Music & Peacebuilding

Speaker 1:          00:04          [inaudible]

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Shevock:            00:04          a lot of actual diversity in the world when it comes to cultural and musical diversity has to do with traditions being held by somebody. And where we in the West have uprooted ourselves, rerouting ourselves and refinding those old traditions where we can.

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Shorner-Johnson:    00:25          You are listening to the music and peacebuilding podcast, a professional development network at music peace-building dot com exploring intersections of peacebuilding, sacredness, community, creativity and imagination through research and story. In this podcast we will explore the beautiful, creative and challenging work of Dan Shevock's eco-literate music pedagogy. Dan Shevock teaches at Penn state Altoona and serves on the steering committee for the Mayday group and as chair of NAFME's creativity, special research interest group. He is the author of eco-literate music pedagogy. As you listen, I hope you notice what I love most about his scholarship and being - the playfulness of his creativity and voice and the degree to which he integrates and synthesizes diverse knowings.

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Shorner-Johnson:    01:22          So, uh, so I want to talk, I want to start in that in your book you talk about interdisciplinary inquiry and intersectionality. And I thought maybe we could start talking about your childhood because I know you have some cool stories about childhood with soil. And I was wondering about your intersectional love for soil, Catholic spirituality, and music and how those kind of emerged for you.

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Shevock:            01:48          Well, certainly my, my family is very, uh, devout Catholics. I never remember a time when I wasn't going to church, you know, as a child. So, so singing was church singing. So music was making music in church. Additionally, my father also, you know, you know, grew up, growing up in small towns. He, like everybody else had at least a garden, right? The garden for food in the back and uh, flowers around the Mary statue in the front. And we took care of those every year. So, you know, putting your hands in soil was just something that was done. It was part of just being And all of these things are connected as a child. When you think about, you know, every aspect of your life, God, the creator, right? The creator integration, uh, you know, those things are just, you know, they're not, you're not at a point where you can think of them as separate.

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Shevock:            02:45          You know, you can't separate, Oh, this is gardening and this is religion and this is music, right? Those things are all all connected, you know, they, they all kind of like blend together. So that affects my work, right? Because then if I can keep ahold of that childlike realization of how everything is one, right? This connectedness of everything, then whenever I approach my career as a music teacher, right? It's more, it never made sense to me that, you know, there, this, this thing an aesthetic, uh, writers were, uh, just about the music, right? The music itself or even earlier than that, um, people who write about Bach write about absolute music, right? Like music that doesn't talk about anything else is somehow better, right? It deserves to be put on a higher rung than other music as if Bach didn't play in Lutheran churches his whole career, right?

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Shevock:            03:49          So if you go into life, you know, I'm thinking, well, how am I going to separate that? What you're really doing is taking a scientific mind to everyday experience, right? But everyday experience, you don't dissect, here's the lung and here's the heart. Here's music, here's religion, here's you know, every other aspect. Right? Um, but they kind of, you know, are together. They're linked, naturally. So we separate them when we do philosophy or scholarship, right? But they're not naturally, so they're naturally bound what's called a ecology. Right? And ecology has always referenced to the more than human world too. Right, nonhuman animals and places, right? Places matter a lot. And soundscapes, since we listened to make sense of the world, right? We use our ears to make sense of the world.

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Speaker 5:          04:57          [inaudible] notice how how your child Penny is kind of a major character in your philosophy because Penny is the child's eyes who kind of allows you to receive and re-imagine the world around you.

Shevock:            05:14          Yeah. So this is a been a major benefit to me. So whenever I was doing my dissertation, Penny was an infant sitting on my lap. While I'm typing away on the, uh, on the laptop, he's the laptop, the top of the lap and then the laptops on that and uh, yeah, but so that's when I realized while doing my dissertation or just thereafter that I really wanted to connect ecological issues to my work as a music teacher. Um, music education scholar, philosopher, that all these things should be brought back together because that's how a child experiences them. Now he's in kindergarten. So I've had five years of re-experiencing all of these things that we can so easily forget as adults. Yeah.

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Shorner-Johnson:    06:07          Dan spoke of the difference between consciousness and literacy. Literacy is our ability to focus on discrete concepts and our move to abstraction that allows us to think beyond our immediate experience, a process that allows us to become critically conscious. In your article of my story of rurality, whiteness, musicking, and teaching. Um, you talk about going from being a successful student teacher to one who is struggling to connect with my students. And I, I sense in this story is this is the genesis of this idea about being locally rooted in a place. Can you talk about what that means in that context?

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Shevock:            06:55          Yeah, so right. Yeah. So I was the student teacher the year, right? I won the award at Clarion and 1997 and then went after the summer to move from central PA to Maryland to a suburban outside of Baltimore suburban Maryland and started teaching and very quickly realized that, you know, there just wasn't a, I wasn't making connections. So part of this is definitely your first year of teaching and what you, who, you know, over the years informally mentoring teachers, right. Early teachers, you know, there's a lot of reasons why you might fail as a teacher and just because you fail in your first couple of years doesn't mean that you're going to fail as a teacher permanently. Sometimes it's about finding the right place. In Maryland, I had very few social connections, meaningful social connections, so I didn't have friends that moved down with me. I didn't have many family members that lived close to where I was teaching. And culturally, there's a lot difference between a lot different between suburbanites and rural people as well. So, I mean that's maybe a generalizable, but definitely specific to central PA, rural people and suburban, uh, East coast, right? There's a lot of differences there. So that was a lot of things to, uh, to figure out at once as a teacher. So how do I teach ethically when I'm trying to get my feet out from under me? Right? When I'm trying to, uh, you know, I'm driving past all these unfamiliar places.

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Speaker 6:          08:45          [inaudible]

Shorner-Johnson:    08:47          Dan Shevock's notion of rootedness. He speaks about the problems of the belief in the universality of a teacher's license. Does having a teacher's license make me a good teacher in any context? Is there a sense of rootedness knowing and investing into my community that is at the heart of teaching? Is the idea of a go anywhere teacher license, a kind of myth that hides the importance of investing in the local community? So a lot of your philosophy rests on this term musicking and rests on the idea of praxial philosophy. So maybe for our listeners who aren't as, um, who haven't encountered this, these terms as much, can you tell us about how these terms live within your work?

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Shevock:            09:36          Yes. Yeah. So music for me is kind of a misnomer, right? When we say music, the word is a noun, right? Just like table is, but I can pick up a table. If I take a table and I shoot it in a rocket and it lands on alpha Centauri, right? It's still a table on theory unless there's something there, right? If it's really hot or something, right? But it's still a table. As long as you get destroyed. Music though is not, doesn't function as, and now in the same way, if I were to take music and shoot it into alpha Centauri, it would be a collection of sounds in some way, but it wouldn't be music. So, but musicking, when we talk about musicking as a verb. Um, so To music, um, that's really what people do. They music and they music for many, many different purposes, right?

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Shevock:            10:32          So all of a sudden we go from it being a noun where it becomes the end of the sentence. John makes music to John musicks. Right? And that opens space there after the verb - musicks, gender identity, John musicks racial conscientisation, right? John musicks for justice. Yeah. John musicks a love of nature, right? A love of nature. John musicks, political satire, right? It does it right. It's done for many reasons, right? John musicks for fame, right? But, but all of a sudden, right? Then we have a much more robust sentence. Right? Or a much more robust understanding of what's happening in the experience of music. Whenever we put it right in the middle of a sentence, because then we are forced to then go on with that sentence.

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Shorner-Johnson:    11:33          I love that idea.

Shevock:            11:35          because makes isn't a particularly robust verb, right? So just from a language right, you know, if, if your, your, you know, your high school English teacher would tell you you need a better verb than that. Right? But music itself as a verb then becomes a really good, good verb.

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Shorner-Johnson:    11:52          [inaudible] inspired by Dan's work. I have been captivated by the work of a preeminent acoustic ecologist, Gordon Hempton. After listening to an on being interview he did with Krista Tippett, I reached out to Mr. Hampton about this episode. Gordon Hempton has musicked, beautiful rich soundscapes across the world. With his permission and then the spirit of Dan Shevock's work. We listened to his recent project to musick, the sounds of the last remaining places of silence on the earth. One square inch of silence.

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New Speaker:        13:05          [inaudible].

New Speaker:        13:11          Dan Shevock speaks to the importance of the good Samaritan story in his own Catholic heritage as a story that expands the boundaries of ingroups and outgroups. While many members of the in-group walked by a victimized traveler, it is finally a Samaritan, a member of the out-group who has compassion and cares for the injured. In a similar way, Shevock challenges us to find stories that imagine an interwoven bond between a human and ecosphere. Can we be cared for by the Raven as a first nation North American folk tale imagines, or to imagine an ecological brotherhood as Saint Francis did?

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Shorner-Johnson:    13:56          In talk to something and think it's really important about your book. At one point you talk about the difference between ecology and then the separation of, of the use of the word environment. You know, there's the self and the other. Can you talk about why you chose the word ecology,

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Shevock:            14:12          right? Yeah. I choose the word ecology. I mean, for a number of reasons, right? For first, the eco part, right? Ecology refers, it's the Greek word for home, which is why it's connected to economics its supposed to be how the household survives, right? But we talk about home, we're talking about familial relationships, right? Which takes me, my mind anyway, to the Franciscan tradition, right? Of Saint Francis going around 800 years ago, calling the son, his brother and the moon, his sister, right? Calling, calling animals, you know, calling this right? This Wolf here is my brother, you know, not necessarily having this larger concept of wolves, right? Or suns, right? He's talking about this specific sun. This specific moon, this specific Wolf, you know, that he's a, has a family relationship with, right? So if we look at ecology and that family relationship and, and we know that the word, unless if it's being misused refers to not just humans, but also nonhuman actors, right? Nonhuman agents and places as well.

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Shorner-Johnson:    15:29          Um, as opposed to?

Shevock:            15:31          As opposed to environment already presupposes a distinction. So when I say environment, I'm talking about, here I am in my environment, thinking about it as environment draws us into this modern controlled or at least false belief in control. Because as we know, our use of air conditioning and stuff is coming back right in the form of hurricanes and droughts and flooding, right they.

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Shorner-Johnson:    16:05          And this is how we get to this other word, which is natural resources, of conceiving of everything as a resource to be used and consumed,

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Shevock:            16:14          right? Yeah. So once you have an environment, then it's a resource to be this, right? And you may, so if you conceive as a par.., Conceived as your park as a resource, right? Your local park, you know, this year it may benefit your community to, uh, to, uh, use it for, uh, playground equipment. Right? And to maybe put in some bat boxes, but next year maybe it benefits your community more in a down, down economy to, uh, sell off the trees and log them right, but then seven generations down the line to use another indigenous concept, right? Seven generations down the line. Who really benefits from having this scorched area with no trees, right? You're not, we're not, we're just. So the environment, our modern conceptions of resources, right? They're very short termed, right? Sometimes they're quarterly when they're economic, right? But we really should be thinking seven generations in the future, or doing even better.

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Shevock:            17:26          Right? We have, you know, we are able to conceive even broader, right? We can conceive what, what does our society look like if we're going to live another 200,000 years as homo-sapiens right? Now, that would be really taking science to heart knowing that homosapiens 200,000 years, right? Some homo erectus also had music, right? They had, uh, I think, the, if I remember right, they found like in Romania or Turkey, they found like a flute, right? So then we're pushing even further back. Right. More than 200,000 years where humans of some form had had music. Right? So, so what does our music, what does our society, what does our lifestyle, what does our culture look like to make it another 500,000 years?

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Shorner-Johnson:    18:22          Yeah. I think back to my some research that I did recently with some members of the, uh, of the culture within Somaliland, um, just just North of Somalia. And one of the things that blew my mind the most was we, we asked this gentleman about his, his family, and he took out his hands and he started counting back 14 generations and he knew the connection every, in that, that idea generational history. I think it's so important to being able to imagine maybe our impact.

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Shevock:            18:56          Yeah. We have to recover our sense of history, right? We have such a minimal sense of history. You put it into a book and accept it. Right? And the people that they decided to write about 300 years ago, right. Those are the important people from 300 years ago, you know? But obviously this gentleman could talk about his family for an extended period of time and he remembered names. Maybe he remembered an action or two from the person. They stay alive in that community in a way. Um, we lose a lot of memory when we start writing things, right? Plato not noticed that. Right. In one of his, uh, one of his dialogues that when people start writing, they don't remember. They don't remember enough of the Iliad to be able to say the whole thing. Right. And people sang the Iliad, right. The Iliad was a sung thing until it became written. And then people had to refer to the written text to remember it. They just didn't remember it, you know? So writing things down in some way, we lose some things, but we can, I think maybe this is a little bit too optimistic, but I think that we can learn from both styles of being, right. You know what I'm calling gardening and wilderness or what I'm calling a consciousness and literacy, right. This parallel ideas,

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Speaker 7:          20:15          you know, the things we touch right, with history and the things that we have to just conceptualize.

Shorner-Johnson:    20:23          Dan Shevock writes of the contributions of Satis Coleman as having particular importance and rebalancing the male dominated, Eurocentric history of music education, Satis Coleman was a pioneering female pedagogue philosopher who for Shevock exemplifies a pedagogical move towards spirituality, creativity, and a choice to become rooted in the wonder of ecological context. Why does she inform a philosophy that's Ecoliterate? Like what's the, what's some concrete examples?

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Shevock:            20:58          Yeah, yeah. So I'd say I've talked to all around that, but yeah, she took, she would regularly take her students outside, right? Uh, famously she took them to the metropolitan museum of art where they would look at, uh, historic, uh, examples of instruments around the world and they would draw them, right? Bring them back and construct those instruments. Right? So she's a predecessor to like world music pedagogy or whatever that's being called today. Right. But in addition she took them outside into nature where she, uh, directed them to listen to what we today call soundscapes. Right? They listened to the music of the birds, right? And she talks about how she observed Robins and she observed a mother Robin teaching her children the songs. Right? And how the, the, uh, the children Robins had a less developed song first off, and she watched him over time.

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Shevock:            21:59          Right? So there's a very observational thing. And, and that's something that more recent zoo-musicological research has found that a lot of birds teach their songs to their young, right? Not all of them, you know, but it's not all instinct. They also educate. Right? So, so again, this, this makes you think, well, she's observing what's obviously right there, that's scientifically proven fact now 80 years later or whatever. Right? Um, but you could just, if you know, if you were looking, you were slowing down and looking, you know, you see the truth that animals have a lot of similarities to us, right? A lot of the things that we would like to say, this is human. This is animal. Well, education isn't one of them, right? Music isn't one of them. Whales sing songs and share them, and they become popular for a couple of years and then fade away and other songs become popular. So having popular melodies that last for a bit of time and then disappear, right? Isn't a human only phenomenon. So less and less, right? And so that spiritually, and it wouldn't, I can't say I would have drawn Satis Coleman this way, right? But spiritually, that draws me towards what Thomas Berry wrote he drew on Chardin, right? Uh, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and who drew on Bergson, right? Um, this idea of, uh, this evolutionary, this evolutionary spirit, right towards greater consciousness, greater complexity, right? So if you look at that, what's physically happening biologically to the universe, spiritually, it's occurring also towards an event or some type of Omega point.

Speaker 5:          24:26          [Whale Song]

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Shevock Poetry:     24:35          Listen, waiting: connecting, linking, joining, thinking, integrating. Listen, waiting. Nature. Thrums hums. Pulsating beaks as drums. Cicada trumpets, jumping, playing. Listen, waiting, disciplines to send through thought children bringing what they brought. Squirrels, their heavy raucous dancing, resident and playful. Prancing. Listen, waiting. Listen, waiting, writing, reading, science. Speeding. Slowly. dawdling seeing modeling novel ways of understanding nature's melodies and phrases. Connecting, linking, joining, thinking, integrating, listen, waiting.

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Shorner-Johnson:    25:20          In Dan Shevock's recent article, a practice of silence. He called music educators into a meditative sense of listening and noticing. He writes "through a meditative practice, I can relive successes, be inspired with new ideas and allow the musics of the soundscape, birds, insects and winds to dissolve my disquiet and focus my pedagogy on that, which to me matters most."

Speaker 5:          26:32          [bird song from Gordon Hempton]

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Shevock Poetry:     26:49          Birdsong. Birdsong symphonizes is this morning for whose benefit crows call and sparrows chip for whose benefit? And spontaneously freely children dance and sing, for whose benefit?

Speaker 5:          27:13          [inaudible]

Shorner-Johnson:    27:13          Dan problematizes the way we view the scientific notion of evolution, our framing of this concept paints a view of a violent world where only the strong survive. If we are to live into a spiritual sense of mutuality. The notion of mutual aid may deepen our ecological frames and relationships.

Shevock:            27:40          Cause evolution, you know, requires a lot of things like ah, I don't know, say what's the old odd barbaric term survival of the fittest, right. You know, I don't really see that happening spiritually. Not in a good way anyway. Right? Maybe a Propodkin's book on evolution. Mutual aid is a, is a better model, especially with what we know with, uh, like Lynn Margolis' research, you know, looking at symbiotic elements of evolution, right? It's not all survival of the fittest. Right? Or you know, Darwin never used that term actually. Um, they actually came out of Herbert Spencer, right? It was a white supremacist and stuff. Right. For a reason. He wanted to, uh, t layer this down onto social systems in a specific way that empowered certain people and disempowered others. Um, hopefully we can watch that and avoid that and take what's true while discarding what's unacceptable.

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Shorner-Johnson:    28:46          .Or in many ways, violent violence. Yeah.

Shorner-Johnson:    28:50          Agreed. Yes. So let's move into spirituality and this is how you close your book. And I have two quotes I wanted to read to you. Your, your response to them. You write. Um, "participating in industrial society, we build, sold, bought, spoiled and threw away our way into ecological crisis. This is the having mode. We have become disconnected from one another and we further exacerbate the having mode degrading ourselves. We, we become human havings rather than human beings. It should be no surprise human havings degrade the environment." How do you sense this as a spiritual crisis in your work?

Shevock:            29:34          Yeah, so, so I took this idea of human havings versus human beings from Eric Fraum, and I don't know if he would call it spiritual at all. In fact, he would probably stick away from that. Um, and he would probably call it psychological, right? But I consider it spiritual not just as well, but because I consider the psychological being spiritual. Um, but it is, it's a spiritual crisis, right? So when you have, when you're, when you Have, right, when you adopt the having mode, right? Your existence is defined by what you have. So I Have this accomplishment I have, right? I, I, there's ways Spirituality can be this way too, right? Like you said, in my own tradition, the Catholic tradition, right? You could Have a certain set of letters after your name, like SJ for the Jesuits, right? Or OSB for Benedictans. Right.

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Shevock:            30:37          You can have a Papal appointment, you can have, right, there's a number, right? They put some having things on top of that, right? But that's not, that's not positive necessarily for spirituality. Spirituality degrades by having and not only spirituality, but the environment and it can't, but be connected. Our spiritual wellbeing and our connections to the environment, there's a lot destroying the environment. Almost all of it that I found is connected to having, right? We Have, um, a certain speed of travel that we didn't have a hundred years ago, right? And therefore we have a climate crisis. We have things wrapped perfectly, cleanly in plastics and therefore we have the great Pacific garbage patch, right? So re, re readjusting, right? Human beings are our essence, right. Is to be, you know, this is, you know, everybody's been answering this right, since Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, different answers, right? Uh, Descartes, right? The uh, you know, I think therefore I am, right? Which focuses on thinking, right? About a thousand years before that Saint Augustan wrote, I make mistakes, therefore I am right. Putting our effort, putting emphasis on making mistakes. When I see the, you know, the emphasis of on modern society of Cartesian thought but not of Augustinian thought, I wonder, well what, how would we be different if everywhere we value thinking we valued mistakes? Right? That would be very interesting. But then again it's about be, its just about, about being,

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Shorner-Johnson:    32:45          I spoke with Dan Shevock about the tension between conservatism and liberation. Shevock writes "in conversation, I convert to sense what to conserve. I want to conserve musical traditions that cannot and should not be ossified into universities. I want to conserve places and musics the industry doesn't. I want to leave a viable, diverse, healthy planet for my child." We talked about the practice of conserving musical traditions without fossilizing them into components of music curricula. And we talked about the danger of progressive liberation, in our Western history of quote unquote liberating indigenous peoples through economic development in a way that often destroys places, cultures and peoples. How do we sow deep roots conserving our place and allowing the winds of change to honor the beauty of evolving diversity.

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Shorner-Johnson:    33:54          And I think that that's a big ethical dilemma about who does the liberating or who does the conserving. That's the power of Freire, who you cite and that practice for you, which becomes literacy, is that practical practice of critical consciousness, critical

Shevock:            34:10          consciousness. So as we look at the roots, right, and we go to the roots and we keep looking at we're dis, so this is something also that, you know, maybe make me the same as other Freirians. Maybe it makes me a little different, right? That I'm not satisfied with the roots. I find, you know, I find the roots and capitalism and racism and sexism, right? But you know, as we keep looking at the roots, there's other roots to the problem, right? And, and some of the roots are a good right to sustain the tree as well, you know, um, to S to sustain a diversity of ways of being the world. Diversity of definitions of music and who gets counted as a musician, a diversity of stories about music. Um, and the, the ways of living that are embedded in those stories, right? This culture, right? Culture is back to that idea of cult and local seasonal festivals. A way to live in a place as the seasons change, right? We need, we need more of these diverse ways of being as we face growing ecological catastrophes, right? Um, cause we need to, uh, conceive how to live well.

Shevock Poetry:     35:41          Sounding wild, hearing wild: All that thrives within the mind. All that loves lives and binds All of it moves all the weights, all this cruel, unkind comes from old and ancient Oak comes when Gabriel's horn first spoke, come to sleep when dreamers woke. Wakening to truth, non remote Windy chilling, wilderness charming, sunny wilderness, thunder crashing, wilderness, dying, stags of wilderness, loving, wild living, wild sounding wild, hearing wild.

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Speaker 5:          36:32          [inaudible]

Shorner-Johnson:    36:32          I think what I have translated out of your work into peacebuilding is when I've put your work beside theories about humanization and dehumanization. I, I take that as an, I see that in many ways. We constantly are trying to de-humanize ourselves by saying, Oh, we're not an animal. I, I don't have an existential end. I can buy life insurance, I can preserve myself. And in many ways, maybe the job of a music educator is to rehumanize ourselves and bring us into a deeper sense of recognition that we are animals and that we have a relation, an ecological relationship to this connected world in some way.

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Shevock:            37:19          Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We, we, we are. So, I mean there's a reason like, you know, Greenpeace is called Greenpeace, right? You know, the, that it was a peace movement that the, uh, those activists grew out of, right. And they started, uh, protesting nuclear, uh, nuclear testing, right. Uh, on an Island outside of Alaska. Right. And the nuclear, the nuclear, nuclear testing is a challenge to both peace and to ecology. Right? They've always been connected concepts, peace and ecology. They've never, they've never only existed separately.

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Speaker 5:          38:06          [inaudible]

Shorner-Johnson:    38:06          Special thanks to Dr Dan Shevock, his book titled eco literate music pedagogy is available from root Lich press. Thanks. Are also extended to Gordon Hempton for the use of his recorded soundscapes and public domain audio from the US national park service. Links will be provided on our website. May we all so deep roots that curl and hold with the diversity of our mutual being. Musicking into ecological being, sounding radiant sunrise or symphonies of inner silence.

Speaker 5:          39:13          [inaudible].

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Shorner-Johnson:    39:13          This is the music and peacebuilding podcast hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson at Elizabethtown college. We host a master of music education with an emphasis on peacebuilding. Thinking deeply. We reclaim space for connection and care. Join us at music peacebuilding dot com.