Music, Sound & Nature in an Age of Environmental Degradation

Presented by the 2050 Forum, the Intercultural Institute, and the Music History Department—a roundtable discussion with Jeff Todd Titon on the future of music & sound in the face of climate disruption.

Coral reef die-off • Depleted soils  • Endangered musics • Melting ice caps • Sea level rise • Bio-diversity loss

What is the sound of climate change?

How does the musician's role change if human culture is viewed from within nature, not outside of it?

Jeff Titon began life as a guitarist and much of his work as a folklorist and ethnomusicologist was in country blues, the practice of Old Regular Baptist music in Tennessee and old-time Kentucky fiddle tunes. For the past 20 years his scholarship has increasingly focused on how music cultures can be understood as ecosystems and he is one of the founders of a growing discipline within ethnomusicology which takes an ecological approach to cultural and musical sustainability. His approach incorporates sound—natural and human-made—into notions of environment and ecology and he considers musical repertoire loss alongside species loss and extinctions.

Robert Labaree is an ethnomusicologist specializing in Turkish music and has been on the faculty of the NEC Music History department since 1984. He is the founder of the NEC Intercultural Institute and the the NEC Intercultural Institute.

Matthew Duveneck joined the NEC Liberal Arts faculty in 2017, teaching courses with a focus on math and science. His  post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Harvard Forest where he researched scenarios of forest change in New England incorporating land use, climate change, forest management, and other interacting disturbances. In addition, Duveneck also has an extensive background in social dance, specifically Argentine tango and English morris dance.