Making Conservation Soundscapes: The Musical Ethnography of a New Zealand Forestry Sanctuary

This musical ethnography addresses the nature conservation work undertaken by volunteers at a New Zealand forest sanctuary. Based on field research in which I volunteered at Bushy Park Tarapuruhi, a privately-owned conservation site managed by New Zealand’s largest and oldest environmental NGO, the Royal Forest and Bird Society, I articulate this conservation work as a creative act: the making of conservation soundscapes. I take as a point of departure Forest and Bird’s slogan “giving nature a voice,” which I argue points to a much deeper sentiment that underlies the work of nature conservation at Bushy Park. Playing with the trope of an NGO giving voice to the voiceless, Forest and Bird’s slogan references the sounds of New Zealand’s endemic and endangered birds, framing conservation volunteering as literally giving nature its voice through working to protect the lives and habitats of these native New Zealand birds so they may continue to sing, enhancing a “bustling dawn chorus”—the closest thing to a synecdoche for the nation’s modern conservation movement.

Rather than pursuing a direct critique (or pollyannaish celebration) of Forest and Bird’s claimed solution to New Zealand’s conservation challenges, I want to vividly articulate the conservation work that constitutes one small part of it. In doing so I aim to portray a relationship between labor, nature, music, and voice that may help further understandings of conservation in New Zealand more broadly. In Chapter 1, I introduce the concept of the soundscape as the guiding theme that links music and nature throughout this dissertation. In Chapter 2, I discuss some of the unpleasant work involved in volunteering at Bushy Park, focusing on pest species management, and framing this labor in terms of recent analyses of Marcel Mauss’s theory of the gift. Chapter 3 considers the experience of listening to the birdlife in the sanctuary as a volunteer, theorizing this aural experience in terms of “the acousmatic”—listening to sounds without certain knowledge of their source or cause. Chapter 4 considers the structure of Bushy Park as a fenced sanctuary, imagining a form of modern nature conservation from the point of view of Western musical aesthetics.

This dissertation seeks to participate in ongoing academic debates about the place of colonial histories within contemporary forms of nature conservation. However, by approaching this study from an ethnomusicological and ethnographic point of view, not only do I address the aesthetic qualities and significance of nature conservation, but I also seek to articulate my positionality as a settler-descendent scholar in relation in New Zealand nature conservation and the Western musical tradition. Theoretically I also aim to extend the usefulness of the soundscape concept, expanding on some of its qualities that first compelled its early users to engage with sounds as both artists and environmentalists. I use my formulation of a conservation soundscape to help reconcile some of the quiet ugliness of settler colonialism with New Zealand’s natural beauty as each manifest in the work of volunteering at Bushy Park.