In 1975 at the University of California San Diego, an ensemble of white American performance artists led a sonic meditation bearing resemblance to Indigenous ceremonial traditions. Embedded in the performance were Native American and Australian Aboriginal acoustic cues, Eastern spiritual motifs and Lakota perspectives that had been compressed into a mono-cultural pallet for Western listeners.[1] While this presents quite a controversial illustration of white-shamanism and cultural appropriation of Indigenous cultures, it is equally as shocking to learn that the performance, Crow Two, was composed by Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016) an internationally accredited scholar and composer known for her magnum opus, Deep Listening.
With the emergence of experimental and electronic music came an ontological repositioning in Western art. It gave rise to composers and thinkers who confronted our characterisations of music and sound, such as Oliveros, R. Murray Schafer, John Cage and more. Though these artists were, and still are, celebrated for their unique approach to experimental composition and sonic performance, it is important to acknowledge that their philosophies and artistry flourished from the colonisation of non-Western worldviews and cultural aesthetics.
Crow Two demonstrates this through the composer’s incomprehension around how performance tools, like the Yidaki and the Native American flute, are used in traditional practices. By claiming that the Yidaki is ‘used by Australian Aborigines for meditation’, Oliveros demonstrates that inserting this sacred instrument within her work comes not from a place of Acoustemological proficiency, but from her romantic conditioning of Indigeneity as an aesthetic device. [2] More broadly, her actions indicate an unjust pattern of sonic exploitation littered throughout experimental sound spaces.
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang write about the settler adoption fantasy, describing it as:
…the adoption of Indigenous practices and knowledge, but more, refer to those narratives in the settler colonial imagination in which the Native (understanding that he is becoming extinct) hands over his land, his claim to the land, his very Indian-ness to the settler for safe-keeping.[3]
This excerpt resonates alongside the romanticisation of Aboriginality within New Age spiritual discourse and the desire to distinguish one’s settled self from their Western identity, thereby framing Indigenous peoples as ‘inherently spiritual representatives of an original and uncorrupted way of being human’.[4] Accordingly, ‘universality’ serves as an acceptable basis for settlers to abstract and homogenise Indigenous and Eastern acoustic instruments, stemming from the fabricated idea that ‘music’ is a universal language and that therefore this cultural boundary can be rightfully crossed/colonised.[5] While the appropriation and misrepresentation of First Nations peoples is one component that leveraged these experimental sound art practitioners, an alternative strategy for cultivating an institutional-based sonic practice lies in the erasure of Indigenous presence from our ancestral lands.
R. Murray Schafer (1933–2021) was another admired composer with a keen interest in sound’s multidimensionality. Known for founding the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC, Schafer’s soundscape research went on to influence international policies, including UNESCO documents and ISO standards on Soundscape measurement.[6] At surface level, Schafer’s research and compositional practice appears to be in favour of Indigenous ecological values and environmental preservation. However, one needn’t look far to discover a trail of his use of conservative and racist tropes aimed at constructing and preserving an idealised, post-war, white Canadian nation, one that contested multiculturalism and discredited Canada's First Peoples:
I'm not in favour of multiculturalism. I think you should forget wherever you came from, and live where you are, and build a culture based on Canadian social and climatological experience.[7]
These values are also reflected in his attitude towards Indigenous peoples of the northwest, describing their acoustic cultural practice as ‘unmusical’ and sonically comparable to ‘Winston Churchill clearing his throat’.[8]
Unlike Oliveros, who engaged in Indigenous cultural appropriation and reinterpretation, Schafer contributed to the erasure and belittling of First Nations peoples in a neo-colonial attempt to reinforce Canadian nationalism. However, the composers’ colonial mentalities converge when assessed against Tuck and Yang’s settler adoption fantasy. Where Oliveros utilises musical universality to breach cultural boundaries, Schafer focuses on burying colonial lineages by rendering settler identities as ahistorical, and therefore, a-racial. Detaching oneself from their past, Schafer claims, allows a person to embrace a pure Canadian identity, thereby asserting an indifference and kinship with ‘the Indians and Inuit’.[9] Robinson unpacks Schafer’s logic, stating that ‘the trope of native family “inheritance” is just as strong in Schafer’s celebration of cultural amnesia that will allow composers to take their rightful place as not simply heirs to the culture but as “part of the family”’.[10]
The desire for these composers to cosplay as Indigenous comes as no surprise, as it has been a settler fantasy reflected in film, literature and contemporary politics. Western scholarship will travel great lengths to claim sovereignty and originality over an artistic concept, despite it having existed outside of the West for millennia. In a televised interview, Oliveros broadcasts this ignorance while explaining how she ‘discovered’ the practice of Deep Listening:
I became very interested in listening to a single sound for a long time. As I listened to a single sound, I began to hear more and more… And then I noticed that other people were not doing that.[11]
Except people were doing that. The Indigenous communities from whose sonic practice Oliveros copied were doing that. First Nations people have always been deep listeners — it is a tradition ingrained into our survival on both sovereign and occupied lands. For example, writing about Bosavi sonic cartography, ethnomusicologist Steven Feld discusses how listening, land, knowledge and song are inextricable within the epistemology of the Kaluli people:
The chronotopic history of sounding these songs is thus inseparable from the environmental consciousness they have produced. This is why, as knowledge production — as listenings and histories of listening — Bosavi songs are an archive of ecological and aesthetic coevolution[12]
In contrast, artist Lawrence Abu-Hamdan frames listening as a necessity for survival innate to Palestinian people who have spent decades learning and updating their bellphonic register under Israeli occupation.[13] Hamdan’s voiceless audio-visual piece, Rubber Coated Steel (2016), provides insight into a court proceeding accusing the Israel Defence Force of killing two unarmed Palestinian teenagers with live ammunition, which officers concealed using rubber bullet attachments. Hamdan provided a spectral analysis for the proceeding, highlighting how Palestinian people have adapted to the militarised soundscape:
Prosecution: Mohamad Azzeh testified that he heard the fire of live ammunition…
His hearing was so acute that he could identify the sound of live ammunition that was cloaked by a rubber bullet adapter and react before he even knew the shot had hit him…the youth's expertise at detecting sounds has led the Israeli military to find innovative methods to conduct their killings… they tried to confuse the protesters masking the sound of live ammunition with rubber bullet adapters. When they noticed that the protesters could hear the difference, they tried to deafen them with sound bombsand use a totally silenced weapon that neither film crews nor protesters on the ground can detect.[14]
Listening, as Hamdan reveals, can be a Palestinian person’s most accurate sensory device when evading attempts of erasure, in the same way that listening becomes the most valuable mechanism for the survival of culture within the Kahluli, as described by Feld above. Comparing these acoustic processes with sonic arts theorists, like Schafer and Oliveros, it becomes remarkably difficult to perceive Western sound scholarship as anything but a collection of dull guidelines ushered by white ignorance.
The commandeering of listening and sonic understanding by Western art theorists has generated a body of knowledge which has exotified, neglected and dishonoured Indigenous sonic and spatial practices. While it must be acknowledged that, today, more First Nations artists are populating sonic arts spaces, our work will ultimately be filtered through the settler listening frameworks that were established by Western arts practitioners. Like in many areas, Indigenous knowledge and experiences have been a valuable resource for Western expansion, and it is time to face a long-awaited truth: your ideas are not original.
[1] Tara Browner (Choctaw), ‘“They could have an Indian soul”: Crow two and the processes of cultural appropriation’, Journal of Musicological Research, vol. 19, no. 3, 2000, pp. 243-263.
[2] Pauline Oliveros, ‘Crow Two, a ceremonial opera’, Alcheringa: Ethnopoetics, vol. 1, no. 2, 1975, https://media.sas.upenn.edu/jacket2/pdf/reissues/alcheringa/Alcheringa_New-1-2_1975.pdf.
[3]Eve Tuck (Unangax̂) and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’, Tabula Rasa, vol. 38, 2012, pp. 61–111, https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630.
[4] Stewart Muir, ‘The Good of New Age Goods: Commodified Images of Aboriginality in New Age and Alternative Spiritualities’, Culture and Religion, vol. 8, no. 3, 2007, pp. 233–253, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14755610701649893
[5]Cynthia Cohen, Music, letter (UNESCO), Universal, “Music, the Universal Language, Brings Together. Music and conflict transformation: Harmonies and dissonances in geopolitics’, 2007, p. 26.
[6]United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, THE IMPORTANCE OF SOUND IN TODAY’S WORLD: PROMOTING BEST PRACTICES (39 C/49), September 2017. Retrieved from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization website: https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000259172; International Organization for Standardization, Acoustics — Soundscape — Part 1: Definition and Conceptual Framework, ISO Standard No. ISO 12913-1:2014, https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/en/#iso:std:iso:12913:-1:ed-1:v1:en.
[7]L. Veeraraghavan, Dirty Ears: Hearing and Hearings in the Canadian Liberal Settler Colony, doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2017.
[8]R. M. Schafer, ‘The Limits of Nationalism in Canadian Music’, Tamarack Review, vol. 18,1961, pp. 71–78.
[9]Dylan Robinson (Stó:lō; Skwah). Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2020.
[10]Ibid.
[11]Arirang TV, Heart to Heart Ep 2720 All the Sounds of the World - Deep Listening - Musician, Pauline Oliveros , 7 April 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vM7SceO26Ps&t=1246s.
[12]S. Feld, F. Giannattasio and G. Guiriati, Perspectives on a 21st Century Comparative Musicology: Ethnomusicology or Transcultural Musicology? Nota, Udine, 2017.
[13]J. M. Daughtry, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2015.
[14]L. Abu Hamdan, Rubber Coated Steel , 15 March 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFIvUV5vmMU.