Is there a connection between aesthetics and cultural sustainability? This is far more than a question I think. It is probably the outline for a field of inquiry. But where would one begin to draw a link. The question may be reposed. Can a musicologist really say something about cultural sustainability in a way that is within the traditional confines of the discipline of musicology 0r even ethnomusicology? Ethnomusicologists have Steven Feld and his work with Keith Basso (senses of place). It seems that making the connection between anthropology and ecology/human ecology is easier. But musicology and ecology. I would make the argument that musicology is already involved in ecological and environmental discourse even if it is under-theorized and under-conceptualized. Cultural sustainability and ecology are an issue of aesthetics. But not of a passive sort. Ecology as immanence is a central, if unacknowledged, category of aesthetics.
Transcendence is part of art discourse. The experience is related, in important ways, to the sublime, of being outside or beyond the limits of physicality and human-ness. Transcendence in my reading is an experience beyond the physical that moves towards the divine. Or an experience of the divine which is beyond human or other-than-human. Interestingly, and maybe alternatively, place is constructed by sound. The place-ness of sound, the territory that sound creates, is a space like this. Transcendence is beyond materiality. But Deleuze championed an alternative, Immanence.
The Immanent space is a real conceptual challenge. But one, I think, makes the connection between the experience of the sublime and the creation of place-ness. So much art has been complicit in the creation of place. Sound has suffered from the incorrect notion that is has a lack of materiality. We know that sound is material. So sound is now a material place that you experience. Sound and music however can be, as Feld pointed out, about place-making. The place-making effect of music that is beyond human avoids what Nietzsche’s warning about being “human all-too-human”. So immanence is related to transcendence.
Michel Maffesoli in The Time of the Tribes suggested immanent-transcendent for the liminal experience that is often associated with ritual (see Victor Turner: ‘Liminal to liminoid in play, flow, and ritual: An essay in comparative symbology’. Rice University Studies 1974. 60(3):53-92). The dissolution of the individual that is associated with the liminal brings up an interesting question. Does the identity dissolve or become associated with a larger identity. Does the individual fuse in a spiritual sort of way with another beyond human identity.
This is why I have included this Sigur Ros trailer for their film Heima. My first reaction to the music of Sigur Ros was “sublime”. This music is often beyond human. But I never felt drawn to a transcendental sublime but an immanent sublime. Something that I have also experienced in my research on Pagan music (see Singing Me Into The Land). There is a dissolution of the identity that is not grafted onto a Judeo-christian divine but a conception of a spiritual physicality. One could suggest a pagan spirituality that is without gods and goddesses and is populated by the experience of “within-place-ness”. The non-human connection to a place that is beyond “nostalgia” and cheap imitations. Music may be a tool for the creation of this sort of physical-liminality, this immanence.
There may be an important point of connection between musicology, cultural sustainability, and aesthetics which goes beyond the comfort zone of each of the participating disciplines. In the experience of making place and self in the dissolution of both. Sigur Ros Heima means home and homeland. I think it also could mean the construction of self and other. The immanent connection to the physicality of placeness that is beyond human-ness may be an important point of connection between local cultural production, sustainability, and musicology.

