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Posts Tagged ‘music’

Music is an occasional topic on this blog (as shown in the Soundscape category). It was my first university discipline and love (when I was an undergrad at York’s wonderfully eclectic Music Department), still figures in my scholarly work from time to time (as in my work on Cape Breton Island and the Chernobyl Zone), […]

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The recent social media meme listing 10 concerts people have attended accompanied by one they didn’t (“find the lie!”) has incited me to complete a list that started out as a “50th anniversary of the concept album” brainstorm over drinks one night last year. The question here is a little different: What are the most formative and […]

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The semester is over, the grades are submitted, the sun is shining after a beautiful heavy rain, and the trees on the streets of Burlington are in full bloom — cherry blossoms and flowering dogwoods, magnolias and crabapples (at least those are my guesses). And this song lilts the afternoon as I watch the traffic outside […]

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My musical, intellectual, and ecocultural interests would not have evolved the way they did without Daevid Allen — beat poet, musical visionary, and psychedelic rocker who died last week at age 77. Here’s a personal account of why. In the background are the social, material, and ecological connections that I intend to examine more closely in […]

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One of my pet musicological theories is that the years 1967-74 were the most creative 7-year period in the history of musical humanity. Why those years? The social and technological revolutions of the 1960s — civil rights, the women’s movement, the counterculture and anti-Vietnam War movements, the sudden unifying singularity of television and mass (and […]

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It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything about music here. But as I’ve gotten thinking and writing about it again, under the “ecomusicology” rubric, expect more of it on this blog. It’s a satisfying return for me (I studied music theory, composition, and performance as an undergrad and continued it semi-professionally for a little while afterward). This […]

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Or, process-relational ecocriticism 2.0 Two of the courses I’m currently teaching — the intermediate-level “Environmental Literature, Art, and Media” and the senior-level “The Culture of Nature” — require introducing an eco-critical framework appropriate to a wide range of artistic forms, from literature to visual art, music, film and new media. The process-relational framework developed in […]

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While this doesn’t have much to do with the usual themes of this blog, it is an interesting case study of media culture and political protest (and one that my Ukrainian studies background qualifies me to comment on). It’s the case of Pussy Riot supporter Inna Shevchenko, an activist with the Ukrainian feminist protest group […]

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Glad someone uploaded this to YouTube… It’s, of course, the Heart Sutra via the Akron/Family. “Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond…” “Gone, gone, gone to the Other Shore, attained the Other Shore having never left. Oh what an awakening! All hail!”  

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Some Landscapes has a great post about landscape artist/musician Richard Skelton. As evident in works like Landings, Skelton is an artmonk, an eco-process-relationalist extraordinaire, and very much the musical equivalent of the kinds of artists I wrote about here. Threads Across the River (which follows Scar Tissue in the video below) is beautiful:

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A couple of off-line conversations about the inspirational power of music and of SF (science/speculative fiction) have gotten me to dig up this old Facebook piece and to share it here. See bottom for details. I dedicate it to Little Rinpoche. 1. My best friend in kindergarten used to mix up mind and matter; he […]

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Tim Morton seems not to have liked my comment suggesting that reality is a mix of stability and instability, and that stability is an achievement rather than a default position. The universe, I would say, is an achievement as well. His much-loved (?) lava lamps are achievements, as are Graham Harman‘s Lego blocks. They don’t […]

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