This book offers a series of thought-provoking essays about music and the performing arts viewed from current Anthropocene-aware perspectives. It will be of great interest to students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences, as well as a broader readership involved in art and environment policies.
Music and the Performing Arts in the Anthropocene offers a series of thought-provoking essays about music and the performing arts viewed from current Anthropocene-aware perspectives. From the use of gas, water and air in 19th-century stage practices to the ecology of musical instruments and sound reproduction technologies, waste and carbon print in experimental music and theatrical production, knowledge of precariousness and empowerment through music in a changing world, each chapter aims at highlighting an issue that has always been here but never looked at thoroughly, due to the divides and hierarchies of the modern cosmogony.
Gathering sixteen scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds (history of literature, opera and theatre studies, musicology, sound studies, sociology, information science, etc.), this volume reflects on the relationships between the performing arts, music and environmental issues, explores a number of tools for changes and sketches how we will understand the arts, their history and their future beyond ecocriticism.
This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences, as well as a broader readership involved in art and environment policies.
1. Introduction Part 1: Making nature Stage matters
2. Heating,
ventilating, cleaning: air quality in performance halls in 19th-century Paris
3. Synthetic waters: aquatic spectacles in France in the 19th century
4. An
investigation into gas lighting in 19th-century Parisian theatres On becoming
modern
5. Naturally speaking about music? An inquiry into music journals,
1850-1930
6. Spectral music, nature and the ecological crisis
7. New music in
the Anthropocene: notes of an apprenticeship Part 2: Tracking materiality
Uncovering Genealogies
8. The making of Eco-Sonic Media: conversation with
Jacob Smith
9. Organology and the silencing of musical instrument museums
Current ecologies of musical instruments
10. Producing string quartets: wood,
nature, and naturality
11. African wood and sustainable ambitions: the case
of Warwick
12. The objects of free improvisation Part 3: Looking forward
Performing what?
13. Do we really need new narratives?
14. The sound of the
Anthropocene: Music and empowerment in a refugee camp
15. Le Grand Orchestre
de la Transition: a grassroots project in retrospect Changing what?
16.
Beyond sustainability: The music industries declare emergency on planet Earth
or do they?
17. An ecological redirection for music and the arts? A
conversation with Diego Landivar
François Ribac was a composer of musical theatre and a sociologist, emeritus senior lecturer at the University of Burgundy and associated member of LADYSS laboratory, France. His research focused on environmental humanities, popular music, sound reproduction and cultural expertise.
Isabelle Moindrot is Professor of Theatre Studies at Université Paris 8 and a member of the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF). Her work focuses on operatic dramaturgy, the history of theatrical spectacle and contemporary opera staging.
Nicolas Donin is Professor and Chair of musicology at the University of Geneva. He has published extensively on the history of music and musicology since the 19th century, with a focus on contemporary composition and performance.
