A Playlist for the Anthropocene: Towards an Ecological Aesthetics of Music

In his Academy project, Rehding asks if an exploration of the act of “listening” during an era of grave global problems is a superfluous undertaking. How can something associated foremost with entertainment shed light on a matters of serious concern? Rehding leans the poet Longfellow’s thoughts on the purpose of music “to charm, to strengthen, and to teach” as its “three great chords of might” to think about music and the Anthropocene. “The first step to take for any eco-musicology is to critically examine its hyphen—to attend both to the prefix “eco-” and to revise our notion of music,” he writes. He models this approach on the burgeoning new field of Plant Humanities, deriving an ecological aesthetics from the American experimental musical tradition. In six chapters that range across R. Murray Schafer’s soundscapes, Katie Paterson’s striking environmental art, Jem Finer’s Longplayer, and Douglas Hollis’ Sound Garden, Rehding’s project delves into the intersections between “organized sound” (John Cage’s redefinition of music) and the ticking clock that counts down humanity’s remaining future on earth. In Berlin, Rehding will explore the city’s vast musicological archives and its contemporary musical scene—classical, avant-garde, experimental, underground. He will also research the culture of environmental consciousness, which he understands less as specific set of policies or technologies and more as a matrix of cultural factors that contribute to a popular pro-active political stance that accepts the protection of the environment as a critical value in its own right.