Environmelisma

Over the last years, we have been working on a research and film project about the relationships between three interwoven extractivist processes in Murcia, in the southeast area of the iberian peninsula: the mining in La Unión, the urban speculation in La Manga, and the agroindustry in Mar Menor, the biggest salty lagoon in Europe^[1]The working title of the film is “Aquel verano del 22”. The sound is made in collaboration with Pedro André; the script was written together with Dami Edwards, in dialogue with Zineb Achoubie, … Continue reading. The three are adjacent to one another. The project approaches these connected situations, and it investigates how the people cope with them through culture and activism.

Together with Pedro André, we have been filming the territory and recording the soundscape, in addition to conducting a series of interviews. One of the main threads we have followed has been the declaration of the legal personality of the Mar Menor; the other, the traces inscribed in culture, such as Flamenco. The question of the voice in both threads has been fundamental, both with humans, but also to try to understand how the environment can communicate. In these next lines, I will try to introduce the word I came up with: environmelisma. This text is not enclosing a definition as such, but instead it brings forward a series of approaches that work as communicating threads. The term proposed in the text tries to find a way to describe what one can apprehend from nature. Beyond the meaning, it is the sense. The sense is what touches and heats. The sense is what sets things in motion. The sense is an interchange, and energy, a flow, a process of semiotic osmosis. In that way, it binds together the notion of environment with the practice of melisma.

                  1.- Environment

It also refers to the coining of the term environment by philosopher Thomas Carlyle, following the genealogy proposed by Ralph Jessop^[2]In 1835, John Sterling, complained to Carlyle about ‘environment’ as one of several Carlylean neologisms, and he noticeably objected to the barbarity of these new terms as ‘words, so far as I … Continue reading: Some such genealogy helps to position the coinage of ‘environment’ within a broader narrative of the transmission of organicist, anti-mechanical, counter-Enlightenment discourses, bringing the notion of environment into relation with a much more extensive story of later attempts to undermine the authority or prevalence of mechanism by writers, thinkers, composers, artists, and campaigners throughout the 19 and 20 centuries. In terms of the ecocentric positions, this genealogy is interesting not only because it directly includes non-scientific positions (without excluding the scientific ones), but also because of the open, playful ways the notion was assembled using a French root to translate from the German word Umgebung in the sense espoused by Goethe. In that spirit of word play, I came to include environ- as the prefix of melisma.

                  2.- Melisma

The Minera is a musical style originally from La Unión and the miners who worked in that area. The lyrics are a record of the hard conditions of the labor there and a testimony of the solidarity among workers. The melismas are one of the mightiest elements of the singing, in which the emotion concentrates, keeping a syllable going up and down with few notes, back and forward, modulated by the gestures of the hands and the muscles of different parts of the body, and the inner forces that tint the sound. The sense comes not from the words, since at that point there is none there, but from the sound itself of the voice.

One of the most touching moments during the filming was an interview with Encarnación Fernandez, the most remarkable singer from La Unión, especially when it comes to the Cantes de Levante, of which the mineras are the foundational part. After the interview with Encarnación Fernandez, Antonio Muñoz  (her son and a guitar wizard) and the cantaora granted us with a few songs to film. When Encarnación sang, we had goosebumps. Among the music, the lyrics, and the power of the voice, the emotion was more accentuated in the ayes and the melismas.

Flamenco is one the genres that play with melisma. But we can also find it in diverse geographies, as Sylviane A. Diouf^[3]Strong trembling sounds, melisma (changing the note of a syllable while it is being sung), wavy intonations, elongated notes, long pauses between sentences, glissandos, and a certain nasality are … Continue reading and Simon Jargy^[4]The highly ornamented, melismatic chant which may be called “long” for lack of more exact terminology, and which the ancient Arab chroniclers called “heavy” (thaqīl): in … Continue reading describe it in relation to Arab and Andalusian music, or Laz E. N. Ekwueme^[5]It is known that in general Africans sing one note per syllable. Occasionally, however, melisma occurs, but generally on exclamations or nonsense syllables. These also provide opportunities for the … Continue reading and Gherard Kubik^[6]The type of pentatonic singing (with much employment of melisma) which we are finding today in musical genres such as ṣakara, àpàlà, etc. is based on Islamic-Arabic traits that were filtering … Continue reading point out regarding African music; Kubik will locate the origin of the use of melisma in Islamic-Arabic. This makes much sense listening to mawwāl and reading the description by Shireen Maalouf: In Arabic Music, the mawwāl (Arabic: موال; plural: mawāwīl, مواويـل) is a traditional and popular Arabic genre of vocal music that is very slow in beat and sentimental in nature, and is characterised by prolonging vowel syllables, emotional vocals, and is usually presented before the actual song begins. The singer performing a mawwal would usually lament and long for something, such as a past lover, a departed family member or a place, in a wailing manner^[7]MAALOUF, Shireen, History of Arabic Music Theory: Change and Continuity in the Tone Systems, Genres, and Scales. Kaslik, Université Saint-Esprit, Lebanon, 2002.. Additionally, it’s important to mention that the first European music school was founded in Córdoba in the 9th century, by an African-Arab composer who came from Persia^[8]GIOA, Ted, The Most Important City in the History of Music Isn’t What You Think. We can learn from the Córdoba Miracle—and not just about music. Something also to remark from this article: … Continue reading. Ziryab was his name, and he popularized the song-sequence, which may have been a precursor to the nawba, in which melisma is largely used. His work had great influence in what later would be the Andalusian music and culture that would flourish on different shores of the Mediterranean.

                  3.- Duende

What these examples have in common is that the use of melisma tends to relate to intense emotions, often in traumatic occasions. In Flamenco, when the melisma appears, it’s not only a matter of the voice. This non-verbal part of the singing has to do with the performance of the body. Although the body is present constantly, it is during the variations of tones that the body revolves, marking with the movements of hands and gesturing with the muscles of the face the shifts of the singing. Not by chance, the ayes (the meslima) is also called quejíos, which means complaints.

Within the melisma, it is during one of the moments called duende that it is more present: One of the things that marks the arrival of duende in flamenco singing is a sound of trouble in the voice, The voice becomes troubled. Its eloquence becomes eloquence of another order, a broken, problematic, self-problematizing eloquence (…) So you see that duende is something beyond technical competence or even technical virtuosity. It is something troubling. It has to do with trouble, deep trouble. Deep song delves into troubled water, troubles the water. Even elusive and impossible to define, Nathaniel Mackey approximates an understanding of what duende can be. To be possessed is to be mounted and ridden by a god. You find that imagery in vodou in Haiti, in candomblé in Brazil, in lucumí or santería in Cuba. Possession means that something beyond your grasp of it grabs you, that something that gets away from you— another sense in which fugitivity comes in-gives you a voice, like Lorca, who, remember, refers to lucumí, I think of this as related to duende^[9]MACKEY, Nathaniel, Cante moro, in Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 2005..

The powers of the duende lie in how it makes something difficult to define emerge from the deep.

The duende translates literally as a spirit, and in that sense it connects with many traditions of animism. The body becomes a medium that channels the spirit that duende is. Michel Serres calls for recovering a sense of worship of nature in order to set his proposal of the natural contract: Modernity neglects, speaking in absolute terms. It cannot and will not think or act toward the global, whether temporal or spatial. Through exclusively social contracts, we have abandoned the bond that connects us to the world, the one that binds the time passing and flowing to the weather outside, the bond that relates the social sciences to the sciences of the universe, history to geography, law to nature, politics to physics, the bond that allows our language to communicate with mute, passive, obscure things things that, because of our excesses, are recovering voice, presence, activity, light^[10]SERRES, Michel,  The Natural Contract, The University of Michigan Press, Michigan, 1995.. We can no longer neglect this bond. Is it perhaps possible to find in the duende what brings the force of the trauma from the deep and connected with the dispossession of the environment?

                  4.- Vibration

In which way can we articulate the proposal of Serres no longer [to] neglect this bond? The regime of visuality we are subjected to seems to be at the core of the modern project, but there is no space here to elaborate on it.

Again, Iván Periáñez Bolaño: It is the ear, above all, which connects the expressions with the memory (experiences and experiences). To know how to listen, to know how to feel, to say the cante, to listen to the cante, are relevant expressions and aspects of the epistemologies of flamenco feeling, of the knowledge and vernacular musical expressions that compose it^[11]Op. Cit.. With Halim El-Dabh, we can understand that the very essence is vibration. Vibration is the reality of our being. We are all vibrations. (…) The reality is we are all one^[12]EL-DABH, Halim, in Symphony for 1000 Drums – Intro. Interview with Halim El-Dabh by Grant Marquit.. Some of the ideas of El-Dabh point to strategies of connecting the micro and the macro, finding the tone of continuity between heart beat and the sound of the spheres, in processes of healing and communion with the world. The work of Halim El-Dabh facilitates a recovery of that lost connection with the world, and although it comes from the sonic, his position called for an activation of all the senses to get involved in an understanding of what the world tells us.

                  5.-Rights in ruins

The deadline of this text is October 7^th, 2024. I cannot help but connect it to the genocide in Palestine. The credibility of the whole infrastructure of international law is about to collapse. Who would trust the capacities of decision making of a system that can do nothing about the genocidal activities of Israel since October 7th? This date marks a dark turn, both in human history, but also in the setting of ecocides. Let’s make no mistake: that date is a mark because of the media-openness in the brutality, as seen by everyone who has a screen at hand. But that process has been in the making since decades in the case of Palestine. Understanding all the particularities, we must connect to the other on-going conflicts in Myanmar, Haiti, Congo, Sudan, and Ukraine, just to name a few. Ecocide is happening in all of them, alongside the violence between humans. What are the sensors and devices we need to stop all these brutalities?

The director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights and the coordinator of Palestine’s legal team representing victims at the International Criminal Court, Raji Sourani, has stated that if Gaza is the graveyard of international law, should we give up or keep fighting by banging our heads against the wall? We will keep fighting because we cannot contribute to the law of the jungle. In the law of the jungle, they will win. As human rights activists, we are romantic revolutionaries. International law and human rights is the crème de la crème of humanity and we want to use it^[13]BIOSCA AZCOITI, Javier, Raji Sourani, de las bombas en Gaza a sentar a Israel ante la Justicia: “Los palestinos somos sangre barata para el mundo.”.

                  6.- Rights of Nature

International law must be repaired and improved, and together with it, the rights of nature should mark the tone effectively as part of the new legal paradigm we need to fight for. Here is Teresa Vicente introducing the question of the voice of nature in relation to law: the implementation of the governance system (Article 3 of the Law, implemented in the Royal Decree of partial development of the Law) and the claim of the rights of the lagoon ecosystem [Mar Menor] raise a series of objections, reservations and criticisms in legal dogmatics and in the legal academic field. Among them, the assumption that Nature, and in particular natural entities or ecosystems, have a “voice” to make their claims heard; how to “make those subjects to whom the law recognises rights speak”; who will speak on their behalf; what place should be given to indigenous peoples’ traditional knowledge about the ecosystems they inhabit and to non-indigenous scientific knowledge; how natural and social sciences can be reconciled; how knowledge can be used to inform and inform legal decisions; how these decisions can be translated^[14]VICENTE GIMÉNEZ, Teresa, Justicia ecológica y derechos de la naturaleza, Tirant humanidades, Valencia, 2023.. The rights of nature also bring into the picture the question of participation in politics. Beyond the granting of rights, one of the fundamental concerns is: How can a system of co-governance with non-human beings be established?

                  7.- Environmelisma

The combination of environment and melisma offers a space to sense what nature tells. Another touching moment of the filming in Mar Menor occurred with Paco “Estrujao”, a fisherman, who offered one of the most poetic contributions to the film, describing how he can feel what the Mar Menor has to say if one pays enough attention, describing the moods of the salty lagoon based on atmospheric phenomena. Water communicates, and humans can understand it. One of the questions with which I began many of my interviews was how my interlocutors would describe the voice of that particular environment, which, in most of the cases, they related to a human voice. But how can one describe the voice of environments, who communicate without words, and even sometimes even without audible sound ?

(Featured image: Film still “Aquel Verano del 22”, Lorenzo Sandoval. Research 2018 – present. Film in editing process)