Virgin Forest and the “Intrusion” of Gaïa: ecomusicological questions, relational listening, and the music of Lionel Loueke of Benin

ABSTRACT

The recent emergence of the subfield of ecomusicology has raised provocative questions about theory and method in music studies, as well as relationships between sound, humans, and the environment. This paper responds to these questions through an examination of two albums by the Beninese guitarist Lionel Loueke, informed by ethnographic interviews with Loueke and fieldwork in Benin and the U.S. Each of the two albums deals with a distinct set of musical materials and strategies to convey their respective ecological orientations. The album Virgin Forest does this through creating ambient atmospheres that blur the lines between human and animal sound, while the second album, Gaïa, deploys guitar distortion and “out-of-joint” grooves to channel an angry earth goddess. This analysis explores connections between the albums and concepts of sacred sound and interdependence in the Nichiren Buddhist practice that Loueke has adopted, and in vodun ancestral practices in Benin. I propose a concept of relational listening, building on Edouard Glissant’s la Relation and Steven Feld’s acoustemology, which embraces humans’ interdependence with the environment while respecting the radical alterity of other beings, including human, non-human, and more-than-human. Loueke’s music suggests that this relational listening necessarily leads to relational sounding: interactive improvisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Benin
• relational listening
• Lionel Loueke
• ecomusicology
• jazz
• acoustemology
• Buddhism
• ambience

Acknowledgments

I would like to offer my sincere thanks to Rujing Huang, Rachel Carrico, Laura Dallman Rorick, Colleen Rua, Alvaro Luis Lima, and Aaron Colverson, all of whom read drafts of this article at different stages during its development. My thanks, too, go to Lionel Loueke for generously sharing his time and thoughts over the past few years. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers whose comments were instrumental to the article coming together in its current form. Any and all shortcomings are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. I also had the opportunity to perform with Loueke with the Harvard Jazz Band during Herbie Hancock’s residency as Norton lecturer at Harvard University in spring 2016.

2. See also Riedel and Torvinen (2020) on music as atmosphere.

3. Fon is the major local African language in Benin.

4. See David Rothenberg’s (2002) work on music, improvisation, and nature, including inter-species improvisation (2016), and recent research by Ryan (2020) discussing its importance for jazz pedagogy.

5. To the best of my knowledge, the term “relational listening” was coined rather recently by Australian composer and sound artist Lawrence English (2017), who uses it differently, to refer to the relationship between the field recordist’s listening and the “listening” of the sound recorder or microphone.

Listening studies has seen a proliferation of taxonomies for listening as “ubiquitous” (Kassabian 2013), “skilled” (Bijisterveld 2019), as “expectation” (Huron 2008) and control (Hagood 2019). However, few, if any, of these listening modes approach the themes of ecology, spirituality, and politics that I hope to define through relational listening. Riedel and Torvinen’s (2020) work in Music as Atmosphere perhaps comes the closest in its discussion of “atmospheric relations.”

6. This is something like what Donna Haraway (2016) refers to as “oddkin,” those we make part of our family, but without forcing them into familiar forms.

7. See also Ingrid Monson’s (2018) excellent discussion of themes of relationality in music studies theories over the past several decades. This discussion also follows calls for a “relational musicology” among scholars such as Georgina Born (2010, 2012) and Nicholas Cook (2012).

8. I have especially appreciated the attention Ochoa Gautier (2016, 132–133) brings to Feld’s work, and his shift from concepts of an “anthropology of sound” to “acoustemology” in her work on “acoustic multinaturalism,” following the work of Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Vivieros de Castro (2014). Anthony Seeger (2016) follows a similar line of thought. These conversations about sound and indigenous ontologies are part of a larger developing literature that seeks to attune to the perspectives of more beings, more listeners, more voices – subjects variously human, animal, divine, abiotic, postcolonial (see, for example, Sykes 2019).

9. Relational listening overlaps with “deep listening” as it has been used by composer Pauline Oliveros (2005), and its meaning as expressed by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh (2001), as practice of compassion to alleviate suffering in relationships between humans, nations, and the environment.

10. There has been much written on connections between Buddhism and environmentalism from several disciplinary perspectives, but a full consideration of this literature is beyond the scope of this article. Further, it is notoriously difficult to generalise about Buddhist beliefs, and in any case such monolithic principles would be highly suspect. See, for example, Darlington (2017) on the ways that Taiwanese and Thai Buddhist practices of animal release and forest rituals can both support and impede environmental sustainability, Curtin (2014) on the long historical relationship between the work of the 13^th century Japanese philosopher Dogen and concepts of the self in deep ecology, Callicott and McRae (2014) for an overview of environmental philosophy in Indian, Chinese, and Japanese Buddhism, Chen (2001) for a deep consideration of the role of music and sound in Chinese Buddhist liturgy, or Mabbett ([1993] 1994) on the functions of music in Buddhist liturgy across Asian cultures and history.

11. In a strict reading of Buddhist scripture, music was considered jin, or dust, something that distracts or stands in the way of true perception. But these concepts underwent a transformation in the development of Mahayana Buddhist forms that came to Japan, among other places, from India in the first century A.D. Through the rising popularity of the Lotus Sutra, the Mahayana traditions saw the Buddha ore as an object of personal worship, rather than simply as a mortal man who had escaped from the cycle of rebirth and attained Nirvana. This made the Buddha more accessible to the everyday worshipper in sensory experience or even in nature. See Chen (2001) for a consideration of the concept of dust (guna) in Chinese Buddhism, and Mabbett ([1993] 1994, 13) for more on Buddhism and music in general.

12. See also Browning’s (2017) work exploring ecomimesis in the practice of the bamboo end-blown flute shakuhachi, which has also become an important part of Zen Buddhist musical practice in Japan that is closely tied to Shintoism and the environment.

13. For more on the history and leadership of Soka Gakkai, see Dessi (2013). The organisation includes a following among jazz musicians like Hancock, Wayne Shorter, my former trombone teacher Robin Eubanks, Loueke, and others. For many of these musicians, Nichiren practice offers a critique of Western consumption practices, individualism, and histories of colonisation, as well as an alternative spirituality compatible with an Afro-centric view of the world that sees different, transformative possibilities for the future.

14. See also the definition of “dependent origination” in the online Soka Gakkai Dictionary of Buddhism (Soka Gakkai 2021).

15. Indeed, many performance contexts in Fon and Yoruba culture play a didactic and social corrective role, such as in the performance and mockery of the egungun masks, often accompanied by gbon drumming styles, which Loueke makes use of in one of the preludes on Virgin Forest.

16. See art historian Dana Rush’s (2017) work on vodun deities and rhizomatic structure in Benin.

17. See Beninese literary scholar Mediohouan (1993, 250) for more on aziza and literature in Benin.

18. See the Beninese theatre scholar Bienvenu Koudjo (1988) for more on the concept of gbè in Fon and Gun-language songs. See also Politz (2018) for further discussion of gbè and resonance.

19. Loueke’s lyric does use the Fon word for a Christian God, or “Lord” (aklunon), here, adding to the interfaith collection of spirits and deities in the forest.

20. I discuss this in greater length in Politz (2018).

21. I am especially grateful to Kyra Gaunt for pointing out the implications of Loueke’s self-representations for black masculinity when I presented a preliminary version of this paper at SEM in 2019.

22. Donna Haraway (2016, 51, 44), reading Stengers, concurs: Gaia, who “figures the Anthropocene” for Haraway, “does not and could not care about human or other biological beings’ intentions or desires or needs, but Gaia puts into question our very existence, we who have provoked its brutal mutation that threatens both human and nonhuman livable presents and futures.” Haraway (2016, 52) ultimately suggests that we are well beyond the Anthropocene at this point, and thus beyond Gaia as a figure. She suggests snaky Medusa as the icon the “Cthulucene,” the age of tentacled underworldian beings, of which Gaia is only one.

23. Loueke’s vision of Gaia also resembles Rebecca Dirksen’s (2018) description of the anger and sorrow of the vodun spirit Ezili in Haiti as a representation of the “unbalanced” nature of the Earth.

24. At the time of writing, the video was available to view at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5Pxy23CGPA.

25. See Morton’s (2016) Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence for more in this line of thinking.

26. Robinson (2020, 22, 53, ibid.) explains that guest listening instead seeks to cultivate a “deep reciprocity” and enter into “temporalities of wonder,” as we learn “how to live our lives in a nonauthoritarian, nondominating, nonexploitative manner.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sarah Politz

Sarah Politz is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Florida. Her work focuses on creative practice in African and Afro-diasporic music, particularly in the context of popular music and new African diasporas in Europe and North America. Her current book project in progress is about sound, spirituality, and migration in the lives of brass band and jazz musicians from Republic of Benin. Politz completed her PhD in ethnomusicology at Harvard University in 2017 and holds an MA in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University (2011), and a BM in jazz studies and a BA in English from Oberlin College and Conservatory (2007). She performs actively as a jazz trombonist.