In an era of mounting concern over climate change, many scholars are wondering how to balance their research activities with transformative action.
After years of scholarly work on biological analogies in music criticism and analysis, in this talk Holly Watkins will discuss her recent shift away from discursive eco-poetics toward embodied eco-practice. The path she has taken resembles neither the gentle modes of institutional agitation recommended by Caroline Levine in The Activist Humanist (2023) nor the acts of sabotage endorsed by Andreas Malm in How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2021). Encouraged by the pandemic to pursue private and local forms of co-productivity with the natural world, Watkins has begun growing food and taking an active role in stewarding the land she inhabits—among innumerable plants, insects, and animals.
The talk will describe some of the challenges encountered along the way, as well as several philosophical steps in a (perhaps foolish) quest to integrate intellectual, ecological, personal, and perhaps even musical registers. Interlocutors in this process include anthropologist Eduardo Kohn, philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, and biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer.
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Photo: University of Rochester website
Holly Watkins is Minehan Family Professor of Musicology at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester. She is the author of Musical Vitalities: Ventures in a Biotic Aesthetics of Music (Chicago, 2018) and Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought: From E. T. A. Hoffmann to Arnold Schoenberg (Cambridge, 2011). She has published on Romantic and modernist aesthetics, music and ecology, and intersections between music and philosophy in such venues as the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Nineteenth-Century Music, New Literary History, Women and Music, Opera Quarterly, and Contemporary Music Review.