Dirty Musicology
An ecomusicology podcast by Jameson Foster (University of Colorado Boulder, Peabody Conservatory). Dirty Musicology explores our fraught relationship between ourselves and the land we inhabit from a cultural, rather than scientific perspective, with an emphasis on music, spirituality, and transcendentalist philosophy.
Jameson Foster is currently working towards his PhD in Ethnomusicology at the University of Colorado Boulder, with an M. M. in Musicology from Peabody Conservatory. While his expertise is in the music traditions and histories of the Nordic countries, his work is guided by a passion in ecological ethic and ecomusicology, with much of his work reflecting concern for how music works with or against attitudes of environmentalism, particularly how animist cosmology manifests in contemporary pagan music practice.
Dirty Musicology
A Word for Music, or an Ecomusicologist's Manifesto
When Henry David Thoreau, in 1851, took to the lectern at the Concord Lyceum, he proclaimed to those in attendance, “I wish to speak a word for Nature.” With the conclusion of his speech, he declared, “in wildness is the preservation of the world.” And with his words, Thoreau marked a turning point in American thought away from superficial talk of nature derived from excessive Romanticism, and towards a more meaningful, sincere understanding of Earth’s Wilderness as it is.
In much of the same character, I would like to speak a word for Music, for in music is the preservation of the human spirit. I hope to make a case for a sincere academic confronting of music’s ineffable power to enrapture those who bear witness to it, with an interdisciplinary approach inviting subaltern, historically dismissed philosophical frameworks and epistemologies. In other words, I too, am lending my voice to a growing turn away from superficial talk of music as metaphor in our parlors, and towards a more sincere fronting of music as the ineffable, yet very real, force that it is in our world.
This is an Ecomusicologist's manifesto.