Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World

10. Emily Doolittle

274 Of the composers considered in this project, Emily Doolittle is the youngest by nearly a generation. Born in 1972 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to American parents, Doolittle enjoys both Canadian and U.S. citizenship; she thinks of herself as North American. Like Pauline Oliveros and Libby Larsen most especially, Doolittle is extremely uncomfortable with categories that might confine her. Where Oliveros speaks often of valuing freedom, and has consciously tacked a professional (and personal) course that some consider to lie outside traditional boundaries, Doolittle simply is a free spirit. She doesn’t talk about it much. There is little that is self-conscious about this young composer. As will become clear, dual citizenship is just one manifestation of Doolittle’s boundary-crossing being. Where Oliveros appears almost uncomfortable with the word “nature” and uses a large repertoire of expressions to speak about the natural environment, Doolittle acknowledges the complexity of the concept it represents but embraces the term as long as she can define it. With characteristic openness, Doolittle actualizes her understanding of nature as a wholly unified entity with human beings one species among many, and she does this without romanticizing nature or taking herself too seriously. Positioning herself within nature means she maintains a healthy, light grasp. Doolittle and her music substantiate the ecological condition; environmental mindfulness is part of her DNA. Given the groundswell of Green thinking in the past thirty years, it may be tempting to interpret Doolittle’s outlook as typical of folks born in the decade that celebrated the first Earth Day and saw the first Greenpeace activism ; and certainly there is broader awareness of environmental concerns in all sectors of society today than prior to the 1970s.1 But to attribute her interest 10 Emily Doolittle � Emily Doolittle 275 solely to the temper of the times would deny Doolittle the passion of her sensibility or her commitment to its practice. Not every Gen Xer shares her passions. Just as Amy Beach was a product of the late nineteenth century and its values and mores, Doolittle is a product of the late twentieth century; that said, historical circumstances alone do not explain the specific relationships each composer cultivated with the natural world. While context can make something possible, it doesn’t make anything inevitable. Doolittle’s particular expression of ecological awareness and her intentional advocacy on behalf of the environment place her in a unique position in the pantheon of composers considered in this study. At least in part because of her relative youth, Emily Doolittle has benefited from significantly greater access to nature compared to many of the women considered in Music and the Skillful Listener. But it is not this alone that separates her from the other composers; greater access to more different opportunities of all kinds may be the single most distinguishing feature of Doolittle’s late-twentieth-century formative years. She is as much the product of second-wave feminist initiatives as the concurrent environmental movement . Where Pauline Oliveros was among a small number of women breaking through barriers of all kinds in the 1950s before second-wave feminism gained momentum, Doolittle was a child of the movement and could ride its wave. She has availed herself of educational opportunities at every turn and pursued formal studies in many fields and across multiple continents. Like many of her contemporaries, she travels freely and frequently, and in contrast to the earliest women writers discussed in the introduction, she does so by herself with no escorts and no disapproving glances. Doolittle earned a bachelor’s degree in composition and theory in 1995 from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, where her composition teacher was Dennis Farrell and where she minored in oboe; she earned the Eerste Fase in 1998 from Koninklijk Conservatorium in the Hague, where she studied composition with Louis Andriessen and Martijn Padding; she received a master’s degree in composition from Indiana University in 1999 studying composition with Don Freund; and in 2007 she completed a PhD in composition from Princeton, where she worked with a number of supportive and influential people, including Barbara White, Steve Mackey, Paul Lansky, Paul Koonce, and Peter Westergaard, and wrote a dissertation cleverly titled “Other Species’ Counterpoint: An Investigation of the Relationship between Human Music and Animal Songs.”2 Her project explored the hypothesis that “some animals . . . share our ability to create and experience aesthetic Beyond the EPA and Earth Day...