Keynote: Prof. Dr. Tore Strøvold – Confronting Climate Change in Popular Music: Nostalgia, Apocalypse, Utopia (15.07.2025, Online/JLU Giessen GCSC)

“Confronting Climate Change in Popular Music: Nostalgia, Apocalypse, Utopia”
Prof. Dr. Tore Strøvold

GCSC Keynote Lecture Series
Justus-Liebig Universität Giessen

15 July 2025, 6-8 pm
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Popular songs are among the cultural resources that humans rely on to envision, explore and understand climate crisis and its imbrication with political, economic and social arrangements. Music can package environmental issues into emotional and embodied experiences, allowing listeners to work through them in individual and social projects of identification. Yet music will always frame the issue in a specific way – using specific means – which will enable or restrict various modes of sensing and understanding. Using textual analysis, we can deepen our knowledge of the musical techniques and compositional decisions that come into play in this context. In this lecture, Størvold offers brief analytical readings of three songs that illustrate three prevalent modes of framing environmental crisis in popular culture: nostalgia, apocalypse, utopia. Each of these rhetorical modes may function as both vehicles and obstacles for addressing environmental crisis. Størvold ends on a defence of the utopic mode: insisting that music can be a sonic laboratory in which musicians and listeners anticipate and prefigure societal change.
//Tore Størvold is associate professor of musicology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. His research and teaching addresses environmental issues in contemporary music and culture in the Nordic countries. His monograph, Dissonant Landscapes: Music, Nature, and the Performance of Iceland, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2023.

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Before the keynote, from 10 am to 1 pm, Tore Størvold will give a workshop on popular music and ecocriticism (online participation possible).
Phds and students interested in participating please contact: helene[dot]heuser[at]gcsc[dot]uni-giesse[dot]de