Ecological Music: Object-Oriented Perspectives in Twenty-First-Century American Music

Abstract

How can music bring about ecological awareness? What does music have to do with coexistence? These are pressing questions for the field of ecomusicology: the study of music, culture, sound, and nature in a period of environmental crisis. This dissertation addresses those questions by investigating how twenty-first-century American concert music engages with contemporary environmental concerns. Drawing on American philosopher Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) and the scholarship of literary theorist and ecophilosopher Timothy Morton as frameworks for analysis, three case studies analyze environmentally-oriented music by major American composers. Through OOO, the unexamined ontological assumptions underlying central topics and themes in ecomusicology, including nature, the Anthropocene, environment, nonhumans, and place are explored. This dissertation argues that by applying the principles of OOO, ecocritical music studies can reveal how music does more than reflect or represent environmental concerns: music can reconfigure ideas of coexistence and the realities of ecological crises in surprising ways. The first chapter examines how Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Mass for the Endangered (2018) stylizes twenty-first-century environmental concerns according to the aesthetics of what Morton calls dark ecology, and suggests that music is ontologically deep, an idea that has profound ecological implications for interpretive musical analysis. The second chapter applies Morton’s object-oriented conception of the sublime to an analysis of Caroline Shaw’s The Evergreen (2020) and investigates how human-nonhuman relations manifest in and through musical experience. This study proposes that musical experience takes the form of coexistence and reveals how central topics in musical aesthetics can be re-conceptualized through the lens of OOO for the benefit of ecocritical endeavors. The third chapter examines the significance of place in relation to John Luther Adams’s philosophy of music. Through analysis of his writings, this study provides new insight into Adams’s creative work by revealing how the ideas that guide it are fundamentally object-oriented. This dissertation represents the first sustained study of Morton’s influential work within a musicological context, and the first substantial contribution to an object-oriented ecomusicology. More broadly, this dissertation examines what it means for music to be ecological, arguing for an understanding of music as a form of coexistence, and contributes to scholarship in ecomusicology and the environmental humanities.