A "Stubbornly Persistent Illusion"?:: Climate Crisis and the North, Ecomusicology and Academic Discourse

The climate crisis impacts the northern polar regions in disproportionate ways, and ecomusicology is an academic discourse. In bringing these two seemingly unrelated pairs together, I argue for academic discourse in ecomusicology that makes connections with the climate crisis in music and sound studies. What can ecomusicology offer humanity as we face climate catastrophe? While not a panacea, ecomusicology can serve to further collapse the unfortunate nature-culture dichotomy that is at the root of so many social and environmental problems.  Academic discourse always should have a place for titillation, but we must not avoid the climate crisis in music scholarship, for that only enables climate change denialism. I elaborate on an ecomusicology that is both new and not new, providing examples of climate connections in ecomusicological discourse. Ultimately, we must make such connections and do something about the problems we face as a civilization.The climate crisis impacts the northern polar regions in disproportionate ways, and ecomusicology is an academic discourse. In bringing these two seemingly unrelated pairs together, I argue for academic discourse in ecomusicology that makes connections with the climate crisis in music and sound studies. What can ecomusicology offer humanity as we face climate catastrophe? While not a panacea, ecomusicology can serve to further collapse the unfortunate nature-culture dichotomy that is at the root of so many social and environmental problems.  Academic discourse always should have a place for titillation, but we must not avoid the climate crisis in music scholarship, for that only enables climate change denialism. I elaborate on an ecomusicology that is both new and not new, providing examples of climate connections in ecomusicological discourse. Ultimately, we must make such connections and do something about the problems we face as a civilization

Exceptional automorphisms of (generalized) super elliptic surfaces

A super-elliptic surface is a compact, smooth Riemann surface S with a conformal automorphism w of prime order p such that S/ has genus zero, extending the hyper-elliptic case p=2. More generally, a cyclic n-gonal surface S has an automorphism w of order n such that S/ has genus zero. All cyclic n-gonal surfaces have tractable defining equations. Let A = Aut(S) and N be the normalizer of C = in A. The structure of N, in principal, can be easily determined from the defining equation. If the genus of S is sufficiently large in comparison to n, and C satisfies a generalized super-elliptic condition, then A = N. For small genus A - N may be non-empty and, in this case, any automorphism h ∈ A - N is called exceptional. The exceptional automorphisms of all general cyclic n-gonal surfaces seems to be hard. We focus on generalized super-elliptic surfaces in which n is composite and the projection of S onto S/C is fully ramified. Generalized super-elliptic surfaces are easily identified by their defining equations. In this paper we discuss an approach to the determination of generalized super-elliptic surfaces with exceptional automorphisms

Review of The Organ as a Mirror of Its Time.

The Organ as a Mirror of Its Time is directed at two primary audiences— organists (due to the jargon and detailed organ speciacations) and historians of music, religion, intellectual trends, and technology. The pipe organ is an inherently interdisciplinary topic, since one must confront the physical (mechanical, architectural) and cultural (musical, religious) aspects of its creation and use. As Snyder states, “It is the central thesis of this book that organs have stories to tell about the times in which they were built that go far beyond the music that was played on them”

Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature . . . and Change in Environmental Studies?

The five senses: touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing. We rely on them daily, professionally, and personally — each can inform our understanding of the world and evoke memories of places and times, both distant and dear. Public policy and science, however, are guided primarily by the visual: maps, not the smell of rich soil or the feel of damp air, are used to understand local and national borders; photographs, not the feel of sticky blood or the cold metal of a weapon, provide evidence for use in court; and data such as lists of ingredients, not individual natural and artificial components to be tasted, are provided in text to be read. Scholarly research, after all, is presented in visual form in the text of a journal: maybe in braille but not as light shows, perfumes, or food, and, while those words in a journal may be read aloud, they are certainly not meant to be performed or sung

Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures: An Ecological Perspective (edited by Huib Schippers and Catherine Grant, Oxford University Press, 2016) [book review]

In Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures, 14 specialists contribute to a tightly woven book illustrating diverse musical practices from around the world using a theoretical framework regarding the preservation of endangered traditions. The volume is the result of a five-year research project (2009–14) in Australia that linked scholars from England, Japan, New Zealand, Sweden and the United States. The concepts and concerns stem from international work beginning in the early twenty-first century as formulated in various UNESCO conventions and initiatives regarding intangible cultural heritage. The project has resulted in other publications and an associated website, which will continue the applied ethnomusicology demonstrated so well in the three theoretical chapters and nine case studies of this book. Other research using the same framework will likely follow, both from these authors and others providing comparable examples

Ecomusicology: Bridging the Sciences, Arts, and Humanities

Paul Ehrlich is a key figure in modern environmental studies. In addition to ecological research, Ehrlich is known for his warnings about human overpopulation (Ehrlich, 1968). In the 1970s, he made a well-known wager with economist Julian Simon: Ehrlich contended that natural resource prices would increase continually during the 1980s, indicating increased scarcity and human suffering brought about by overpopulation, while Simon believed that prices would decline. Ehrlich was a good sport, and because his neo-Malthusian concerns lost to Simon's cornucopianism, he paid up and admitted he was wrong—but he was wrong only for that decade. Considering a longer time scale, from 1900 to 2008, we see that Ehrlich's perspicacious concerns were indeed correct (Kiel, Matheson, & Golembiewski, 2010). In the inaugural edition of the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, Ehrlich (2011) provided his “personal view” of environmental education. Considering his role as an important and respected environmental thinker and leader, and given the presentation of his ideas in such an auspicious forum, Ehrlich's advice merits our consideration

Bruce Cockburn: Canadian, Christian, Conservationist

Since his first album was released in 1970, Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn has produced 30 more, 20 of which have gone gold or platinum. His institutional honors includes 13 Juno awards, seven honorary doctorates, induction into both the Canadian Music Hall of Fame (2001) and the Canadian Broadcast Hall of Fame (2002), and many other honors. An official Canadian postage stamp was even issued in 2011. Such public recognition provides some insight into Cockburn’s long, successful, and consistent career, but these facts only touch on the surface of the complex connections of identity, religion, and ethics that guide and define him