Music Studies for a Damaged Planet

Music Studies in/and the Anthropocene (MSARN) brings together scholars from across disciplines in the humanities, arts, social sciences, and natural sciences who are interested in music and sound to reckon with the new planetary epoch.

Music studies in a new planetary era

What might music studies look like as we face the end of the world(s), and recognize that, for some, that end has already come? The term “Anthropocene” is now used across disciplines and in public conversations about ecological crisis. Yet it has received relatively little attention in music and sound studies so far. Instead, our disciplinary interactions with ecology have often sought to assimilate the natural (i.e., the environment) into the realm of the human (i.e., music). his apparent neglect might be unsurprising, given the vast epistemological distances that separate areas of geological and musicological inquiry. Yet in light of encroaching ecological disaster, racial and socio-economic inequities in climatic impact, and continued extractive capitalist practices, our disciplines might do well to traverse this gap.

In the dark times,
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing,
About the dark times.

— Berthold Brecht, “Motto”

Today, we are living in a “climate of concepts” (Badami 2021), as surviving remnants of old systems of power and value drive a global increase of 1.5° C, extreme natural disasters, viral illnesses, and episodes of mass death, crises that particularly impact those occupants of the global South not historically deemed “human.”