4Ĭrucially for my study, the Orbis Spike data frame coloniality-and its invention of systems of nonwhite nonpersonhood in the service of capital-as a qualitative shift that triggered a progression into the formal beginning of the Anthropocene that geologists can now recognize quantitatively in the accumulation of the past century’s climate signals. 3 While researchers now prefer a mid-twentieth-century date as the Anthropocene’s early boundary, and while publics and nonspecialists still commonly treat European industrialization as the Anthropocene’s de facto point of origin, the fact that the Orbis Spike has been seriously considered at all in the geological sciences community as the epoch’s year zero suggests that the moment deserves consideration. Researchers refer to this 1610 “carbon dioxide minima” as the “Orbis Spike,” and some have argued that it is the earliest viable formal signal in the planet’s geological record to mark the start of the Anthropocene. 2 Around the year 1610, a conspicuous planetary low point of atmospheric CO 2 can be observed in Antarctic ice core samples. 1 “The Anthropocene” refers to a new geological epoch-one in which the Earth has left behind the stability and normativity of the preceding Holocene epoch as a result of the actions and attitudes of some humans and “is currently operating in a no-analogue state,” as climate scientists Paul Crutzen and Will Steffen put it. This article considers musicological consequences of a recent proposal advanced by some climate and Earth systems researchers to date the beginning of the “Anthropocene” to the period immediately following European colonial contact with Indigenous Americans in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Ultimately, this article demonstrates Anthropocene stakes for early modern music studies and foregrounds the colonial underpinnings and contemporary racial asymmetries of ecological precarity as urgent questions for musicology’s emerging engagement with the Anthropocene. Recognizing how the lethality of colonization shaped the Anthropocene confronts the time of musical history with geological time, centering Anthropocene climate change as a background analytical framework for music seemingly far-removed from familiar ecomusicological themes. Accordingly, I develop Anthropocenic recontextualizations of Purcell’s Indian Queen (1695), eighteenth- and nineteenth-century musical and ethnographic representations of Native American “death songs,” and two practices of Indigenous resurgence via song: psalmody and Ghost Dance ceremonies. The Orbis Spike proposal challenges musicological inquiry into the Anthropocene to be not only ecologically and musicologically sensitive, but also decolonial, antiracist, and critical of global capitalism. In 1610, this reforestation triggered carbon dioxide sequestration and a planetary low point of CO 2, a climatic signal that geologists call the “Orbis Spike.” I explore how colonization’s Orbis Spike alters the historiographical horizons for approaching musical and aural documents of the early modern to nineteenth-century Atlantic. Colonial decimation of Indigenous communities in Central and South America led to land abandonment and a reforestation event. This article considers musicological consequences of recent proposals by climate researchers to date the beginning of the Anthropocene-the geological epoch in which human activities define the Earth system-to the period immediately following New World colonization.
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