'Self-Possessed, Calm': Does the Danube Have an Environmental(ist) Sound?

• In Event: Danube, beyond the Blue: Riparian Power and Musical Affect in Southeast Europe

Abstract

This paper takes a scene from a recording notebook kept by the New Zealand-born composer Annea Lockwood (b. 1939) as a point of departure. Capturing sounds, including conversations from the habitats beneath, along, and above the riparian ripples, the artist was developing a formative social and political orientation to field recording, realized in her A Sound Map of the Danube (2005). In the notebook, Lockwood writes of lending a boy her headphones so he might listen to the sounds of an underwater fish hatchery. She sits back and observes a cat watching the fish, too. While sound and media studies have defined headphones as an isolating technology, here the tools shape a social world where listening intersects, but is not collective or coherent. Indeed, Lockwood’s Sound Map is not a project that tries to capture the river as a magnificent whole, nor does it shy away from the Danube’s politics past and present. This paper analyzes the ways in which the three-hour sound installation critiques racialized conceptions of idyllic water and challenges human listeners to reflect upon their limited ways of knowing what a river is–or is doing. I situate it among other field recordings (for example, by folklorists and environmental scientists) along the river to imagine a sound history of the Danube against the romance of the river. I reveal these archives’ capacity to work ‘quiet’ as the glue of social contracts, as people stop listening, defer to others’ hearing, and refuse to hit record.

Author

• Andrea F. Bohlman, UNC at Chapel Hill