Towards an Ecological History of Music

’The idea of culture’, Raymond Williams argues towards the end of Culture and Society, ‘rests on a metaphor: the tending of natural growth’. This chapter rethinks the historiography of twentieth-century music by reading an incipient ecological critique out of Williams’ work and coupling this relational paradigm with Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the rhizome. I ground this discussion in disputes over cultural pluralism occasioned by The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music, edited by Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople in 2004. What would it mean, I ask, to reclaim organicism as a way of understanding the proliferation, cultivation, and complex multiplicity of sonic practices across the globe? Can we move beyond prior conceptions of the natural to arrive at a new history of musical experience both radically democratic and more in tune with hybridity, interconnection, heterogeneity, and unpredictable flux? Therein lies the possibility of an ecological musicology.