(2023-11-16) Schroeder The Music Of The Anthropocene

Karl Schroeder: The Music of the Anthropocene. ..some pieces are holding my attention not because they capture the aesthetic of the day, but because they engage with the moment in other ways: they are music about life in the Anthropocene. Here are a few that I’ve had on steady rotation.

The Lost Birds: An Extinction Elegy

Christopher Tin is a musical chameleon; he’s done chamber music and video game soundtracks; in fact, his Swahili-flavoured hit ‘Baba Yetu’ became the first piece of video game music to win a Grammy Award.

This is an album of choral music—and yes, choral music is alive and well in 2023.

Mass for the Endangered

More austere and formal, Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Mass for the Endangered is no less powerful (here’s the official website). Yes, this is a mass, and an overt prayer for forgiveness; but it is the natural world we are begging to forgive us

Every Valley

By contrast, Every Valley by Public Service Broadcasting is entirely and solely about people. While I think the posthumanism of the Mass for the Endangered is important, there’s also a story unfolding that we’re getting to know very well after two centuries of boom-and-bust industries

try “Spitfire” and “Go!” if you want to get a flavour of what they do. They know how to rock out, and they’re a lot of fun.

Fordlandia

You’ve almost certainly heard Jóhann Jóhannsson’s music, and you’ve almost certainly liked it. He’s best known for his soundtracks, for films such as Arrival, Sicario, and The Theory of Everything.

Pandemic Bonus: The Incident

I’m including Klangwelt’s The Incident mainly because it helped me get through the lockdown period of the pandemic.

Precisely what the “incident” that this musical journey relates to is never specified, but as with the emotional arcs of Every Valley and Fordlandia, it evokes a narrative, writ as it were in Rorschach ink-blots.

This is electronica, which may or may not be to your tastes.

I’m including it here more because I like it than because I think you might. It helped me make sense of a strange and dark time; and that, I think, is what the music of the Anthropocene is intended to do.

Uncertain Postscript

There are hints in these pieces that we are leaving behind the obsessions of the 20th century, and indeed modernism and postmodernism themselves (in visual art, the work of Kent Monkman hints at the same).