See Max Ritt's most recent contribution to Society & Space, free to access until January 2018, here: Environmentalists Abide: Listening to Whale Music, 1965-1985
I
n general, comeback albums are better off avoided. So I was wary of New Songs from the Humpback Whale (Important Records: 2015), an updated play on the 1970s hit album Songs of the Humpback Whale (CRM Records: 1970). In the initial era of ecological and social unrest etc., the initial Songs was a generation-defining achievement, selling millions of copies and inspiring the environmental movement. Its green credentials were so impressive that NASA featured the album in on its famous “Gold LP”—an acoustic emissary of Earth's biodiversity sent into space in 1977. Two years later, National Geographic burned samples of Songs onto 10 million flexi-discs for its growing North American readership.
Whale music was celebrated at a time when “the environment” had suddenly entered the collective consciousness of millions of white middle-class North Americans. It represented an unlikely convergence of things: underwater sounds, advances in audio production, a growing consumer base, eco-minded arts councils, and newly pervasive nature beliefs. Whale music was not just music, then, but prefigurative eco-politics. It identified a range of subject positions for identifying with, and making sense of, environmentalism. Such, at least, are the arguments of my recent paper in the journal, (“Environmentalists Abide: Listening to Whale Music, 1965-1985”), which surveys the rise of whale music over its most celebrated period.
“Environmentalists Abide” stakes out a few claims at the intersection of music and environmental geography. First, I argue that recording studios are underexplored sites from which to probe the relationship between ideologies of space and nature. Space is routinely theorized in treatments of acoustics (Doyle, 2007). Through sonic manipulation—the application of echo or delay effects—music can communicate information about the spaces in which it is heard. The fact that the listening space whale music modeled was so unlike the space modeled in Duke Ellington recordings had to do with more than what the microphones captured; it also had to do with different ideologies of music production. The "soothing" and "smooth" spaces central to whale music were deliberate accentuations, introduced by music producers and studio engineers. They were also desired elicitations, shaped by the beliefs of eager music consumers. Technological changes in the modern music studio beginning in the 1960s revolutionized the possibilities of musical space fabrication. In this paper, I suggest that the whale music of the 1970s routinely modeled a particular kind of musical space, one that corresponded to Neil Smith’s (1984) “bourgeois ideology of nature.”
A second theme of the paper is the historicity of whale music. Whale music was the post- industrial, post-whaling), pre-New Age, self-reflexive soundtrack of a middle class newly attuned to “late modern nature” (Braun, 2002). It was consumed alongside neo-colonial eco-tours and on living room stereos surrounded by New Age artifacts. Throughout the 1970s, whale music was never far from the sophisticated advertising campaigns groups like Greenpeace developed to convince the uninitiated to join their cause, and nor did it ever depart from state interests, serving as a basis for experiments with environmental citizenship up and down the West Coast. If the materials of whale music doubtlessly depended on non-human vocalists, they also depended on human taste-makers, acting out institutional demands at particular historical moments.
In North America in the 1970s, whale music expressed the practice and the values necessary for membership within a community of continued historical significance: environmentalism. The musicologist Simon Frith (1996) teaches us that attributions of musical meaning are always about particular claims on community. A musical history of environmentalism is not just about ecologically tuned-in folk songs. It is also about the consolidation of particular ways of experiencing nature, and the forms of privilege and exclusion upon which those experiences routinely depended. The playlist below captures some of these moments. These songs are heartfelt, playful, cheesy, and beautiful at different turns. They give renderings of environmentalism’s shifting “ideological terrain” (Gramsci, 2011)—the space through which environmental ideas traverse and intersected. “We would never have been inspired to try to save the whale without being touched by its song,” David Rothenberg (2008) writes. Rothenberg is correct, but who is the ‘we’ he presumes?Tracklist
- Paul Spong “Who’s Studying Who?” Songs and Sounds of Orcinus Orca (Vancouver Aquarium: 1982)
- Judy Collins “Farewell to Tarwaithe” Whales and Nightingales (Elektra: 1970)
- 3. Paul Horn “Share A Feeling” Paul Horn and Haida (Sealand of the Pacific: 1974)
- Ann McMillan “Whale II” Whale - Wail, In Peace, en Paix: For Voice and Tape Structures of Whale and Other Animal Sounds (Folkways: 1986)
- George Crumb “Vox Balaenae” Vox Baleanae (Naxos: 1970)
- Jim Nollman – “The Rattle” Orca's greatest hits (Folkways: 1984)
- Pink Floyd – “Echoes” Echoes (Atlantic: 1972)
- Dane Stotts – “Ultra Meditation IV” Cetacean Mind Link (Zygon: 1984)
- Merzbow – “Anti-Whaling Song Part. 1” Bloody Sea (Vivo: 2006)
- Hans Joachim Roedelius – “Regenmacher” Durch die Wüste (Bureau B: 1978)
- Steven Halpern – “Leviathan Blue” Sepctrum Suite (Yandex: 1976)
- Marc Barreca – “School for Whales” Twilight (Palace of Lights: 1980)
- Burning Sensations – “Belly of the Whale: (Capitol Records: 1983)
References
Braun B (2002) The Intemperate Rainforest. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Doyle P (2007) Echo and Reverb: Fabricating Space in Popular Music, 1900–1960. Wesleyan, PA: Wesleyan University Press.
Frith S (1996) Music and identity. Questions of cultural identity, 1, 108-128.
Gramsci A (2011) Prison Notebooks Volume 2. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rothenberg D (2008) Thousand Mile Song. New York: Basic Books.
Smith N (1984) Uneven Development: Nature. Capital, and the Production of Space, 3.
