Ecomusicology

The 1952-born Canadian artist, photographer and poet Marlene Creates has been exploring “the relationship between human experience, memory, language and the land, and the impact they have on each other”¹ for over forty years.

Deeply interdisciplinary, the field of ecomusicology is a branch of study exploring the various and complex nexus between people, nature and sounds. Ecomusicologists can come from the fields of composition, acoustic ecology, bio-acoustics, ethnomusicology, historical musicology, biology as well as ecocriticism, biosemiotics, ecosemiotics, phenomenology.

The attraction that is exerted by ecocriticism arises through the force with which it invokes pressing aspects of the real.   Even though the total scholarly field of such study is not singularly concerned with the indisputable f

Music for People and Thingamajigs  

Travis D. Stimeling, West Virginia University

Saro Lynch-Thomason, Blair Pathways, Asheville, NC

Nate May, College-Conservatory of Music, University of Cincinnati

Categories and Borders

Historians have, in the last decade or so, expanded their approach to the past to include sensory experiences.  Sounds and ways of listening to them—what people heard, what sounds had meaning to them—have been established as an important way to understand the past (Johnson 1995; Picker 2003; Smith 2000; Sterne 2003; Thompson 2002).  The senses are at, indeed form the very foundation of, the unstable intersection of nature

This piece originally appeared in the October 2012 issue of the Ecomusicology Newsletter.