Chapter 6: Slow Music
Rena Upitis, Queens University
Abstract:
This chapter explores how technologies can be both enabling and crippling. While music technologies—for centuries—have afforded us the means of creating and performing music, sharing our deepest emotions, there are losses associated with the advent of ubiquitous technologies. Technologies can engender a loss of silence, information overload, excessive consumption, and lack of connection to the natural world. Some scholars have suggested that these negative outcomes can be counteracted, by replacing the information overload from screens with the drama presented by nature, by combatting overconsumption by living well with less, by privileging the natural world over [MR1]the virtual world, by embracing silence and by finding time for music. The chapter explores the slow food metaphor as a way of counteracting the negative aspects of technology. Music educators are challenged to explore what slow music would be like, savored like a fine meal and influenced by local possibilities.