Music and the Environment in Dystopian Narrative

Sounding the Disaster

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by Heidi Hart

Type

Essays

Subject

Technique > Music

Keywords

music, disaster films, ecology

Publishing date

2018

Publisher

Palgrave MacMillan

Collection

Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 112 pages
5 ½ x 8 ½ inches (14 x 21.5 cm)

ISBN

978-3-030-01814-6

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Book Presentation:
Music and the Environment in Dystopian Narrative: Sounding the Disaster investigates the active role of music in film and fiction portraying climate crisis. From contemporary science fiction and environmental film to “Anthropocene opera,” the most arresting eco-narratives draw less on background music than on the power of sound to move fictional action and those who receive it. Beginning with a reflection on a Mozart recording on the 1970s’ Voyager Golden Record, this book explores links between music and violence in Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2017 novel The Book of Joan, songless speech in the opera Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, interrupted lyricism in the eco-documentary Expedition to the End of the World, and dread-inducing hurricane music in the Brecht-Weill opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. In all of these works, music allows for a state of critical vulnerability in its hearers, communicating planetary crisis in an embodied way.

About the Author:
Heidi Hart teaches German and culture courses at Utah State University, USA. She is also a Pushcart Prize-winning poet and singer.

Press Reviews:
"Music and the Environment in Dystopian Narrative: Sounding the Disaster is a fascinating study of the therapeutic role of music in an endangered universe within the Anthropocene age. Hart offers an intriguing interdisciplinary analysis of the interconnectedness of music, film, and literature as intermedial genres capable of being deployed in the service of the campaign to save the world from environmental disaster." (Nduka Otiono, Assistant Professor and Graduate Program Coordinator, Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Canada)

See the publisher website: Palgrave MacMillan