New Directions in Music and Sustainability Research

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In September 2015, leaders from around the world met in New York to formally agree the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, which are designed to underpin the UN's socio-political agenda for the next fifteen years (until 2030). "Sustainability" is a watchword of the early twenty-first century, with activists, academics, and politicians all struggling to balance the wide-ranging meanings and interpretations of "sustainability" to address the urgent economic, environmental, and humanitarian challenges facing the planet. The arts and humanities have an important role to play in such debates, and the aim of this Leadership Fellow project is to imagine new ways of addressing current environmental challenges through the arts with a focus on the theme of music and sustainability. My first task is to compare and critique how, why, and to what effect such concepts as "sustainability," "ecology" and other environmental studies terminology are now being deployed across various sub-disciplines within music scholarship, with a view to encouraging interdisciplinary dialogue in this area. I will also examine how music professionals outside the academy navigate the challenge of environmental sustainability against challenges of the sustaining their livelihoods in the digital economy.The project draws on a sociological model of sustainable behaviour change to explore three case study areas. First, it investigates music-making and music-listening technologies. I will use the history of drum kit as a lens to explore the growth of the musical instrument manufacturing industry, and develop the argument for an ecological turn in both musical instrument and music consumption research. Through participant-observation and interviews, I will then explore how members of the global DIY music "maker" movement addresses sustainable consumption of music technologies through building their own instruments and other music technologies. Both of these studies will shed light on the hidden costs of music - be they economic, social, labour, or environmental - and how they change.Second, the project builds on previous collaborative AHRC research to develop an ecological approach to understanding live music, focusing on how organizers, artists, and audiences currently balance issues of economic and environmental sustainability across the British live music sector. I will work with stakeholders from relevant organizations in the live music sector to (a) assess the infrastructure and environmental consequences of live music in the UK and (b) foster an emerging community of practice across live music organizations that seeks to adopt environmentally sustainable production practices and encourage sustainable audience behaviours.Third, the project will draw from new research into music and arts sustainability research to envision what a "green cultural policy" might look like. I will analyze approaches from existing cultural policies across the Global Greens (a network linking Green political parties from around the world) in relation to the cultural policies of other political parties within the UK, and create an account of the current state of green cultural policy - as well as recommendations for how it could fruitfully develop in future.Finally, in addition to exploring new directions in music and sustainability research through the case studies above, I aim to build new links between music scholars and relevant wider networks across the arts and humanities (e.g. environment humanities, energy humanities, and petrocultural studies) with a view to enhancing the impact of arts and humanities research in sustainability development studies as a whole.