More Than a Soundtrack: Music Between Text and Image in Environmental Art

Abstract

Music has rarely been the subject of analysis in environmental art forms, from film to post-apocalyptic fiction. This article seeks to fill that gap and shows how music functions between word and image, using three case studies: The Crossroads Project, a lecture-performance series on climate crisis; Trinity, a short documentary video on the history of nuclear testing; and Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan, a dystopian novel with music at its core. In all three examples, music does not work as atmospheric background but rather as an active mediator in its own right. Entering the spaces between text or spoken word and image with unexpected material presence, it can help to open the audience toward greater urgency or inquiry about climate disruption; it can accumulate intensity as viewers watch and hear data on nuclear testing; it can even incite violence within a narrative, both thematically and in the text itself, as Sybille Krämer has noted in her work on performativity. Though activist art can easily become baldly manipulative, music can “expose” its hearers (to use Stacy Alaimo’s and Jean-Luc Nancy’s term) to planetary threats in a way that fosters critical, not just sentimental or fearful, response.