Selling Nature to Save It: Approaching self-critical environmental sonic art

Abstract

With similarities to the emergence in fifteenth-century landscape paintings, to poems by the Transcendentalists and to the more recent 1960s land art movement, environmental sonic art is always context-based and conjointly performs as environmental activism with aims to break down the nature/culture dualism. Nature, however, is both a material object and a socially constructed metaphor that is infinitely interpretable and ideologically malleable based on one’s values and biases. Does the environmental sonic artist acknowledge this? The theoretical framework of this article extends acoustic ecology, first theorised by R. Murray Schafer, to include environmental history and cultural theory – ultimately problematising definitions of ‘nature’ and ‘natural.’ Through this framework, the author critiques the way composer John Luther Adams represents his environmental sonic art. This analysis will illuminate a dialogue that asks, ‘What is self-critical environmental sonic art?’