Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment

Conclusion

Conclusion A fter eight years, this research still feels incomplete. Despite a lot of hard work, I feel as if the project is just getting started. Of course, all musicians think that. Almost every musician I have met thinks that he or she is about to write, record, or perform a song that will capture the audience’s imagination or finally scratch their artistic itch. As a teenager I met one of the members of the McCoys in a Chicago suburb (not Rick Derringer; he went on to become a bigger rock star). The McCoys recorded the number-one hit “Hang on Sloopy” (1965, 1995). The ex-McCoy was sure that his Holiday Inn band was about to make it big. He never returned to the limelight, but he did make more great music. The tragedy is not that the McCoy in question never made it back to the big time, but that such a talented performer did not seem to realize how much joy his music brought to audiences, regardless of size. Musical research has a similar dynamic. As investigators, we imagine that the next project will reveal a new key to music’s hidden magic. However , the search for sustainable music has just begun. Ecomusicology as a field of study is in its infancy, working through definitions and goals and generating new questions, while finding a few answers along the way. Ethnography is just one way of doing ecomusicological research. Ethnographers seek answers in human experience, the partial, intersubjective, and complex realities of daily life. Such experiences take shape in particular places during specific periods in history, sometimes referred to as the “ethnographic present.” My fieldwork and book take place in just one of many possible times and places. As generations of anthropologists have learned, however, the small places we study ethnographically are integrally connected to more encompassing geographic, temporal, and cultural abstractions. If we want 200 Conclusion to understand environmental music as performed in specific locales like Stillwater, Minnesota, Orcas Island, Washington, or anywhere else, for that matter, we need to consider the regional, national, and global soundscapes in which such performances take place. Ecomusicologists consider multiple, interacting levels of life, from local concerts to global soundscapes , local groundwater to climate change. This field research indicates that local musicians are heavily influenced by music made on much larger stages. The spirits of Guthrie, Dylan, and DiFranco hang over us all. The truth is that globalized music dominates local soundscapes (Breen 1993; Dawe 1998). There are, of course, local references in globally circulated music; “world-famous” music and musicians have to come from somewhere. However, the global music industry exerts much more influence on what happens in local music scenes than those scenes exert, in return, on the global soundscape. It is not a completely reciprocal system. “These days if you are traveling to Tuva to study music,” Theodore Levin writes, “you’re likely to find that Tuva’s famous throat-singers are all away on tour” (2006, xii). After finding success, many Tuvan musicians decided to take up residence elsewhere. Yet global attention has led to “musical revivalism in Tuva itself, where new ensembles sprang up like wildflowers,” thanks to the local style’s international success (ibid., 162). This cycle leads to hybrid global-local genres as well. Levin explains that “worldbeat buffs” and “new agers” in Greece, the United States, and elsewhere have exerted a strong cultural influence on Tuvan musicians and music (ibid., 210). Some Tuvan musicians have become like “rock stars” (ibid.). Their “pop fame” and performances are far removed from the traditional Tuvan cave ceremony (ibid., 211). Yet Tuvan music is one of the local-goes-global success stories. Most local music lacks that level of representation in global markets. However, all local music is influenced by global music industries and markets. It is similar to the relationship between global nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and local social movements. Global NGOs create a “market” that directly influences how and where local movements orient their activism (Bob 2005). Similarly, global music markets influence the sound, performance, and consumption of local music. Local musicians are seduced into meeting global audiences “at least halfway” (Levin 2006, 217). Global attention can foster local musical traditions, but it greatly modifies them in the process, as it has in the Tuvan case. In short, even cases of local and regional music successfully making it onto the global stage illustrate the overdetermining influence of global markets and industry. Conclusion 201 Nevertheless, a...