Relational Capacities, Musical Ecologies

• Main Author: Von Glahn, Denise
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University PressNew York 2023
• Subjects: Thornton; tlingit
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197546642.003.0009; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/58067072/oso-9780197546642-chapter-9.pdf

Abstract Referencing works by anthropologists Thomas F. Thornton and Julie Cruikshank, and especially Cruikshank’s scholarship on the Tlingit people’s relationships to glaciers, this essay considers the significance of epistemological connections that inhere between the Tlingit people and the geography of their homelands and the ways those understandings can illuminate modern compositions about our environment. The relational capacity of individual sonic elements in a piece of music—pitches, rhythms, and timbres—invites listeners to understand music metaphorically in ecological terms. Auditors experience both the instant expression of an individual sound, its immediate interactions with others as they occur, and, over time, the entire sound environment that accumulates. Sound comes to listeners whole despite its composition of discrete, partitionable parts and listeners’ varying abilities to distinguish and identify them. Listeners make sense of sounds in relation to each other—sounds to sounds, and sounds to listeners. This complex, multivalent relationship operates in Ice Becomes Water, Judith Shatin’s 2017 piece for string orchestra, electronics, and recorded sounds of glaciers that comments upon the accelerated rate of melting polar ice and the environmental changes it registers. Shatin’s work is simultaneously a musicalized ecological system, a lament for unthinking human behaviors, and a call to act.