Music and the Environment in the 1970s

Detailed engagement with R. Murray Schafer's _Music for Wilderness Lake_ (1979) is currently lacking in the scholarly literature regarding site-specific art. The work is briefly mentioned by Alan Licht in _Sound Art Revisited_ (2019) and in _Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?_ (2007) by Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter. Instead of discussing any of Schafer's compositions in depth, Licht, Blesser and Salter, and other authors including Brandon LaBelle in _Background Noise_ (2015), Emily Thompson in _The Soundscape of Modernity_ (2002), and contributors to _Music, Sound and Space_ (2013) and _The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies_ (2019) discuss Schafer's written work, namely _The Tuning of the World_ (1977). This paper is a detailed investigation of the available archived materials and personal recollections that seeks to unpack the significance of _Music for Wilderness Lake_, Schafer's first environmental composition.


The work is scored for twelve trombones stationed around a lake, and the premiere performance was recorded for film and radio broadcast. Decisions made by individuals involved in the premiere as well as acoustic features of the landscape can all be seen in the notation of the published score, released by Arcana Editions, but this is not the only version of the score in existence. Drafts and other related score materials are housed in the R. Murray Schafer collection at the National Archives of Canada in Ottawa. I also gained access to additional versions of the score shared from the private collections of trombonists involved in the premiere. By coordinating all of these materials, I present a narrative of how both land and people have left traces in the published score.


The goal of this score study is to unpack the progression, development, or rejection of notated ideas. This identification process occurs in two ways. First, I highlight key ideas present in the work in its various stages. For example, all of the score versions contain moments of animal depiction by the trombones, though the precise notation changes depending on the version. Second, I undertake a specimen analysis of the start of the first movement, informed by the narrative uncovered through engagement with all the sketch material. My analysis reveals how early drafts have an improvised opening before a lengthy solo trombone melody, ideas that would be rejected in later score versions. On the whole, Schafer's musical compositions are typically overshadowed by his written work. This paper is a first step toward inserting his first environmental work into the ongoing scholarly discussion regarding the challenges of making and documenting site-specific environmental art.

In 1972, Jerry Goldsmith told an interviewer for _Cinefantastique_ magazine that he did not want his landmark film score for _Planet of the Apes_ to be "gimmicky" or "obvious." The obvious, to Goldsmith, were scores from the 1950s, the Golden Age of Science Fiction, where electronic sounds dominated. While Goldsmith's scores often rely on strange and noisy timbres (unusual percussion, extended techniques, muted brass, prepared pianos), he chose to explore the acoustic avant-garde for his brand of science fiction. Focusing on _Planet of the Apes_ (1968) and _Alien_ (1979), I argue that Goldsmith used serialism, dissonance, and idiosyncratic instrumentation to create two distinctly different sonic impressions of outer space as disorienting and dangerous. In _Planet of the Apes_, serialism functions as an allegorical tool. I show that Goldsmith represents the "alien" planet with I-0 and uses prime rows in scenes showing humans and the environment, alluding to the revelation that the "alien" planet is actually Earth. In _Alien_, Goldsmith works within the New Hollywood sound, as defined by Frank Lehman and other film music scholars, following in the footsteps of John Williams's leitmotivic score for _Star Wars_, but remains firmly in the avant-garde-director Ridley Scott's preference-, by employing dissonant intervals, such as augmented fourths and major sevenths, and dense cluster chords to echo _Alien_'s menacing setting.


As humans finally entered into orbit and landed on the Moon at the climax of the Space Race, newspaper headlines stressed the American obsession with space as an environment rich in possibilities that, in turn, would greatly benefit life back on Earth. However, Goldsmith's music for these two films works against this romantic perspective and mirrors more conflicted attitudes toward futuristic technology and modern colonialism.

In 1979, Musicians United for Safe Energy (MUSE) held a series of concerts to advocate against the use of nuclear energy, using profits from the event to benefit grassroots environmental groups across the United States. The event took place in New York City shortly after the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, a crisis that validated a decade's-worth of anti-nuclear protests. According to press from both the live concerts and the album, critics described an unusual tune as the movement's anthem, Jackson Browne's "Before the Deluge." Unlike typical protest songs, Browne's song barely mentions the cause at hand and is confessional in tone, describing experiences of personal loss. How did confessional songs become the soundscape of the environmental movement? And how did "Before the Deluge" communicate a generation's desire for social change?


In this paper, I argue that confessional songs encapsulated the views of the environmental movement in the 1970s by showing how singer-songwriters used romantic loss as a metaphor for the degradation of nature. Using archival and ethnographic research, I lay out a history of how three singer-songwriters-Joni Mitchell, Phil Ochs, and Jackson Browne-became involved with activist groups that each viewed the proliferation of nuclear energy as a major force disturbing ecosystems, including Greenpeace, the Clamshell Alliance, and finally the formation of MUSE. This research draws on work about environmental protest songs by David Ingram and Travis Stimeling and further adds to discourses within ecomusicology about the relationship between musicians and the natural world. Through this history, I challenge perceptions of the singer-songwriter movement as apolitical and theorize how confessional songwriting articulated the anthropocentric views of environmental activists.