OLD GROWTH PLAYBACK
MUSIC BY LISA SCHONBERG + ARTBOOK DESIGNED AND ILLUSTRATED BY AIDAN KOCH
Old-growth Playback centers around four works I composed as an artist-in-residence at HJ Andrews Experimental Forest (HJA), a biological research station in the central Oregon Cascades. It is an album and an art book - illustrated and designed by Aidan Koch.
HJA is a Long-Term Ecological Research station (LTER), with projects planned out for as long as 200 years that are generating a vast and detailed body of knowledge about these forests. Old-growth Playback is a contribution to the artistic component of this 200-year project called the Long-Term Ecological Reflections program. Inspired by this long-term approach to getting to know a place, Old-growth Playback is a project of listening closely to forests in the present to speculate on the soundscapes of future old-growth ecosystems. Through listening, we can consider how present forests with their emergent 21st century soundscapes will have novel old-growth futures. Listening can prompt acknowledgement of our undeniable entanglements with and responsibilities to these dynamic sounding spaces.
The notion of old growth might bring to mind images of cathedral-like forests and sounds of droplets falling from mossy branches, but it has
become almost synonymous with scarcity and a fear of losing what remains to profit-based resource extraction. While there are very real ecological, cultural, and intrinsic reasons to nurture remaining old growth, this project looks forward to what is yet to grow. The old-growth forests of the future are coming of age in a more extreme climate, with technologies and sounds that were not present even 100 years ago. Might we (humans) stay with this trouble [1] and learn from these forests? HJA is a good place to prompt this train of thought; among ecologists and foresters, HJA is known as a place where assumptions have been challenged and ecological concepts have been redefined. Only so years ago, scientists at HJA were prioritizing studies concerned with optimizing forest growth for resource extraction by replacing old growth with fast-growing plantations [2]. However, in the 1970s ecologists at HJA began to push towards conceptions of forests as complex ecosystems supporting a diversity of species worthy of protection. In 1981, HJA ecologists described the characteristics of old growth forests for the first time, including the importance of fallen trees, nurse logs, snags (standing dead trees), and structural heterogeneity to these habitats [3]. In the 1990s, efforts to protect remaining old-growth forests were founded on studies by HJA scientists of the endangered Northern Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis), ultimately reducing old-growth logging significantly. More recently, HJA has challenged the exclusivity of ecological research, inviting artists and writers into the research process. Reflecting on her own experience at Andrews, biologist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer speaks to this potential exchange with beyond-humans: 'in the right hands, scientific research is a
conversation, an interview of sorts between two parties that don't speak the same language" [4].
1. Donna Haraway (2016), Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press).
2. William G. Robbins (2018), 'The HJ Andrews Experimental Forest: seventy years of pathbreaking forest research', Oregon Historical Quarterly, 119 (4), 467.
3. Jerry F. Franklin, et al. (1981), 'Ecological characteristics of old-growth Douglas-fir forests', USDA For. Serv. Gen. Tech. Rep. PNW-118, (Portland, Oregon: Pacific Northwest Forest and Range Experimental Station), 48 pp.
4. Robin W Kimmerer (2016), 'Interview with a Water shed', in Forest Understory: Creative Inquiry in an Old-growth Forest, Eds. N. Brodie, C. Goodrich and F.J. Swanson (Seattle: University of Washington Press), p. 44.
credits
released October 4, 2024
All music, field recording, performance and composition: lisa ann schonberg
Illustration and design: Aidan Koch
Field recording assistance: Anthony Brisson & Leah Wilson
Scientific advisor: Fred Swanson
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[listen to a] FIRST LISTEN:
Hudson Mohawk Magazine invited me to bring some listeners into their studio to record their responses during a 'first listening' session of the album. The listeners - including several highschool students from North Troy -- responded with stories and reflections that i would have/could have never considered. You can listen to that here.