Uncomposing Gaia: new music, sound art, and the limits of non/life

Part of the Music Research Seminar Series 2025-26

Speaker: Joseph Browning – City St George’s, University of London

Location: School of Music Lecture Theatre 2

• This will be a hybrid event. The guest speaker will be present with us in the School of Music, and colleagues and other guests are encouraged to join us there. But if you are unable to do so then please consider joining us via Teams.
• No booking is required. Those wishing to attend online should contact series convenor Dr Ellis Jones (e.n.jones@leeds.ac.uk).

Is music alive? And what does it mean to ask this question, now, when multiple ecological crises threaten and make strange established relations between life and nonlife? Focussing on the artworlds surrounding new music and sound art, this talk explores how musical thought is transforming in the epoch some call the Anthropocene. It charts how composers are navigating the breakdown of stable arrangements of non/life – exemplified by Gaia, preeminent figure of ecological holism and planetary self-regulation – through creative experiments with musical ontology. It shows how long-standing notions of music as organic or life-like are mutating, such that music is now understood in terms of a host of other ideas that populate our Anthropocene imaginary: decay, decline, extinction, imbalance, resurgence, recycling, toxicity, and more. Taking up Elizabeth Povinelli’s concept of ‘geontology’, little discussed in music studies, I consider its importance for understanding transformations in musical culture. To do so, I develop an account of ‘musical geontology’, a historically emergent structure of thought in which musical life is no longer thinkable except in terms of the troubled relationship between life and nonlife that characterises our current moment.

Joseph Browning is a Senior Lecturer in Music in the Department of Performing Arts, City St George’s, University of London. His current research explores issues at the intersections between music studies, the environmental humanities and anthropology. His writing has appeared in journals including Ethnomusicology, Ethnomusicology Forum, Journal of Musicology, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Organised Sound and Twentieth-Century Music.