“Adoration of the Earth”: Music, Species Belonging, and the Worship of Nature

When we speak of “nature,” what are we really referring to? In some ways, this is a very straightforward question: look outside of your window, to your right or to your left. Flora and fauna, trees and stones, insects and animals—what “counts” as nature is seemingly obvious. But “nature” is also a deceptively complex term: there is good reason why literary theorist Raymond Williams referred to it as the “most complex word in the English language.”[1] This essay offers a brief introduction to Western ideas of “nature” and how they relate to Western concepts of “music.” While these categories have long been enmeshed in the history of racial politics, this essay argues that more recent composers have managed to reimagine the music-nature relationship to bring listeners into simulated contact with non-human agencies, vitalities, and temporalities essential to understanding the slow-moving, geophysical processes of the climate crisis.

In the Western historical context, the word “nature” typically evokes images of non-anthropogenic environments, wide-open spaces absent of human beings and untouched by modern life. Sociologist Jason W. Moore writes that “nature” has, for Western thinkers, erected a separation of certain human beings—at first, white, wealthy, European men—from the natural world since at least the sixteenth century.

The most fundamental separation was Humanity/Nature. Some people became Humans, who were members of something calls Civilization, or Society, or both—as in Adam Smith’s “civilized society.” From the beginning, most humans were either excluded from Humanity—Indigenous Americans, for example—or were designated as only partly Human, as were virtually all European women. As with property, the symbolic boundaries between who was—and who was not—part of Nature (or Society) tended to shift and vary […]. But a boundary there was and much of the early history of modern race and gender turns on the struggles over that line.[2]

In this formulation, “nature” becomes a site for extraction of resources of all kinds (from oil, timber, and ore to spiritual and psychic relief), and the exploitation of those humans who do not qualify as “human” at all, and thus become resources, too. “Nature,” then, is a construction (not just a set of anodyne images), and has never been benign and apolitical. Instead, it is central to old (and new) boundaries of “human” belonging, attendant categories of gender, race, and class, and even the emergence of capitalism.

Such a fraught environmental imaginary has been entangled with musical thought and practice since at least the eighteenth century. The writings of philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried von Herder, as well as composers like Richard Wagner suggest, as music theorist Alexander Rehding has explained, that “nature” can and has been “employed in the service of an authoritative argument […] to demonstrate why [certain] music is misguided and unviable—in a word, that it would ‘fly in the face of nature.’”[3]

In each case, “music” has been perceived as a kind of palimpsest of that non-anthropogenic, idealized nature: Wagner’s famous essay, “The Artwork of the Future,” for instance, begins by outlining this relationship, writing that “as Man stands to Nature, so stands Art to Man.”[4] Conceiving of music as a form of nature transformed the medium into a site for obliquely celebrating an idealized humanity who existed, in Wagner’s words, in “right relation” to that nature. Marshaling these ideas towards biopolitical ends, he even imagined that exposure to his “organic” music might condition listeners’ character and physicality to match that idealized image of the human species. For Germanic thinkers like Wagner, that idealized, even “universal” humanity was epitomized by both Perseus and Siegfried, and was counterpoised by what he referred to as a “gathering of animals” (an anti-Semitic reference to the Jewish people).[5] Herder and Rousseau viewed music-making as affirming “human” (and less-than-human) identity: those who could produce autopoietic song were deemed “human,” and those who could not were debased to the “state of the Beast” as they, in Herder’s words, merely “aped the nightingale.”[6] “What sort of monster is this?” Herder asked in his “Treatise on the Origin of Language” of humans who deigned to debase their species in this way. Wagner proposed an anti-Semitic response to this question in many of his dramas and essays.

We often find this racialized distinction between human and less-than-human playing out on stage, including in familiar, repertoire operas. Recall moments from Wolfgang Amadè Mozart’s The Magic Flute where the heroic Tamino routinely performs original song on his flute. In Scene 15, he even uses that music as a means of controlling and manipulating the natural world, the “wild animals” famously emerging from the forest to dance around him.[7] Peter and Joseph Schaffer’s 1793 design for that scene, those “animals” (bouncing bears, tigers, and lions in many of today’s productions) are literally Black men emerging from the trees, rendering visible the eighteenth-century elision between nature and racialized categories of the “human.” In strategic contrast, Papageno (the bird-catcher) uses his pan-pipe to commune with his avian brethren, his body almost indistinguishable from a bird; the first Papageno, librettist Emanuel Schikenader, was even dressed as a bird in the original production. Wagner’s Siegfried makes for a powerful comparison to Mozart’s late Singspiel. In Act II scene 2, the eponymous hero is unable to mimic the wood-bird and instead performs his folkloric horn call to lure the dragon Fafner from the shadows (and subsequently learn what courage is, his core imperative at this moment in the opera). Here, the dwarfish Mime, who Siegfried had recently learned was not his mother or father (despite having raised him), is established as the racialized foil to ultra-human Siegfried by his relationship to birdsong. Siegfried explains:

As historian Kári Driscoll has shown, Siegfried’s apparent failure to mimic the bird is, in fact, a performance of his human (and, ultimately, Germanic) identity.[9] But the mimicry that eludes Siegfried, and seems natural to Mime, serves a second function—to dehumanize Mime and mark him as anti-Semitic caricature as he, to borrow Herder’s derogative language, claims one might “ape the nightingale.” Alluding to Herder’s distinction between original, human song or speech and the act of “aping” the nightingale, in the composer’s infamous “Judaism in Music,” he accuses Jewish composers Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer of mere mimicry, composing only “vague, fantastic shadow-forms,” and being incapable of original composition.[10] Scenes (and prose passages) like these render certain musical actors and their musics as non-Germanic and “beastly,” and suggest that they and their creativity were incompatible with the highest forms of Germanic musicality that ultimately erected the boundaries of human belonging.

The discursive and musical history of this conceptual triad (“music,” “nature,” and the “human”) is undoubtedly complex and ethically uneasy. Historian Ian Angus has even gone so far as to argue that, for their authorization of destructive processes of resource extraction and dehumanization, they could be said to have “helped produce and legitimize active human interference in the processes that govern the geological evolution of the planet.”[11] It certainly doesn’t help matters that, as has been well-documented in recent years, musical processes—from instrument-building and opera production to music streaming and the manufacturing of CDs and LPs—is more ecologically devastating than was previously believed.[12] In some ways, more recent eco-themed pieces—like John Luther Adams’ there is no one, not even the wind and Ricardo Zohn-Muldoon’s Songtree, both premiered in 2017—reinscribe elements of this conceptual history simply by utilizing music as a site for conjuring environmental imagery. But they also marshal the medium as, in musicologist Holly Watkins’ words, a site for “cross-species encounter,” and simulation of non-human temporalities and vitalities that are essential for us to attempt to understand as we reckon with the deep geophysical timescales of climate change. Adapting Vincent Ialenti’s perspective to this context, these works help us to “pluck little kernels of long-termist wisdom” such that we can “become more robust and talented deep-time thinkers ourselves.”[13]

Adams and Zohn-Muldoon demonstrate that is more possible than ever to proffer cohesive and convincing narratives about multi-species encounter and deep time in musical contexts, and to rethink the boundaries of the medium itself to simulate those non-human experiences, agencies, shapes, timescales, and vitalities for listeners. Adams’ there is no one, not even the wind crafts sediments of “layered time and physical space” to evoke the emptiness of the desert, its stillness and slowness, an environment that subsists in ways that transcend human time and (most humans’) lived experiences. His Pulitzer-winning Become Ocean similarly asks listeners to allow any perceived separation between themselves and the natural world to dissolve in order to better understand, in Adams’ words, that “as the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may literally become ocean.”[14] Zohn-Muldoon’s Songtree experiments with slow, gradual musical evolution as a metaphor of slow, gradual organic process of evolutionary change and organic shapes, all transcribed musically. About a separate song, “Candelabra III,” he explains: “like other works in the series, a minute musical module is expressed in multiple dimensions such as time, pitch, and timbre, creating a structure that emulates the homonymous cactus. […] We hear this musical idea in distinct temporal planes and colors, simultaneously as line, ornament, and harmony, just as in the cactus we see small leaves growing on bigger leaves of the same design.”[15] Songtree builds on similar compositional principles of “organic” formal development, but pairs them with texts by poets Raúl Aceves and William Shakespeare that dissolve distinctions across human, nature, and art.

These works offer us hope—that music can simulate deep temporalities and in/organic vitalities that transcend the world of human beings in ways that are instructive for understanding the slow processes of climate change. These works help us to reimagine music, in Watkins’ words, as both the “art of possibly animate things” and evokes a “form of animation that thrives where human, organic, and inorganic energies [and temporalities] cross over and shade into one another.”[16]