Rowan Hawitt | About time: Ecological contemporary folk music and the performance of more-than-human temporalities

Event details

Speaker: Rowan Hawitt (University of Edinburgh

Date: Thursday 8 February 2024

Time: 5.15 - 6.45pm.  

Venue: Alison House, Atrium (G10)

Abstract

As climate change increasingly affects our planet, social and cultural experiences of time are shifting. For instance, in the Scottish and English folk music scenes, environmentally-motivated musicians are rethinking how their practices (based around tradition and continuance) intersect with ecological legacies and increasingly disrupted natural rhythms. This paper explores how these folk musicians conceptualise temporal relationships with the more-than-human world during a period of climate crisis. Drawing on interviews, participant-observation fieldwork, and innovative walking methodologies, I illustrate that folk music can foreground contradictory understandings of time which variously embrace or deny our connectedness with ‘nature’.

I begin by outlining how foundational understandings of folk music in Europe largely relied on a linear idea of time which upholds a binary between human ‘modernity’ and ‘nature’ (including certain groups of humans who are deemed unmodern, like ‘the folk’). By dialoguing contemporary case studies with the writings of early folk music collectors, I examine the extent to which this understanding of time – which also undergirds environmentally damaging colonialist-capitalist epistemesi– is reproduced or challenged in folk music practices today. I thus position folk music as an important site to evaluate how certain ideas about time affect our relationships with the more-than-human world, often unwittingly.

Biography

Rowan Hawitt is a PhD student in the Reid School of Music, University of Edinburgh. Her research brings together ethnomusicology, environmental humanities, and critical time studies to explore how contemporary folk music practices in Scotland and England refract changing understandings of time occasioned by the climate crisis. Having recently submitted her PhD, she is looking forward to taking up a postdoctoral Landhaus Fellowship at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich in April 2024. Rowan is also a saxophonist, cellist, and singer with a particular love for improvisation, Renaissance polyphony, and – of course – all types of folk and traditional music.