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| Diane Moser |
In December 2020, we lost Diane Moser who was known as a musician rather than an environmentalist. We were acquaintances, perhaps even friends, but we became closer in the last years of her life because of a project she started involving the music of bird songs.
Improvisations by Diane Moser - piano, Anton Denner - flutes - Ken Filiano - bass.
Music recorded at Rockland Recording, Orangeburg, NY April 22, 2019.
Recording engineer, mixing and mastering by John Guth.
Music recorded at Rockland Recording, Orangeburg, NY April 22, 2019.
Recording engineer, mixing and mastering by John Guth.
Diane wrote me last summer after a conversation we had at a party. She said "Here's something for you that I came upon today, through my research. It is Barry Truax's book Acoustic Communication (he worked with R. Murray Schafer on The World Soundscape Project). There is a chapter called "Listening to the Past" that you should read.
I read it and this was the quote that I wrote down.
"The individual listener within a soundscape is not engaged in a passive type of energy reception, but rather is part of a dynamic system of information exchange. Similarly, soundscape composition is an open circuit in which the composer communicates the essence of a place to listeners."
Diane said that quote was pretty much what she was after with her new project. The project was recording endangered and threatened coastal and wetlands birds and their environments and then composing music to that.
Diane had just come back from a conference in June and she said that a group of people there agreed that "creating empathy is the first line of environmental communication."
"I recommend R. Murray Schafer's book, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and The Tuning of the World. Here is something I wrote recently for a grant proposal: "To evoke a memory of nature, or feelings of compassion for nature is often times the first step for someone to take action in the form of volunteering, voting, protesting, signing petitions and so forth. It is my hope that this will happen with this new project."
"I was looking through Pauline's book Deep Listening: A Composers Practice. Here is a little of what she writes -
...sounds carry intelligence: ideas, feelings and memories can be triggered by sounds
...if you are too narrow in your awareness of sounds, you are likely to be disconnected from your environment
...more often than not, urban living causes narrow focus and disconnection
...too much information is coming into the auditory cortex, or habit has narrowed listening to only what seems of value and concern to the listener...all else is tuned out or discarded as garbage.Diane told me that what she was finding interesting on her bird hikes was that people were talking. They weren't so much listening to the birds so much as they were looking for them. She said that she would either stay ahead of them to hear a good leader or more often stay way behind so she could listen and record.
I think that every sound has a memory to it. We all don't share the same memories for the same sound, but that is also quite beautiful. Tuning in to the sounds of nature and hearing the music there is a gift not all of us were given. Thankfully, the gift has been given to some of us, and they want to share it with us. Thanks, Diane.
MORE ABOUT DIANE
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