FOREST LISTENING ROOMS (2018-present)
Photo by Julian Foglietti for Columbus Alive and Pacific Standard
“Harnetty has invited people from the Little Cities of Black Diamonds—from traditional environmentalists to lifelong drillers—to take part in a radical act of listening in hopes of finding literal common ground via their shared love of the land. The forest itself is the mediator. Maybe, Harnetty argues, if we listen to the forest together, we can alter its future.”
“Studs Terkel meets Brian Eno in the woods.”
“A Blade of Grass Fellow Brian Harnetty is an artist who chose to stay... His commitment to place is a radical choice, in the original sense of ‘radical,’ meaning to have roots, specifically to share the experiences and concerns of communities to which we are accountable.”
“After the first session happened, it became more apparent than ever that the activities of walking through the forest initially, being present there, hearing the archival voices and particular opening observations, in combination with the participants sharing life experiences, created an intimate situation that refocused the questions asked and transformed the listening, generating an energy whose potential was much larger than that just created by the hearing itself. ”
“What do our National Forests sound like? And how do they make us feel? ... [Harnetty] uses the Wayne National Forest as a venue for a dialogue around American rural life and the land we live on.”
“Harnetty’s light touch allows FLR to speak what Robin Wall Kimmerer (botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi nation) might call the ‘grammar of animacy.’ Kimmerer writes that when our language honors the animacy of all life forms—including those that English-speakers are used to describing as inanimate—we are able to come into relationships of reciprocity rather than exploitation. In FLR, we see one vision of this—as Harnetty puts it, participants envision a world in which ‘we could actually help change the place, to heal it, even at the same time as it was changing us.’”
The Lost Art of Listening: Sound Artist Brian Harnetty wants to transform the future of Appalachian Ohio’s forests through radical acts of listening
A collaboration between Columbus Alive and Pacific Standard
Joel Oliphint, June 2019
"OK, so we'll just listen for a few minutes."
Brian Harnetty sits in a metal folding chair in a clearing at the base of Robinson's Cave in Wayne National Forest, which covers nearly a quarter million acres in the Appalachian foothills of Southeast Ohio. About 20 others join Harnetty, seated in a circle on a warm, humid Saturday morning in May, their chairs slowly puncturing the soft ground.
For more than 10 minutes, no one says a word. It takes a bit to settle into the quiet, to live in it comfortably, but soon the vibe becomes meditative. It feels like a ritual. Some people bow their heads. Some fold their hands and close their eyes. Others scan the woods that surround the clearing.
A sycamore partially shades the circle of listeners, dappling sunlight into the middle of the ring. As the wind blows, the swaying branches and quivering leaves of countless trees create a kind of woodwind symphony. Someone's stomach growls. A dog barks; it sounds enormous and menacing. The trill of a red-bellied woodpecker dominates an improvisational chorus of birdsongs. At times, motorcycle engines temporarily take over as they cruise along Main Street in New Straitsville, a town known for its Moonshine Festival that sits just below the clearing…
Photo by Julian Foglietti
Enter the Forest with Brian Harnetty
Columbus Alive, December 2021
Back in the summer of 2019, Alive took readers on a journey into the woods with multidisciplinary Columbus artist Brian Harnetty, who created a project he dubbed Forest Listening Rooms.
"It’s basically like, ‘There’s this crazy dude who’d like to go out to the forest with you and just sit and listen,’” Harnetty said at the time.
Since then, the 11-year project, which came about through relationships Harnetty developed with folks in Appalachian Ohio (and particularly in Wayne National Forest), has evolved and grown. Recently, Harnetty made an installation version of Forest Listening Rooms for the Columbus Museum of Art, and last week, he released a remixed and mastered version of the installation's soundtrack on Bandcamp.
"On this recording, you’ll hear the voices of past and present local residents of the forest in Appalachian Ohio," Harnetty said in a statement about the 13-minute track. "They recount their love for the land, memories of the past, disasters and underground mine fires, economic and political struggles over mining and extraction, and their hopes for the future. You’ll also hear field recordings of the natural environment of the forest: a spring chorus of pre-dawn birds, summer drones of insects, and faint autumn sounds of wind and rain on brittle, fallen leaves. Finally, you’ll hear the sounds of an ensemble of seven musicians, whose long tones and static, ambient harmonies complement and interact with the environmental and human sounds already present."
One of the featured voices belongs to Perry County resident Joelene Dixon, whom Harnetty interviewed the day I accompanied the pair into the forest. As Dixon stared out across Essington Lake, she began to reflect on her relationship with her family and with the land, and how the two are inextricably linked.
“My parents are gone. And after my dad died — my mom died first — and after my dad died, I wasn’t quite ready for… the feeling of being an orphan," Dixon says in the recording. "And something about being in an area that is familiar to you, that reminds you of your childhood, reminds you of carefree days, is comforting. I don’t know how else to say it, it’s just comforting. It’s home.”
— Joel Oliphint, 2021
Stay, Listen, Organize: Bridging Appalachia’s Past and Present through Sound
A Blade of Grass Magazine, Issue 2, “Who”
Robert Sember, April 2019
A Blade of Grass Fellow Brian Harnetty is an artist who chose to stay. Born into a multi-generational Appalachian family in southern Ohio, his work as composer, musician, and sound studies scholar is both inspired by and addressed to his local communities. His commitment to place is a radical choice, in the original sense of “radical,” meaning to have roots, specifically to share the experiences and concerns of communities to which we are accountable.
Brian uses a deceptively simple practice to root himself in place and community: he listens. He has listened for close to twenty years, which has enabled him to realize a remarkably diverse collection of compositions, recordings, and writings. His latest work, Forest Listening Rooms, brings together residents and workers from rural Appalachian Ohio for collective, site-specific listening sessions. In these events, listening is a tool for community organizing…
Harnetty interviews Joelene Dixon in the Perry State Forest, Ohio
The Sounds of Rural America
Published by The Daily Yonder and 100 Days in Appalachia
May, 2019
An audio project set in Appalachian Ohio expands the idea of “listening to each other” to include natural soundscapes and audio archives. Composer and artist Brian Harnetty says such listening is one way to bridge differences in perspectives, politics, and place.
I spend a lot of time listening to Appalachian Ohio. I listen to its people: bakers and shopkeepers, community organizers and coal miners, farmers and fracking protesters, and they all have a story to tell. I listen to places, too: forest hemlocks and sulphury streams, warblers and spring peepers, oil wells and local industry, as they come together to make the region’s soundscapes. Just as importantly, I listen to sound archives, where I hear voices and songs of everyday people; I am eavesdropping as sound and history collide.
I transform these sound archives into new music. For the past two decades I have worked as a composer and ethnographer to figure out a process and a language to do so. I have worked with archives across Appalachia and the Midwest from Kentucky to Chicago. They have included everything from 90-year old ballad singers to the ruminations of jazz visionary Sun Ra. In this work I am striving toward a new way of listening that involves careful attention to both old recordings and contemporary voices. The projects look back and perform history, but invariably they also lead me to the present moment.
Making music from archives helps me develop an understanding of complex cultural and social relationships that inform both rural and urban places. …
Composing Sociality: Toward an Aesthetics of Transition Design
Jeremy Woodruff, from the The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound Art
Harnetty’s work shows how composing sociality thrives through returning again and again to a community over a long period of time, with the commitment of an artist who maintains a presence, building trust over years, unlike the typical time frame of socially engaged artworks where an artist or collective moves in and then quickly out again. … After the first session happened, it became more apparent than ever that the activities of walking through the forest initially, being present there, hearing the archival voices and particular opening observations, in combination with the participants sharing life experiences, created an intimate situation that refocused the questions asked and transformed the listening, generating an energy whose potential was much larger than that just created by the hearing itself. … Listening brings us viscerally out of rationalizing away systematic destruction and face-to-face with the impact and bond the natural environment has in our lives.
“A Community is a Garden” from the Guggenheim Environmental Justice Practicum Sustainable Futures
Download a PDF version here.
Kanyinsola Anifowoshe and Mikki Janower
December, 2020
…It is perhaps difficult to imagine the silence that Forest Listening Rooms participants encounter—the absence of noise that creates space for another kind of presence. Cheryl Blosser, a local historian and FLR participant, notes, “It seemed to me that [Harnetty] was being very careful not to influence you too much. He wanted what came out of the conversations to be mostly let in by the silences or the sounds of the woods or the other people. A lot of what he did was to just let us feel and talk about what we did feel and whatever memories those brought out.”
Blosser’s comments highlight that by stepping back rather than stepping in, Harnetty creates space for the forest’s sounds and silences to guide the conversations. In FLR, land is a form of active life rather than a static background—which Harnetty emphasizes by letting the land’s many histories speak.
Harnetty’s light touch allows FLR to speak what Robin Wall Kimmerer (botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi nation) might call the “grammar of animacy.” Kimmerer writes that when our language honors the animacy of all life forms—including those that English-speakers are used to describing as inanimate—we are able to come into relationships of reciprocity rather than exploitation. In FLR, we see one vision of this—as Harnetty puts it, participants envision a world in which “we could actually help change the place, to heal it, even at the same time as it was changing us.”
Through communion with the land, we learn new ways of being in community with each other: as Harnetty observes, “The forest itself becomes a mediator between people that might think differently or have different cultural backgrounds or are even on different parts of the political spectrum. It opens up the conversation so that participants are much more engaged and open with one another. That’s the point where something can really change between how people perceive each other.” By building connections across lines of difference, the forest provides roots for a community not of superficial unity, but of multifaceted togetherness.
For Harnetty, facilitating this community required him to be open to shifting the conditions of the work in order to reach those who may have not been immediately sympathetic.
If a Musician Plays in a Forest: How the Sounds of Our National Forests Make Music
Matt Harmon, National Forest Foundation
If you search “forest sounds” on YouTube, you’ll find hundreds of hours of forest ambiance to help you wake up, meditate, work, sleep, or any other activity where you want to pretend you’re among the trees. But these videos could be any forest. What do our National Forests sound like? And how do they make us feel?
Luckily, a few world-class musicians and scholars have set out to create albums and auditory maps based on our National Forests. During their research and community outreach programs, they found that National Forests hold a special place in locals’ hearts and ears.
Brian Harnetty is an interdisciplinary artist that uses archival material and music to create sonic compositions that reflect communities. His album Shawnee, Ohio was inspired by his family roots in the town where the Midwest meets Appalachia.
Shawnee, Ohio combines archival interviews with residents of the rural town, new musical compositions, and field recordings from the Wayne National Forest to tell the stories of past Shawnee residents and their relationship to the land around them.
“The connection between real people and an archive made, for me, archives come alive. I often think that archives contain everything except a living interaction so any way to make the objects within an archive come alive, that’s where the magic happens,” Harnetty said.
With tracks like “Jim” talking about life in Shawnee, “Boy” interviewing his grandmother about mining, and “Ina” singing local folk songs, all with Harnetty’s field recordings and instrumentation underneath, Shawnee, Ohio uses the Wayne National Forest as a venue for a dialogue around American rural life and the land we live on.
While the album speaks for itself, Harnetty didn’t want the engagement with Shawnee to stop at the archives. As a part of the overall project in 2018, Harnetty and Shawnee residents went on guided walks into the Wayne National Forest and participated in what Harnetty calls Forest Listening Rooms.
“The idea is to use listening and the forest itself as a mediator to allow new kinds of conversation and connection to take place. By listening to the forest and listening to each other and then having guided conversations about land use, [we all realized] the shared interest in the land itself and its history. There’s a large labor history there … Eventually [we can] imagine the future as well and ways the forest might look in the future and how we might benefit from it and how we can protect it,” Harnetty said.
Harnetty hopes to continue the Listening Rooms once it is safe to do so. The walks consist of designated stops to sit and listen, sometimes in silence and other times with accompanying tracks from Shawnee, Ohio. Harnetty said the forest and the silence you rarely hear near so much industry allowed for those deeper conversations to take place.
“At the end of 15 or 20 minute or half an hour of silent listening, the mood dramatically changes. It feels almost giddy. … In the end, it makes it very easy to talk about ways to protect the land and to tap into those feelings of being proud about the land itself. … I really felt like the trees and the forest itself became in between us. We were listening to the forest but the forest was changing us in turn,” Harnetty said. Shawnee, Ohio utilizes musical compositions in addition to field recordings of the forest to set the scene.