Catálogo de publicaciones - revistas

<jats:p>The new historical paradigm ushered in by the Anthropocene offers a timely and urgent opportunity to rethink the relationship of humans and nature. Bruno Latour's take on the Gaia hypothesis, which rejects the traditional subject/object divide, shows how the human can be inscribed into the work of music theory. This turn toward Latour's Actor-Network Theory, which erases the categorical difference between human and nonhuman agents, now dressed up in cosmic garb under the banner of the Gaia hypothesis, appears to be distant from traditional music-theoretical concerns, but the connection is in fact less far-fetched than it seems. J. G. Kastner's music theory, taking its cue from the sound of the Aeolian harp, serves as a test case here: the Aeolian harp, played by wind directly, had long served as a Romantic image of the superhuman forces of nature, but Kastner argues that the Aeolian network only becomes complete in human ears. By unraveling the various instances and agencies of Kastner's theory, this article charts a novel approach to music and sound that sidesteps the conceptual problems in which the nineteenth-century mainstream habitually gets entangled. Kastner's work is based on a fundamental crisis in the conception of sound, after the invention of the mechanical siren (1819) tore down any certainties about the categorical distinction between noise and musical sound. Seeking to rebuild the understanding of sound from the ground up, Kastner leaves no stone unturned, from the obsolete Pythagorean tradition of musica mundana to travelers’ reports about curious sonic environmental phenomena from distant parts of the world. Where the old mechanistic paradigm was built on a “physical music” (and a static “sound of nature” based on the harmonic series), Kastner proposes a new “chemical music” that is based on the dynamic, ever-changing sonority of the Aeolian harp. This chemical music does not (yet) exist, but Kastner gives us some clues about its features, especially in his transcription/simulation of the sound of the Aeolian harp scored for double symphony orchestra. Kastner's “chemical music” finally closes the music-theoretical network that he builds around his new conception of the supernatural sound of the Aeolian harp and its human and nonhuman agents.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Today, knowledge concerning the relationship between temperature and musical pitch shapes many dimensions of Western musical practice, from the ambient conditions of performance sites to the design of musical instruments, and performers’ routines and techniques. But the history of how temperature came to play such a defining role in musical cultures remains unexamined. This article lays the foundations for such work by approaching musical instruments as sites of negotiation between acousticians, instrument makers, and players on the one hand, and music's variegated environments on the other. First, the article shows that the conceptualization of pitch in relation to temperature was a by-product of nineteenth-century international negotiations over musical standardization. These debates reveal that, while assessing the relation between pitch and temperature may seem like a decisive step toward the regulation of musical frequencies, in fact it was the source of countless epistemological and sociopolitical problems. Next, the article turns to David J. Blaikley, a British maker of wind instruments, whose experiments on the influence of extreme temperature variations on army-band instruments revealed the limits of Western attempts to control sound on a global scale, including in colonial contexts. Finally, I trace the implications of this new awareness of the interplay between sound and the environment to expose the silent ways in which that awareness continued to inform Western musical practice into the 1940s and beyond.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Discussions of promenade concerts, at least in the United Kingdom, tend to run along one of two lines: either the format is emblematic of attempts to popularize classical music or (in the famous case of the Last Night of the BBC Proms) it is symptomatic of a contested cultural nationalism. An alternative line of inquiry is to consider promenade concerts as part of the built environment. Until 2010 the fountain at the Royal Albert Hall was a mainstay of musical promenading; it had been so for over a century and a half. Such fountains, often accompanied by potted plants and Arcadian décor, were said to cool the concert hall and freshen the air, especially when their sprinkles were supplemented with blocks of imported ice. They occupied a prominent place in a concert architecture that encouraged mobility and informality, drawing on a long tradition of outdoor promenading that had gradually moved indoors. The history of concert hall suggests that the promenade phenomenon constituted not only a site of social and political negotiation (as it has typically been described), but also a staging post in the enclosure of hitherto open spaces and an example of the Victorian desire to control the climate of public assembly.</jats:p>

<jats:p>Existing scholarship struggles to theorize the relation between aesthetics, especially the aesthetics of catastrophe, and concerns with ecology and the environment. Mendelssohn's sacred oratorio Elijah premiered in 1846 at the birthplace of the steam engine in Birmingham, England. Commissioned by municipal reformers, Elijah constitutes a case study in disaster art. It was conceived as a vehicle for atmospheric repair, clean breathing, and moral healing for Black Country working populations. Its contexts include the development of biomedicine, public health discourse, and the history of air-purification systems, as well as the prophetic rhetoric of such firebrand modern Elijahs as the contemporaneous preacher-evangelist John Cumming. The popularity of the singing-class movement, moreover, aligns with the “great sanitary awakening” both because of its allegedly sanctifying spiritual potential, and because it was thought to fortify the lungs. Mendelssohn's oratorio was at once financed on the back of the profits of coal-fired energy systems and produced by well-meaning environmentalists to mitigate against the effects of heavy air pollution. The reception of the work is evidence of the extent to which the concerns of industry and the concerns of natural recovery co-constituted each other. Elijah deals in a cosmology—a way of narrating nature—that begins with the very real experience of ecological crisis. The endgame is to count the cost of a master narrative that sought natural recovery in an industrial enframement of global nature.</jats:p>

<jats:p>“Tectonic Microphonics” explores the politics of seismologists’ use of the microphone to listen to the deep, elusive sounds of the Earth in the years around 1900. It argues that seismological representatives of three emerging nation-states and empires—Italy, Japan, and Britain—used the microphone to lay claim to elusive geophysical data, encrypted in fleeting, earthly sounds. It suggests that seismologists’ enhanced knowledge of the subterranean movements of the Earth, a purported consequence of their microphonic aurality, represented a form of geopolitical currency. Such powers of prediction were viewed as an important index of national security and scientific development: the microphone thus represented an opportunity for occupants of seismic geographies (like Italy and Japan) to overcome what Deborah Coen has referred to as the “deterministic geography of security and risk” that, for some geologists, reduced them to the status of “barbarians.” At the same time, this article demonstrates that valorizing the civilizing consequences of this form of technologically mediated aurality relied upon extractive ecologies of capitalism and exploitative human labor that were often obscured by scientific users and their global networks of collaborators and enablers. As the article's concluding section shows, these activities came on the heels of the birth of one of the earliest ideas of the Anthropocene, circulated in the writings of an Italian geologist as a term for the agency of white, European, “steam-powered” men (a circumscribed Anthropos) over the Earth, its fossil resources, and its less-than-human laborers. This article concludes by arguing that the microphone established a standard of anthropogenic aurality fit for the birth of the age of the Anthropocene.</jats:p>

<jats:p>In his 1853 autobiographical narrative, Twelve Years a Slave, violinist Solomon Northup recounts his own experience of being abducted and sold into slavery for twelve years. Born as a free Black man with significant musical experience prior to enslavement, Northup offers considerable detail about his sonic (and musical) experiences, frequently situating them in a broader environmental context of slave plantations, land- and riverscapes of the American South, and their remediations in print/musical notation. In asserting a salient connection between environment, race, and sound, Northup's memoir points to possible limitations in conceptualizations of the environment that have predominated in recent ecomusicology but have tended to efface the issues of race. I sketch here a prehistory of ecomusicology that grapples directly with the sonic legacies of transatlantic slavery, underscoring how landscape might be understood not as a space of solitude or contemplation, but rather of economic exploitation and violence. Like other areas in musicology, ecomusicology has been hindered by its reliance on a “white racial frame” that tends to presume certain kinds of subjectivity and possible relationships with the environment. When considered from this perspective, Northup's account offers an important, if harrowing, reminder of the complex entanglements of environment, race, sound, economy, and violence.</jats:p>