Many of us, if asked to say whether ecology and musical work have anything to do with each other, would probably answer in the affirmative without much hesitation. And in conversations with colleagues, one notices just how urgently current the associated debate is. The term “ecology” is actually a fairly young one, coined during the second half of the 19th century. However, the dream of getting close to nature and listening to its inner workings and secrets is most certainly far older—probably as old as humanity itself.
Over the course of human history, people’s concepts of nature and hence musicians’ relationships therewith have constantly changed. Claude Debussy’s La Mer (1905), for instance, differs fundamentally from portrayals of nature heard in 18th- and 19th-century musical works such as Beethoven’s Pastorale. Debussy, wrote the French philosopher and music commentator Vladimir Jankélévitch, listened to “the breast of the ocean and the breathing of the tides, the heart of the sea and the earth.” In La Mer, he wrote that “the human face” had “utterly disappeared”; it was “a poem of anonymous elements and non-human phenomena of the heavens.”5 To Jankélévitch, therefore, Debussy’s music sounded suggestive of a human being’s disappearance behind nature. How did this perceptual stance come about? Can a composing subject still be sensed in this music? Or is it something that was much rather overheard from an unknown “opposite”?
Questions such as these gained currency after 1945 and came to be viewed in connection with ecological debates. In contrast to earlier times, when some held that nature was to be thought of as a controllable entity, this period witnessed the attempt to become better acquainted with such seemingly foreign terrain. Gradual progress was made toward the objective of viewing humankind and nature as components of an overarching whole in the context of an “alliance technique” (Ernst Bloch).
James Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979), for instance, proposed a perspective in which nature is understood not as something “other” but rather as an integral part of our sensory world. Gibson’s ideas subsequently came to influence not only scientists but also composers such as Gérard Grisey and Salvatore Sciarrino.
Grisey’s oeuvre of the 1970s features a compositional and ecological perspective that is echoed even in present-day works by more than a few composers.6 Grisey viewed sounds not as controllable and exchangeable “parameters” but rather as living beings that are born, live, and die. He belonged to a generation that succeeded for the first time in obtaining a microscopic understanding of sounds. On that basis, he realised that the principle of genesis and decay upon which all nature is based is also a constituent aspect of sounds’ temporality.
Sciarrino likewise mentions ecology in his texts and work commentaries. In doing so, he assumes a unity of subject and object as well as the inseparable interlacing of the senses. Sciarrino’s approach consists not merely in “composing” sounds in the literal sense of the word—i.e., putting them together—but (quite close to Grisey) in exploring and paying sustained attention to sounds’ individual characteristics and the ways in which perception functions.
One might imagine this as follows: sounds represent offers (or, as Gibson puts it, “affordances”) to the listeners. At the same time, those who perceive “cast their nets” (Sciarrino) and are receptive to some of these offers. It is in this interplay that our encounter with the resonant world occurs. One must be mindful here of how every individual perceives things differently and casts their nets in an individual way. Against this backdrop, the term sdoppiamento (“division” or “splitting”) refers to Sciarrino’s attempt to attain distance from his own self and enter into an internal alliance with the listener. As a consequence of this collective, empathy-based perceptual process, listening becomes an overarching sensory perception that ultimately leads to a “vision” of the whole.
A further way in which to approach this holism is the notion of “atmosphere”, which Gernot Böhme placed at the centre of his eponymous 1995 study. Therein, Böhme involved those interdependencies that an atmospheric unity of humankind and nature entails: “Atmosphere is the common reality of the perceiver and the perceived.”7
Against this backdrop, let us turn once again to the music of Sciarrino: in the opera Luci mie traditrici (My Traitorous Eyes), the common reality of the perceiver and the perceived can be directly felt. All of the senses are activated: the visual impulses that reach us from the stage correspond to instrumental sounds that affect us physically. Nature is made to sound different depending on whether we find ourselves amidst a reddish sunrise, midday brightness, or evening twilight. These atmospheric transformations of sound are analogous to the inner drama of the plot. Nature and humankind form a whole. The outcome of this project, however, remains open. At the conclusion of Sciarrino’s opera, the impression arises that this alliance should be interpreted as a fateful and inescapable entanglement—with humankind as an abysm, intertwined with a nature that is dark and inscrutable.
Is there such a thing as “ecological composing” today? One could claim with some justification that soundscapes, for instance, do come close to such an aspiration. But one mustn’t conceive of the relationship between music and ecology too narrowly, either. For today, every practice of art is fundamentally called upon to explore forms of mutuality between art and nature, subject and object, thinking and feeling, thereby subjecting historically rooted dichotomies to critical scrutiny. This process has long since begun.8 It is unstoppable and ongoing in all contemporary art forms, and we shall see where it leads.
- Vladimir Jankélévitch, Die Musik und das Unaussprechliche, Berlin 2016, p. 59.
- Cf. Daniel Smutny, “Musik als ökologische Praxis”, in: www.daniel-smutny.de/texte/musik-als-oekologische-praxis-2021 (accessed on 3 Oct. 2024).
- Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre. Essays zur neuen Ästhetik, Frankfurt/M. 1995, p. 34.
- Cf. for example Aaron S. Allen, Current Directions in Ecomusicology, New York/London 2017.
