Event Details:
Topic: Whale Song Recordings and “The Cry of Life Itself”.
Abstract: This paper considers the context and deployment of whale song recordings in the 1970s. Continuing work started in my book Interspecies Communication (Chicago, 2024), and drawing on archives at the Getty Research Institute, I suggest that the recordings reveal a new set of relations between nature, its documentation, and its presentation. This new set of relations reactivated a practice that the ancients called prosopopoeia, the rhetorical device of giving voice to things that are absent, imagined, or that otherwise cannot speak. I focus on the political and artistic work of three individuals—Scott McVay, David Tudor, and Barbara T. Smith—and illustrate the ways that each attempted to speak for a Nature that by itself could not.
Gavin Steingo is Professor in the Department of Music at Princeton University. He is the author of Interspecies Communication: Sound and Music Beyond Humanity (Chicago, 2024), and Kwaito’s Promise: Music and the Aesthetics of Freedom in South Africa (Chicago, 2016, winner of the Alan P. Merriam Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology). With Asif Ghazanfar, he runs The Animal Song Collective, a research initiative that brings together scientists and humanists to explore the idea of animal song from a cross-disciplinary perspective. Gavin also composes music and plays guitar with various groups in the tri-state area.
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