Widening Our Attention
A couple of people have asked me about the lanyard in my last post. Since I’m also barreling towards a deadline (if you happen to be in DC this December, come and see Jungle Book at Washington National Opera!) I thought I would go ahead and share that TEDx talk from last May. More specifically, I’m sharing the first draft of the talk, which is quite different from what it ended up being. Part of this is because of the distinct processes used in parsing language from speech as opposed to text. (Case in point, the previous sentence: easy enough to read, but harder to follow if you were just hearing it.) Because the written word is fixed, we can go back and revisit a sentence that we didn’t understand the first time around. Spoken language is ephemeral– we can’t review what was just said unless we ask the speaker to repeat themselves. And even then, it might not be exactly the same (though this can also be a benefit, as the speaker can adjust to make themselves clearer). All this is to say that the process of preparing the talk is a different thing than writing an essay. In deciding which text would stay and which would go, I had to move toward greater simplicity than I might use in a written text. So here is the first draft of the talk and you can see how it changed for the actual talk if you scroll to the bottom.
One of the challenges we face in encouraging city dwellers to be stewards of the natural environment comes from the psychological border between the urban landscape and “the wild.” This border, drawn between the edge of the city and the edge of the forest, between the natural and unnatural, leads us to a similar siloing of our attention. We dream of the pristine forest tree while neglecting and forgetting the tree outside our own building. We don’t see the natural world around us. It appears as undifferentiated spots of green amongst the concrete. We are unable to parse out the individual plants and trees. This phenomenon is so pervasive, it even has a name: plant blindness.
But it’s important for us to see and to care for those individual plants and trees. The urban forest also has a role to play in the mitigation of climate change, reducing the effect of heat islands, creating oxygen and shade, and providing habitat for many other forms of life. To do this, we need to widen our attention, allowing those plants and trees to become a focal point. We need to build our own empathy for them as living beings and different forms of intelligence worth preserving.
This is where I believe art can play an important role. Art, music, and theater ask for sustained attention over a prolonged period of time. When we give this kind of attention, we center the subject of the artwork and this may make us see it differently. As we experience this new perspective, our old may perspective may shift. And the shift of perspective to include the needs of the non-human intelligences with whom we share the planet is a necessary precondition for real action.
To illustrate this point, I’m going to share a few examples from my own recent body of work.
As a composer and sound artist working mainly in theater and opera, my practice has long involved centering the stories of marginalized communities and contemporary social issues with the goal of creating perspective shift and understanding. With the increasing urgency of the climate crisis, my work has begun to focus on connecting humans with the natural environment.
I first explored this direction in “The Last Stand,” a sound installation I built in collaboration with Creative Time as the winner of their 2021 Open Call. The piece developed out of conversations with arborists, including Dr. Suzanne Simard, about what “musical sound” might be for a tree. The answer they gave was that “tree music” is the sound of a healthy forest. Inspired by these conversations, I spent several weeks making field recordings in the Black Rock Forest. I created the installation by layering the field recordings, leaving their natural melodies and rhythms intact.The resulting piece was a 10-hour long sonification of the life of a white oak tree, performed for the trees of Prospect Park.
Here is a short excerpt from the 10-hour work
Human audience members were invited to stay in the installation as long as they liked and to visit multiple times over the month-long run of the installation. It was my hope that this timescale and the emphasis on the non-human singing of birds and frogs would create a different awareness when the listener walked back into the park from the installation. And this is indeed what happened: several visitors told me that they had lost track of how long they were in the installation. Several others reported that they noticed the sounds of birds that they had previously been tuning out.
Another example comes from my time as the Performing Artist in Residence at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. During my residency, talked to the arborists, horticulturists, and historians at BBG about the trees there. My image of BBG was always as an oasis of nature in the heart of Brooklyn. But I learned that the majority of trees there are actually cultivars, created by human intervention and chosen for their beauty. My time at BBG culminated in Cultivar, a multi-movement acapella work written for the vocal ensemble Western Wind. Each movement in the piece centers a specific tree at BBG. Between these movements, short interludes with text from Michael Pollan’s book “The Botany of Desire” discuss the relationship between humans and the evolution of plants.
Here is a short clip of the movement inspired by the Evamaria Magnolia
In both performances of this piece thus far, audience members have talked to me afterwards about how it made them think of specific trees in their own lives. This was true even when the concert was in a concert hall and not a garden.
Finally, I’d like to share an augmented reality piece I created for the daylighting of Tibbetts Brook right here in the Bronx. This piece, titled The Buried Brook, was commissioned by City as Living Laboratory in advance of Tibbetts Brook being daylighted– brought back above ground after being diverted into the sewer system in the 1920s. The piece is built in the Unity game engine and uses a listener’s location data to turn music loops and field recordings on and off. To hear the piece, you must walk where Tibbetts Brook used to flow. The app also contains an overlay that allows you to see a historic map from 1890 with the former watercourse of the brook. To create the sound, I led community recording walks in Van Cortlandt Park using a hydrophone, which is a special microphone for recording underwater. The piece also contains a song for the water sung in Munsee, shared by Nikole Pecore and Ja'Ni'Ya'Ku?Ha Webster of the Mohican-Munsee, Oneida and Menominee Nation, situating the land in the historic Lenapehoking.
Here is a demo of the app. If you’d like to experience it yourself, you can download it from the Apple or Google Play store. The piece is also currently featured at the Hudson River Museum.
Once more, listeners reported feeling a different connection to the environment after experiencing the piece. One listener even told me that he had always felt like there was an invisible wall between the park and the rest of the Bronx, but taking this walk made him realize it was all connected.
And that is really the goal– to remind us how connected we are. How we share a common world and a common fate. Art is a powerful tool in building this sense of connection and I would like to see it fully used as we address the challenges facing our changing world. I think that William Cronon really says it best in his powerful essay, The Trouble with Wilderness, so I’d like to close with a quote from him:
“Our challenge is to stop thinking of such things according to a set of bipolar moral scales in which the human and the non-human, the unnatural and the natural, the fallen and the unfallen, serve as our conceptual map for understanding and valuing the world. Instead, we need to embrace the full continuum of a natural landscape that is also cultural, in which the city, the suburb, the pastoral and the wild each has its place. We need to discover a common middle ground in which all of these things, from the city to the wilderness, can somehow be encompassed in the word “home.”