Music and the Environment in Dystopian Narrative: Sounding the Disaster
investigates the active role of music in film and fiction portraying climate crisis. From contemporary science fiction and environmental film to “Anthropocene opera,” the most arresting eco-narratives draw less on background music than on the power of sound to
move
fictional action and those who receive it. Beginning with a reflection on a Mozart recording on the 1970s’ Voyager Golden Record, this book explores links between music and violence in Lidia Yuknavitch’s 2017 novel
The Book of Joan
, songless speech in the opera
Persephone in the Late Anthropocene
, interrupted lyricism in the eco-documentary
Expedition to the End of the World
, and dread-inducing hurricane music in the Brecht-Weill opera
Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny.
In all of these works, music allows for a state of critical vulnerability in its hearers, communicating planetary crisis in an embodied way.