About

The Music and Sustainability project explores new ways of addressing environmental challenges through the arts. It also aims to build new links between music scholars working in this area and wider networks across the arts and humanities.

“Sustainability” is an incredibly slippery concept which has migrated from the world of policy-speak and infiltrated the discourse of arts and culture. As a result, the term is now much used (and sometimes abused) by industry lobbying groups, policymakers, and academics across the creative sector. Despite having been co-opted for a multitude of diverging purposes, the concept of sustainability is unlikely to disappear from public discourse either. The 2015 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are designed to underpin the the global socio-political agenda until 2030. "Sustainability" therefore seems destined to remain the watchword of the early twenty-first century, with activists, academics, and politicians all struggling to balance its wide-ranging meanings and interpretations to address the urgent economic, environmental, and humanitarian challenges facing the planet. 

This project investigates the relationship between music and sustainability in all its guises (e.g. economic, social, environmental), as well as how related concepts (challenges facing musical “ecosystems" or scenes, etc.) are used in music research. It focuses on the case studies of the recorded music industry, the live music industry, and musical instruments industry. Visit the Outcomes page on this website for more details.

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References

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John Robinson quoted in Zummit-Lucia, J. 2013. “The art of sustainability: imagination, not spreadsheets will create change,” The Guardian, 23 May.