Episode 3: Songs Of The Earth
What sounds and signals evoke the natural world? This hour of Stylus explores the songs of our planet, from geophonies—the very first noises on earth—to the stirring, dark rumbles at our deepest depths, to ghostly sounds emanating near a small New England town. We consider human efforts to represent the whole earth through music, too, from the drumming songs of the Penobscot Nation in Maine to the composer Gustav Mahler's epic song cycle, Das Lied von der Erde.
Listen above, download an mp3, or find other formats at the Internet Archive. To license the program for radio broadcast, please find us on PRX.
"Songs of the Earth" includes the voices of:
Bernie Krause, bioacoustician, sound recordist, and founder of Wild Sanctuary.
R. Murray Schafer, composer, author, and acoustic ecologist.
Carol Dana, language master at the Cultural Preservation Center of the Penobscot Indian Nation.
Lotte Geeven, sound and multimedia artist.
Pauline Oliveros, composer and founder of the Deep Listening Institute.
Douglas Kahn, sound, media, and art historian and author of Earth Sound, Earth Signal.
Philip Erickson, space plasma physicist and principal researcher at the MIT Haystack Observatory.
Benjamin Zander, conductor and founder of The Boston Philharmonic Orchestra.
Jane Struss, soprano and lecturer at the Longy School of Music.
Thomas Peattie, professor of ethnomusicology at Boston University.
Ernst Karel, field recordist and lab manager at the Sensory Ethnography Lab.
Helen Mirra, multimedia artist.
Cathy Wilson, Moodus resident.
Alison Guinness, historian.
John Ebel, seismologist at Weston Observatory at Boston College.
Joseph Armillas Lecuona, son of Margarita Lecuona.
Stephan Palmie, anthropologist at the University of Chicago.
Michael Atwood Mason, director of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.
Amanda Villepastour, ethnomusicologist at Cardiff University.
This hour was produced by Anna Cataldo, Ari Daniel, Zack Ezor, Conor Gillies, Qainat Khan, Emile Klein, and Lisa Tobin. It includes a montage made from the NASA Voyager 1977 "Sounds From Earth Record." It also includes an excerpt of Bones of the Earth, a documentary by Chris Brookes and Paolo Pietropaolo. Special thanks Margaret Noble, who found the 1965 earthquake recording. Thanks to Katherine Gorman and Erika Lantz for helping to edit the hour.
