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

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