Final proposal: environmental awareness in/through music

Environmental awareness in/through music

Is music able to make us aware of environmental issues? What part do music and the music business/industry actually play in creating a more “earth-friendly” and responsible behavior towards nature – and what part could they play?

Throughout history, music has been used for different reasons, e.g. to celebrate, to mourn, to dance, to present power, and for spiritual/religious reasons. Music addresses humans on a very emotional level and thus can offer a different approach to deal with environmental issues, additionally to hard facts and ‘dry’ data.

Using the relationship between composed music (coming from the Romantic music as the (arguable) beginning of “environmental music”) and the sounds of nature as an introduction into contemporary “eco-music,” the main focus is split into two parts.
1. Looking at the music itself.
A deep literary and musical analysis of the songs Earth Song by Michael Jackson and The Landscape is changing by Depeche Mode as well as music by the local singer Jon Pult.
2. The role of music industry.
In this part, I will concentrate on the Live Earth concerts in 2007, initiated by Al Gore. I will research the program itself, data about the carbon footprint, the intended goals of this global events and how they worked out. Though the global event pretended to have been almost carbon-neutral, served as a starting point for Green Event Standards and encouraged other artists to rethink their environmental responsibility, the individual effects are still arguable and hardly to value.

As I did not find any data about the long-term effect of the Live Earth concerts as well as the influence of environmental music, I will argue that music needs a stronger platform in order to change our behavior, and more than only one-day events. I hope to come up with solutions/suggestions how this should exactly look like.
Finally, I will create a website to present all this. However, this website does not only deal with the issues and anticipated results stated above but will include a collection of different “earth/environmental songs” as well as an annotated resource page with further articles, topics and links concerning environmental music, such as the World Soundscape Project, Acoustic Ecology, and the Green Music Initiative.