Creatures of the Air

"From the sounds of West Central African harps to the sounds of the European J. S. Bach revival, Creatures of the Air is a nineteenth-century music history told as a history of the art's elemental media system, air. Air is here understood as a human domain and music as an art of that domain, as such embedded in histories of environmental and colonial struggle around a thickened consciousness of the air and of breathing itself. The narrative moves across malarial equatorial climates and polluted industrial ones; the loss and recovery of the human voice in hazardous environmental conditions; scenes of suffocation and breathing mirrored in the creation and performance of Mendelssohn's enormous Elijah oratorio. No longer just an innocent luxury, by its claim to invisibility music is shown to be implicated in the struggle for control over air as a most precious natural resource. What emerges is a complex political ecology where differentiated musical systems combined, struggled against, and co-constituted one another in the course of the global nineteenth century and beyond"--