Ecologies of Creative Music Practice: Mattering Music explores music as a dynamic practice embedded in contemporary ecological contexts, one that both responds to, and creates change within, the ecologies in which it is created and consumed. This highly interdisciplinary analysis includes theoretical and practical considerations – from blockchain technology and digital platform commerce to artificial intelligence and the future of work, to sustainability and political ecology – as well as contemporary philosophical paradigms, guiding its investigation through three main lenses:
- How can music work as a conceptual tool to interrogate and respond to our changing global environment?
- How have transformations in our digital environment affected how we produce, distribute and consume music?
- How does music relate to matters of political ecology and environmental change?
Within this framework, music is positioned as a starting point from which to examine a range of contexts and environments, offering new perspectives on contemporary technological and ecological discourse. Ecologies of Creative Music Practice: Mattering Music is a valuable text for advanced undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers and practitioners concerned with producing, performing, sharing and listening to music.
1. Critical Perspectives on Mattering Music 2. Music and Material Creativity 3. Music, Rights and Revenue 4. Music and Digital Creativity 5. Music, Creative Labour and Artificial Creativity
Biography
Matthew Lovett is Associate Professor in Music Innovation at the University of Gloucestershire.
‘Music matters. And, as Matthew Lovett argues in this compelling book, it cannot be understood without reference to matter, whether in the form of technological tools or wider physical environments. Taking an ecomusicological approach, Lovett joins the dots between Vaughan Williams and Justin Bieber, between blockchains and physical bodies, to position music as enmeshed, embedded, entangled – and entirely interdependent with other systems in both production and consumption.’
Marcus O’Dair, Associate Dean, Knowledge Exchange and Enterprise, University of the Arts London
‘Ecologies of Creative Music Practice reminds us that music, before it is anything else, is interdependent and environmental, embedded in various systems, ecologies, and material networks as it is: this has always been the case, but in a context of naturing-culturing anthropocenes, capitalocenes and novacenes this sort of immanent critical approach to music is more timely than ever. Taking an intriguing, adaptive ecomusicological approach in which recent trends in new materialist thinking are applied to and within various musical and music business contexts, Ecologies of Creative Music Practice brings theory and matter – the matter of theory, the theory of matter – together to illuminate the practices of music and, in turn, to use those practices to help us think differently about broader questions of technology, materialism and philosophy, and the environment. Roving across everything from video games to speculative realism, AI and blockchain to François Laruelle, and ending with a vision of music as 'ecology in motion', the book is a must read for anyone interested in creative musical practice as an assemblage or nexus of big, knotty, heavy global challenges (and vice versa). This is an intriguing book that repays close attention.’
Dr Stephen Graham, Head of School of Arts and Humanities, Goldsmiths, University of London
