melt the snow around it as it grows. The reddish purple, pod-like growths were all over the ground, bringing color to the brown land. Skunk cabbage has a distinctive smell, to say the least, which though offensive to humans and other mammals, attracts bees, butterflies and other insects. While I wouldn’t recommend bringing them into your garden or yard, the skunk cabbage is a helpful part of the wild ecosystem.

So too is my vision for music education. Music educators can find themselves as helpful parts of the overall school environment—teaching music, which is essential to the lives of children and many adults, and, employing an interdisciplinary focus, teaching students to holistically consider all challenges schools consider. The skunk cabbage doesn't float above the mud like some perfect angel, but resides in the mud, benefiting many others in its distinctive ways. I don’t see this approach as emphasizing “extra-musical” aspects of music education, because music has always, since the time the first homo sapiens sang and danced around campfires hundreds of thousands of years ago, been intertwined with other "disciplines" such as visual arts, storytelling, and science. This is where the old aesthetic music education philosophers erred. Music is not one thing, and these other disciplines found in schools essentially something else. Music is all of these things.

Younker and Bracken studied the pedagogical possibilities for birdsong as thematic-based curricular connections between science/ecology and music with fifth-grade students. Ultimately, students composed birdsongs, and the importance of the project was strengthened by the experience of “doing.” They conclude, “we live in a world of projects that requires ongoing, working knowledge of the interrelationships among disciplines” (p. 50). I would argue, their approach is not "music for musics sake," but music for life's sake, which is far more meaningful.

I believe this interdisciplinary understanding of music education is true. But also, I want to push the bar of interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity implies distinct disciplines that exist, sort of like Plato’s forms, that we can bring together. This, I suspect, is NOT the intention of interdisciplinary-minded music education scholars. Instead, I think the natural—if I can use that word in a less-than-natural way—state of things is connected, and we have historically, through schooling, created disciplines (classes, subject-matter, and curricula) for our ease as educators. Disciplines make schooling easier, so we reinscribe the idea of disciplines evermore each schooled generation.

I also don’t think it’s for students’ ease or use. Thinking of mathematics, and reading, and musicking, and storytelling, and cooking, and gardening, and all of the other important “disciplines” of living as separate or separable doesn't seem like the best approach. It’s a big part of how we got into this ecological mess in the first place. Engineers don’t art, dancers don’t nuclear science, mathematicians don’t ecosystem, etc. Like horses with blinkers on. This is not picking on any single discipline or individual as doing worse than another—but rather a questioning of the disciplinizing of the lived world. Interdsiciplinarity can serve as a counterweight to centuries of disciplinizing our world, but ultimately I think we need a deeper conception, one that is more fully anti-disciplinizing, de-disciplinizing, or antithesis-to-disciplinizing.
 
DS

Post 86.

In 2013 June Boyce-Tillman wrote an article for Music Educators Journal, “And Still I Wander … A Look At Western Music Education Through Greek Mythology.” Boyce-Tillman pointed out that searching for spiritual experience has long been central to the human experience, and that music is often a part of spiritual practices. Drawing on Greek myths, Boyce-Tillman sheds light on Western music education. For classical Greece, the idea that humans have souls is central, and psychoagogia (“the leading the the soul” p. 30) was a process to greater understanding and empathy. This process involves rationality and intuition. The human body is placed at the center of the sensory experience of beauty. This leads Boyce-Tillman to her four-part model of spirituality (I copied the image from the article).

1. Material: Music is drawn from the material human body and the environment. Boyce-Tillman suggests the material experience is often reduced to mere technical skill in much music education (including Carl Orff and John Blacking in her critique). “The close relation of musical experience to the natural world is simply ignored. We could transform ecological understanding at a stroke if we taught all our violin students to open their instrument cases and honor the tree that gave its life for the instrument” (pp. 30-1).
   
2. Expression: She suggests that in England early childhood education does this well, but people involved in educating younger students might look to music therapy, “as a means of deep inner self-exploration rather than therapeutic attendance of the participants’ psychopathological needs” (p. 31).
3. Construction: She suggests improvisational elements of delight and play be centered in the curriculum.
4. Values: Values involve searching for that which is good. And she suggests we don’t talk about the Good often enough, even when we perform music that opens space to discuss the good. Values are connected to culture.

Boyce-Tillman states that these four domains lead to spirituality. “Spirituality occurs in moments when fusion occurs between the four domains” (p. 31)—a restoration of body, emotions, intellect, and culture.

In previous posts, I have given examples of music performed in schools where values are never discussed. Space isn’t opened for conversation or understanding . Student improvisation and composition is often avoided by many music teachers—or narrowed to the point where it’s not very creative at all, just answers to be plugged into a preset question. But material is perhaps our biggest area of contention.

Music teachers ought to teach our students where our instruments originate. We ought to seek that information out for ourselves. It doesn't appear by magic. I'll draw your attention to a 2015 article in Popular Music, where Kyle Devine tracks down the waste involved in LPs, cassettes, CD’s, and MP3s, including the destructive material waste of our most seeming-immaterial musics, in the form of server farms. A spiritual approach, following Boyce-Tillman’s model, isn’t immaterial. It begins with the material. The material is the first consideration, even if the material has been ignored by most of music education. A return to the spiritual is a return to awareness of our material footprint. Conscientization.

DS

Post 85.

Today in MUS 5: Introduction to Western Music, a group will be presenting on Pauline Oliveros, and I’ll teach a small segment on Libby Larsen. Both composers had deep ties to the natural world, as was described in Denise Von Glahn’s book, “Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World.” I have been using this book as a secondary text in this class for years, and asked the Penn State library (which they did) acquire a digital copy so students could access it at no cost. Each year, I separate the students into groups based on the chapters on Amy Beach, Joan Tower, Louise Talma, Marion Bauer, Ellen Taaffe Zwillich, and Pauline Oliveros, and I cover Emily Doolittle and Libby Larsen separately. These women composers serve as counterpoint to the classical music history created in the primary text, which includes few women composers, and those in condensed manner. For instance, I explain to students that even though I begin this class with Hildegard of Bingen, because we begin with medieval musics, many music history texts don’t mention Hildegard's name. Despite her importance to the field. I hope a more counterpuntal approach, one that centers gender, awakens students to gendered hierarchies in classical music and the world.

I use Von Glahn’s chapter on Larsen to contextualize Larsen's work and address distinctive ecological challenges we face in the 21st Century. Libby Larson (b. 1950), who co-founded the American Composers Forum (which promotes diverse composers and collaborations) has long been linked to the University of Minnesota. Unlike other composers in the book, Larsen’s work emphasizes “extramusical intent” (p. 242) with clear political and ecological agendas.
           
Women composers have traditionally been connected to what Von Glahn calls small-nature subjects, such as ants and grasshoppers, home and gardens; and Larsen composes music inspired by these; but she also composes pieces inspired by big-nature, the atmosphere, moon, and the skies and sea. Larson defines nature as a life-embracing action. “For me nature is life force, life force, global and way beyond global … the physical forces that allow those who are imbued with it to recognize their state of being” (p. 243).
           
Larsen embraces the concept of Gaia, in contrast to the patriarchal church she grew up in. “Nature provided her with an ungendered place and limitless possibilities” (p. 252). The Gaia Hypothesis was put forth by biologists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. In this theory, the Earth is treated as a living entity, with self-regulated boundaries and, most importantly, life as people define living beings. “This new way of looking at global ecology and evolution differs from the classical picture of ecology as biological response to a menu of physical conditions.” Findings in research on mycorrhizal fungi, climate change, earth systems, self-organization of the biosphere, each deepen our understanding of Gaian science.

In class we listen to Larsen’s Womanly Song of God, which is based on Catholic poet Catherine de Vinck’s "Woman Singing," (p. 41) in the collection, God of a Thousand Names.

Larsen's program notes read:
“The music for The Womanly Song of God draws upon Western European trumpet tonguing syllables set to African drumming patterns to create drum circle/drumminbg ensemble feel for the chorus - a whirling and powerful force to support the spiritual energy of the text.
Poet Catherine DeVinck (b. 1923) describes her writing as "soaked in the theology of hope, that is, in the knowledge that death has no dominion, that light overcomes darkness, and that love is a divine power of transformation and renewal.”

And here are the lyrics:

I am the woman dancing the world alive:
Birds on my wrists
Sun-feathers in my hair
I leap through hoops of atoms;
Under my steps
Plants burst into bloom
Birches tremble in their silver
Can you not see the roundness of me:
Curve of the earth
Maternal arms of the sea?
I am the birthing woman
Kneeling by the river
Heaving, pushing forth a sacred body!

Round, round the wind
Spinning itself wild
Drawing great circles of music
Across the sky
Round the gourd full of seed
Round the moon in its ripeness
Round the door through which I come
Stooping into your house
I am a God of a thousand names:
Why cannot one of them be
Woman Singing?
 
Questions for students:
How does Larsen relate to the natural world?
Why do you think it is important that Larsen writes both reflective of small-nature and big-nature?
In what ways in nature a life force?

DS

Link to image, Mother Goddess, Madhya Pradesh or Rajasthan, India, 6th - 7th cents., National Museum of Korea, Seoul: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f0/Mother_Goddess%2C_Madhya_Pradesh_or_Rajasthan%2C_India%2C_6th_-_7th_cents.%2C_National_Museum_of_Korea%2C_Seoul_%2840236606165%29.jpg

Post 84.

According to Jason Bittel, writing for National Geographic, Humpback Whales seem to show empathy for other species. There have been more than a hundred instances of humpback whales protecting the objects of orca hunts, rescuing non-whale animals such as seals. Altruism is one possible reason for whales protecting other species, and cetaceans (the order of marine mammals that whales, dolphins, and porpoise’s belong to) have advanced limbic systems, the part of the brain that processes emotions. This has led the Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC) to call for cetaceans to have individual rights under international and national law. Here are two interesting points they make.

1. “The evidence suggests that whales and dolphins are not only conscious, and that bottlenose dolphins, at least, are self-awareness, but also that they have complex brain structure for complex function, that they often live in complex societies, that they are capable of experiencing a range of emotions.”
2. “As we know, empathy is another very important emotion for social species, particularly because it is associated with anticipating the reaction of others. The discovery of spindle cells in the brains of some whale and dolphin species provides good supporting evidence that these species may be capable of experiencing complex emotions such as empathy and indeed that this emotion may provide an important evolutionary advantage for these highly social species.”

When I listen to Paul Winter’s “Lullaby From the Great Mother Whale For the Baby Seal Pups” it speaks to me as a father, and not merely an intellectual who thinks whales need protected. However, even without the context of Paul Winter’s human musics, Roger Payne’s 1970 album, “Songs of the Humpback Whale,” which introduced Paul Winter and the world to the musical lives of whales, still moves me as a being on earth. Music, whether co-created by humans and whales, or solely the creation of whales for their own purposes, which we don't fully know, helps cultivate my feelings. My empathetic response.

Empathy is defined as “the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiences from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another’s position.”  Can I truly place myself within the whale’s frame of reference? Considering this definition, can I place myself within other people’s frame of reference? I grew up in a rural PA town, and taught in a city; and now in a small rural city. What tools do these experiences give me to fully understand the frame of reference of Suyá living at the Xingu River, the Nivkh of the Sakhalin Island, or the Maasai of the African Great Lakes region? Heck, I sometimes find myself thinking suburbanites were born on Pluto! Yet it doesn’t seem to require a perfect understanding of another's life to empathize. In fact, if perfect understanding were required, empathy would be unnecessary. We would simply be the other. But we need others to work for and protect us. I can imagine myself, to some extent, as another person with a different frame of reference, even while recognizing that there are things I'll get wrong, because my understanding is imperfect.

Similarly, I can imagine living as a whale. I may not have as advanced a limbic system as whales, but I can still feel. I can imagine sharing popular whalesongs below the sea. Protecting a pup, or a seal from hunting orca. I can imagine the fear of facing a whaling ship. Of losing family members from my pod. Or the pain of inhaling plastics suffocating the oceans. However imperfect my understanding is as a human—not fully part of whale culture—there is something linked between all life on earth. We are all cells within Gaia. This is what I think is central to ecological thinking. Ecology. We can feel connected to diverse human cultures and diverse species because we are connected. All of the world is. There is not ecology without considering the more-then-human world. Diversity and stability are two traits of ecology. We are all connected. Ecological realization can lead to empathy and then action.

DS
 
Link to image: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Sanc0603.jpg

Post 83.

I and He, by Marion Cuthbert

I told my child
God could make worlds.
Delight was a fountain in his eyes,
Remembering his own secret world
Which he might turn to in any wakeful hour
Or enter in a dream
 
It was good to know
That God, too, could make a garden
Or a friend.
 
I told my child
God was not greater than the rules.
This seemed right to him--
To know that things are as they are
And will not change except as they must
Because of what they were created for
 
If you have a little puddle of water,
You have to play in it fast.
Putting your hands over it won’t help long
Because little puddles go back to the sun.
 
I told my child
God was always becoming.
He said this was true, of course, because
All alive things were growing all the time.
 
When he was a little boy, he thought
Lilacs die forever, but they don’t,
They just like to come before us in spring.
And then, too,
He, himself, was four, going on five,
And after that would be six.
 
The Harlem Renaissance poet Marion Cuthbert (1896-1989) also wrote the 1936 book We Sing America (discussed by Marie McCarthy in her presentation Black Music and Music Education in the Mid-Twentieth Century during the most recent NAfME Conference), which depicted “stories of outstanding African-American achievements with descriptions of present-day racial injustice,” and a Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia University, Education and marginality: A study of the Negro woman college graduate, which became a foundational document in that field of study.

The poem I and He opens her book, Songs of Creation. [See the photo I took of the book cover]. Drawing together parenting an African American child, I and He contains subtle and beautiful references to how to survive psychologically, how to find happiness and beauty in the present moment. Cuthbert's spirituality and connection to nature speak deeply to me. Layers upon layers of beauty and strength.

And for music educators today?
Green Hip-Hop is a “small genre,” but growing. There are some artists who are writing mostly eco-conscious music. Markese “Doo Dat” Bryant was identified as the lead among these. Growing up near a Chevron plant influenced his ecological understanding and his music. Listen to this Living on Earth show about Green Hip-Hop, and listen to Markese’s 2009 song The Dream Reborn (My President is Green). “Look, I’m from the hood. We need better food and better air, you probably wouldn’t never care. Why?! You ain’t never there. … My president is Black, but he’s gone Green.”

For many of my students, Black, White, East Asian, and other, Hip-Hop is the primary way to think and act musically. When we song-write in class, many of my students rap. I leave the choice to sing or rap up to them. Environmental science scholar Michael J. Cermak writes about the opportunity for Hip-Hop to be central to cultivating critical ecological literacy. In his work, students composed green hip-hop lyrics (more than 200 compositions collected over four years). Of particular interest, he writes “when student-produced texts are refined they can become teaching materials for other students. … This student-to-student transmission of environmental knowledge is a crucial step in mitigated the potentially problematic role of cultural insensitivity in environmental education, and one that allows texts to grow organically.”

There are other Green Hip-Hop pieces music educators can make themselves familiar with, such as Mos Def’s New World Water and Will.i.am’s S.O.S., but, since hip-hop is a conversation between artists, providing space for students to take the lead, to center their own experiences (rather than another global industry), and create a truly local database, an ongoing conversation to share from one year to the next, might be an authentic and ecologically affirming way to teach hip-hop in communities and schools. This can become central to an educational approach that treats students not as waste or as consumers, but as artistic beings living in resisting a problematic society.  

DS

Post 82.

Deep in my soul
the old songs are waking
Inspired by nature
love of our earth
She who came first
Her old bones are quaking
I open myself
I will not deny my voice
We were all brought forth
out of the darkness
The forest, the seas
the mountains and shores
Stomping a beat
that bubbles within me
Wind carries my dance
an old tune of unbroken lores
 
My sister, Christine Hartman, wrote this poem yesterday in our family Facebook group. Indeed Mother Earths old bones are quaking.

When I think of the idea of old tunes, and unbroken lore, my mind goes to the folk song tradition, which, though now is a pop music genre, feels connected to an older song tradition. The type of balladry used by singers like Joan Baez, Odetta, Lead Belly, Bob Dylan, and Yusuf Islam, simple singer and accompanying string instrument, would have been in-place in medieval Europe, in ancient African civilizations, in the ancient Israel of David, and in the ancient China that gave birth to Laozi—though the string instrument of choice would be different in each case. Laozi writes: “People follow the earth. The earth follows heaven. Heaven follows Dao. Dao follows what is naturally so.” People, Earth, Heaven and Nature.

And in the Psalms David sang: “Bless the Lord, O my soul. The trees of the Lord have fruit in abundance, the cedars of Lebanon that he planted. In them the birds build their nests; in the fir trees the stork makes its home. The high mountains are inhabited by the wild goats; in the rocky crags the badgers find refuge.”

Nature, home, and sustainability have been themes of folk musics since the start. In a more modern folk song, Yusuf Islam, in “Where Do the Children Play” sings, “Well you’ve cracked the sky, scrapers fill the air. But will you keep on building higher ‘til there’s no room up there? Will you make us laugh, will you make us cry? Will you tell us when to live, will you tell us when to die? I know we’ve come a long way. We’re changing day by day. But tell me, where do the children play?”

In popular music, lyrics serve as the core of the musical experience. The essence. This may come as a surprise to music educators, who have, I think inadvertently, been taught that music education is about teaching the sonic/theoretical aspects of musics—chord relations, rhythms, form, dynamics, etc.—but when I teach popular songs to my students in MUS 8 (which is an introductory music theory class for undergraduate non-majors), their experience with music (and I always begin with student experience) is almost always with the lyrics. Words in rhythm and melody. Not three separate ideas but one: words/rhythm/melody. Every now and then I’ll have an EDM fan who experiences “the beat” first; but 99% of the time, it’s a meaningful, evocative, feelingful lyric that draws people to music. Music educators ignore this at their own, and the field's, loss.

In an upcoming presentation at the Music, Spirituality, and Wellbeing Conference (in July), I’m working with Gareth Dylan Smith to understand a project we have worked on. I am writing poetry, and he is creating drum tracks to accompany those poems. Here’s a link to his YouTube page, where he posted the interpretations of the poetry from my book, Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy. What might this mean for music education?

I have students in MUS 8 improvise/compose two songs during the semester, as they get their heads around various music theory concepts. In the first, students write and read poems (outside/describing soundscapes) and create beats behind them using found-sound instruments. See my 2019 article on waste and popular music for my philosophical thought on why instrument construction can serve as a resistance to metaphorical and material waste in popular music education.

In the second group presentation, students turn the approach on its head, thinking about the forms used in various popular songs, and creating beats, chord patterns, and improvised solos using apps and other technology (which they share and explain during their presentations/performances), and create/add lyrics that the music inspires later. They can sing or rap these, as is appropriate to their style. By the time students finish MUS 8 in my sections, they not only have an [hermetic] understanding of sonic music, but a practical experience of musicking; and they understand the embeddedness of lyric-writing to the musical process. Not all musics have lyrics. But most does. It always has. Our first musical instrument is our human voice. Singing likely kept us running together 200,000 years ago when humans were persistent hunters in Africa (some folk still are), and the same singing scared away predators at night and joined us together in communion. Lyrics can and must be meaningful. This is likely why folk musicians were addressing the ecological crises long before school music educators and scholars. Music and words aren't two different things. We have ignored words for too long.

DS 

Image of Yusuf Islam cropped and retouched from original by Bryan Ledgard as allowed per Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) licensing. link: upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Yusuf_Islam_BBC2_Folk_Awards.jpg

Post 81.
 
Michael Jackson’s 1995 hit, Earth Song—with its over-the-top, Grammy nominated music video—is a series of questions. “what about sunrise? What about rain? What about all the things that you said we were to gain? … Did you ever stop to notice all the blood we’ve shed before? Did you ever stop to notice this crying earth, these weeping shores? … What have we done to the world?”
 
Twenty-seven years later these, and similar questions, are still central to what it means to be human; and what it is to do philosophy. Philosophy is, loosely speaking, most truthfully defined as the love of wisdom. A lover of music is called an amateur, originating in the Latin word amator, lover. Even amateur musicians, maybe especially so, recognize the love of music and the love of Mother Earth are connected. We walk in the woods and we hear the beautiful sounds of winds, and birds, and bugs. We search YouTube for the latest musics by global superstars and unknown independents alike. Beauty--loveliness—follows the musician, and the musician is distinctive as being the type of person who stops and listens, and then joins in with the great earth song in their own improvisational ways.

Tara Lohan shares the work of Kathleen Dean Moore in The Revelator. She writes, “What does a biodiversity crisis sound like? You may need to strain your ears to hear it.” That’s because the soundscape today is degraded through species loss. A third of bird species have become extinct and 60% of mammals. Also check out the book, Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World. We don't annihilate something or someone we truly love. We resist capitalism's expansive destruction, when that destruction includes that which we love.

What of music education philosophy? What of all music educators, considering what music education ought to be? What kind of field would ignore the questions Michael Jackson, Kathleen Dean Moore, and others have posed to humanity in a time of such devastating musical loss? On a positive note, it seems music educators are beginning to awaken to our responsibilities. My work for the past six years, as well as the work of others in music education and ecomusicology, may be partly responsible for that awakening. Check out the tab on eco-literate.com on Relevant Music Education Articles, which I know I need to update.

Or perhaps people are awakening because of the Covid pandemic, beginning with habitat loss, expanding suburbia around the globe, and humans and non-human species coming into ever closer, unusual proximity. The UN Environmental Chief says Covid is “nature sending us a message.” Or perhaps it’s because of NASA’s continuing work showing the public the evidence that climate change is real and anthropogenic. Whatever the reason, this ecological awakening is good. Let's deepen it. Let's ask questions about climate change, waste, water pollution, and other ecological challenges in our classrooms. This is at the heart of philosophy, music education philosophy or other. Questions. Let’s ask them, insistently.

DS

Link to NASA Chart: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Scientific_consensus_-_Earth%27s_climate_is_warming_%28Temperature_Anomaly_CO2%29.png

Post 80.


In what civilization
            What crooked nation
            Are businesses persons
            While climate change worsens?
            Business has rights
            While lands suffer blights
            Caused by our greed
            Our misplaced need
            For speed and for cash
            While oil spills and ash
            Fall from the sky
            As species die
            Never to be heard
            The song and the word
            And we, in our sin
            Forget where to begin
            The soil beneath our feet
            With which we daily entreat
            But in its place, we ignore
            Cries of the earth, the poor,
            Trading water for coal
Dis-easing our soul

I wrote this poem inspired by a recent Yes! Magazine article by Mark Ruffalo and Melissa Troutman, discussing the recent documentary Invisible Hand. They claim that “living ecologically is illegal” and point out that, in our society, corporations, a fiction of business, are treated legally as people, while nature, which is actually conscious and living, is situated ONLY as property. They discuss people in Toledo, OH and Grant Township, PA trying to protect their land from corporate pollution, while the legal system protects the rights of corporate “persons” to pollute uninhibitedly. They write, “The Rights of Nature movement is changing the foundation of Western Law to recognize Nature as an entity deserving the recognition of rights—not for what she does for us, but by virtue of the fact that she exists.”

Considering a piece secondary concert bands might program to open space for students to discuss the challenges of a conscious Mother Earth, the possibility of her having rights in a legal system that already recognizes fictitious corporations as “persons,” consider the level 5 piece, “Symphonies of Gaia,” by Jayce John Ogren. The ancient Greek goddess Gaia has “become a universal symbol for ecological stewardship and wisdom.” Listen to the University of Minnesota Symphonic Band performance of this powerful piece.

I like to pose questions to students in schools. Brazilian educational philosopher Paulo Freire called this problem-posing education, and it is a cornerstone of critical pedagogy. According to James Lovelock, Gaia is “the global ecosystem, understood to function in the manner of a vast self-regulating organism, in the context of which all living things collectively define and maintain the conditions conducive for life on earth.” Ancient goddess, or living thing, if corporations deserve the rights of personhood does Mother Earth?

Corporate personhood seems to, through processes like eminent domain, take away the rights of a lot of human persons to protect their land, calling into question the very concept of land ownership. If human persons do not really own "their" land, if it can be poisoned through collaborations between governments and international corporations, has the legal system, capitalism itself, or merely human empathy failed?

The use of eminent domain benefits rich corporations while negatively impacting the little "owned" by the poor, including people of color. Is eminent domain representative of colonization, where billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Bernard Arnault (who have major interests in land purchases and fossil fuels) use the legal system to steal from the colonized?

According to Forbes Magazine Indigenous People are at "war" against pipelines. It seems the UN documents and US law are both against indigenous groups fighting to protect the land. Put yourself in their shoes: centuries of wars and broken treaties and promises. What would you feel and do if your waterways and lands were poisoned, using eminent domain, by a national government and world governance, in collusion with globalist corporations, that you recognize as foreign to your society, which has resided on Turtle Island since prehistory? 

DS

Link to image, Mother Earth by Jacob Lipkin, 1966: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=mother+earth&title=Special%3ASearch&go=Go&ns0=1&ns6=1&ns12=1&ns14=1&ns100=1&ns106=1#/media/File:Mother_Earth_by_Jacob_Lipkin.jpg

Post 79. 

In recording the 1985 album Canyon, the Paul Winter Consort rafted 279-miles on the Colorado River, four times, improvising music in various places to entwine their music with the music of the Grand Canyon, including the sounds of physical forces and biological organisms. See the liner notes for the Paul Winter Consort’s album Canyon. And listen to the album on YouTube. A group of people in nature, traveling and stopping at various places, and improvising to co-create a composition. This sounds like a fun and life-filled musical experience.

Scholarship has long suggested that learning improvisation can foster both musical skills and empathy. What happens when we take students outdoors to improvise? What if we, in a miniature refashioning of the Paul Winter Consort journey, grabbed our school instruments and rafted down a local river or creek with students? We could record these improvisations and students could create their own albums. Would it still be music education? I suspect so. What would we hear when we stopped the raft and listened to varied places? And would our students be better prepared to protect Mother Earth from destructive forces in our economy?

The U.S. National Parks Service identifies two sources for soundscapes:
“The natural soundscape is comprised of two main sound categories: physical and biological. Physical sounds are created by physical forces (wind, rock fall, rivers, for example), whereas biological sounds are created by organisms (bird song, wolf howls, and frog calls, for example). The presence and abundance of sounds from these two categories is used to characterize different habitats. Different habitats have specific soundscape characteristics that are an important attribute of the natural system, with distinct impacts on human perception of the environment.”

Putting these ideas together, when we take our students outside to listen to soundscapes—identifying the physical sounds and biological sounds—and improvise in these places, students and teachers alike can cultivate empathy with one another and with non-human animals; and deep feelings for places that we need to protect in the 21st Century. It seems logical: people who empathize with non-human nature advocate for its protection.

According to the Indian activist Siddhartha, “we can save the earth only if we believe it is sacred” (p. 99). Taking students beyond the yellow-painted walls, sterile fluorescent lights, and machine-like soundscapes of school buildings, we, teacher-students and students-teachers, can explore the sacred—not as a religious dogma but as an exploration of free persons living and embodying our species-creativity within the diverse beauty of Mother Earth. This, for me, can be a music education worth cultivating.

DS

Link to image of Black Moshannon State Park (a half-hour drive from my home): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Black_Moshannon_SP_Lake_Panorama.jpg

Post 78.  

Mountain Flower (English Translation)
by Kim So Wol (1902-1934)

There are flowers blooming in the mountain
Flowers are blooming
It does not matter if it is Autumn, Spring, or Summer
Flowers are blooming

In the mountain
In the mountain
The awakening flowers
Are blooming there by itself 

The little bird that cries in the mountain,
Because it likes the flower
In the mountain
It lives

There are flowers withering in the mountain
Flowers are withering
It does not matter if it is Autumn, Spring, or Summer
Flowers are withering
 
In music education scholarship, Sangmi Kang writes of the song Arirang: “Various versions of the song “Arirang” have been performed all over the world in a wide range of musical styles. Currently, thanks to the explosion of musical material on the Internet, music educators can easily access these performances for their classrooms. This gives students the opportunity to appreciate and analyze the song from different perspectives, both Eastern and Western” (p. 34). In the spirit of appreciation, I am listening to Korean music that can give me an opportunity to appreciate this music from different perspectives. Here is a link to Arirang: https://youtu.be/5xGSngr275c

Today, however, I’m listening to the Korean court music (aak) composition Sujecheon. According to KBS World Radio (an international broadcaster that seeks to present programs and news on Korea’s politics, economy, society, culture and traditions for a global audience):

“The ancient song is about a woman’s prayer for her husband, a street vendor at a market. When he fails to return even late at night, she sings to the moon to rise up even higher so that the moonlight can better illuminate his way home. This song was passed down many generations, through the Goryeo period and the Joseon Dynasty. However, its lyrics have been lost over the long years, leaving only its melody. Renamed “Sujecheon” in the Joseon Dynasty, the music was performed as an accompaniment piece for the royal dance “Cheoyongmu (처용무)” and sometimes when the crown prince traveled.”

In contrast to the courtly Sujecheon, the poet beginning this post, by Kim Sowol, is well known for writing in a style reminiscent of Korean folk songs (minyo), more like Arirang. As a music teacher, I often teach students about cultures for which I have little experience. Nobody can have an experience with everything. I have never been to Korea. Still, we must try to cultivate intercultural understanding. I believe this is one duty music teachers have; however imperfectly we attempt it. I first heard Korean music in person when my friend Yo-Jung Han invited me to a performance of Korean Music at a local public library in 2012. Listen to Byungki Hwang’s Spring Snow performed by Eunsun Jung at that concert.

In the book “Traditional Music: Sounds in Harmony with Nature” published by the Korea Foundation, there’s a quote by the English scholar Jonathan Condit, “One of the special characteristics I would like to point out Korean music, from court music to folk music, is its diversity and wide range of expression. … In comparing Korean music to Western music, Korean music can be very slow and very fast, but there is no Western music that has the same kind of slowness. It seems that Korean music is one step closer to nature, while Western music is more artificial” (p. 14). This slowness, the book goes on, is connected to breathing. While we listen to Korean music in class I draw students’ attention to breath. What happens when we draw students attention to the experience of “mountain” in Kim Sowol and in Sujecheon? Of flowers? Of nature? How can our study, deep or shallow, deepen our understanding of nature in Western music classes, as well as our appreciation for the depth of philosophy in the Korean artistic traditions?

DS

Link to image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hibiscus_syriacus#/media/File:Hibiscus_Syriacus.JPG