Music and the Environment in Northeast Asia
Instructed by Kip Hutchins at Oberlin College and Conservatory
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What do spike fiddles, singing garbage trucks, and Gobi Desert dust storms have in common?
To Kip Hutchins, Henry Luce Foundation Scholar and Visiting Assistant Professor at Oberlin College & Conservatory, they are all evidence of the vast cultural exchange practiced between contiguous nations in Northeast Asia –– and indicative of the environmental consequences one region can enact upon another. Hutchins examines these topics in his interdisciplinary course, Music and the Environment in Northeast Asia.
Music and the Environment in Northeast Asia
School: Oberlin College & Conservatory
Course: Music and the Environment in Northeast Asia
Instructor: Kip Hutchins
Course Description:
This course introduces students to a survey of musical practices connected to the environment across Mongolia, Japan, Northern China, Korea, and eastern Siberia.
The goals of this course are to give students a broad knowledge of musical cultures in the region as well as an understanding of the ways people engage with the environment musically. We will take a multi-media approach, combining relevant literature with critical listening examples.
Ask the Instructor: Kip Hutchins
How did you initially begin teaching at Oberlin?
I’ve been teaching at Oberlin for two years, and every class that I teach is one that I get to design and develop. My official title is ‘Visiting Assistant Professor in Anthropology, East Asian Studies and Environmental Studies’, but my position is actually with a program called LIASE, or the Luce Initiative for Asian Studies and the Environment.
The Luce Foundation is a private foundation that funds research and teaching on East Asian heritage and the environment. I’d been working with the LIASE on a few research projects when they elected to fund my two-year contract with Oberlin. Because my work is funded by the initiative, a large part of my role at Oberlin is to widen the traditional scope of Asian area studies to include places that are typically excluded from these kinds of conversations, like Eastern Siberia and Central Asia. I design one new class each term, and it has to be something that draws on my experience as an anthropologist — but also has to appeal to students who are interested in East Asian and Environmental Studies. My research background and my work generally focuses on the relationships that people create with non-human animals, plants, and other members of the local ecosystem — particularly through music, and particularly within Mongolia.
In which department is Music and the Environment in Northeast Asia housed?
All my courses are housed in Anthropology, but this class is cross referenced with East Asian studies and possibly Environmental Studies. About half of my students came from the Conservatory side of Oberlin, and I tried to play to that strength for the final: I gave students the option of either doing a paper or creating a musical composition. Because I had so many students from the conservatory, and so many students who were enrolled in the college but were taking conservatory classes, I had some stunning musical submissions.
What topics do you cover in class?
We explored all kinds of different ways that people interact with the environment through music. In some cases, that means looking at the way that music is a kind of avenue through creating and exploring local cosmologies. A lot of these cosmologies are not bound by national borders because you have continuous, or at least contiguous, spiritual systems and religious systems that span multiple countries: China, Mongolia, Russia, Korea…. so there’s this idea that these kinds of cosmologies are not really nationally, or even ethnically, fixed.
We’ll look at a cases of concerning instruments — like spike fiddles, for example. Spike fiddles are designed so that the neck descends into the body of the instrument. That style is something that you find really commonly in traditional music with environmental focuses in China, Mongolia and parts of Japan. But who created the spike fiddle, initially? How was this design then circulated around Asia? And what effects does the instrument’s design have on its sound?
We’ve also discussed pollution and anti-environmental events from the perspectives of disparate regions. Some environmental events are localized within a specific region — dust storms caused by environmental degradation in the Gobi Desert, which spans both Mongolia and China, those dust storms blow all the way to South Korea. They sometimes even reach Japan. Often, discussions of environmental degradation are tied to regional industries — so we examine local policies and practices which affect the environment.
To give you a more optimistic example of that concept at work: Taiwanese garbage trucks play music as they collect waste — kind of like old-school ice cream trucks do here — because Taiwan is a tropical environment. Trash goes bad very quickly, so it must be disposed of efficiently. These garbage trucks go through the neighborhoods once per day, always at the same time. When locals hear the song playing from the street, they gather their trash and line up to dispose of it. This brings the neighborhood together in one place at least once per day, strengthening their sense of community.
The way that East Asia has handled international relationships in the post-colonial era goes kind of like this: you have a garbage truck, built in Japan, singing a Japanese song, but cleaning up waste in Taiwan. Eventually they’ll replace these trucks with newer models. But to then dispose of that older garbage truck… it would be a little ironic, no? So they end up donating them to programs housed in other countries. My students and I kind of follow this life-cycle, learning how a singing garbage truck might make its way around the Asian continent.
That’s an interesting facet of life in Taiwan that I’ve never once heard of — very niche, but something that students can use to better understand cultural exchange within Asia. I wish our American garbage trucks sang.
From start to finish, how long does it take you to design a course like Music and the Environment?
That’s a bit of a tough question to answer. Music and the Environment was sort of a survey class, and I designed it knowing precisely which examples I wanted to bring into the classroom — so not too long. But knowing which topics I wanted to cover was born of years of research into these topics.
The most challenging course that I’ve designed while at Oberlin was one that involved critical listening skills. I had to find a lot of music to accompany the topics we were talking about in class so that we could use the skills that we’d developed theoretically to examine them critically. Planning the topics for that class took only a few days, but tracking down all the resources was very time consuming.
So… to answer your question, designing a course can take anywhere from a few days to a few years.
Would you say that the course is somewhat reactive to events unfolding in real-time? Do you modify the topics you cover as new environmental events arise?
Definitely. In any class where you’re teaching an environmental subject, access to information becomes increasingly available at a rapid rate. Music is the same way. Last semester, as we were discussing environmental degradation, an artist in one of the regions we examined released an album of soundscapes focused on that topic. We were able to bring music and the environment together through that album, which we wouldn’t have otherwise discussed.
It sounds like both Oberlin and LIASE allow you to have a lot of freedom in designing the course.
I think the attitude at Oberlin is really: experimental is good. A part of my role is to introduce courses that have the potential to reach students who come from different backgrounds — that’s something that I always consider. Can I teach a class that is equally interesting and informative to an Anthropology major, a Music major, and an Environmental Studies major? I try to pitch the most lofty, unspecific versions of courses that I can, because it gives me the room to find resources that will appeal to everyone.
If your students were to leave this class knowing just one thing that you’ve taught them, what would you want it to be?
Hmmm…. all of my classes hinge on practicing a multifocal perspective: how to write on plants and animals and music and the mind and industrialism and the environment. I want my students to be able to speak constructively and with understanding to someone who comes from an entirely different background, and who may hold a very different perspective, from their self.
If I wanted to think of myself as having succeeded in teaching my students, I would say: they’d leave my class knowing how to entertain and discuss different perspectives that they don’t necessarily agree with. •
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